Eight And A Half Hours Of Standup Comedy

The Comedy Store on Sunset, vastly inferior to any store with 'liquor' in its name.

I think sometimes, ‘Maybe I should do standup comedy, y’know?’

Sure, I’ve seen all of the comedians go on TV and talk about how rough it is to get started, and how everybody has terrible shows, and how you need to be thick skinned and able to take a beating without hating yourself, and none of these are things that I’m at all capable of and I know that. But in the back of my mind, there’s this little voice saying, “You were a three time state finalist in competitive high school after dinner speaking speaking in Oregon. You’re probably so damn good you’ll never so much as have a bad show!”

And then, Patrick and I watched eight and a half hours of standup comedy at The Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, on a Sunday night, starting at 7:00 and going until almost 3:00 AM.

Patrick is writing a screenplay about stand up comedians, and unlike Mike and I, who get an idea for something and promptly sit down and bang out a screenplay as fast as possible, Patrick actually does painstaking amounts of research, because he’s concerned with the overall quality of his creative endeavors. Part of his research is going to comedy shows, and since I thought I liked stand up comedy, I went with him.

He plays a failed jock on the show, but in real life he's got wicked nerd cred. Also, he writes rap songs!

Earlier in the weekend we saw Donald Glover, who plays Troy on Community, and he was positively incredible. But, since Patrick’s script is about struggling comedians, we went to The Comedy Store on a Sunday night. Because, you see, Sunday is the least funny day of the week. Nobody wants to go out late on a Sunday and watch people tell jokes – they want to cry themselves to sleep asking their pillow where the hell their weekend went. It’s science.

This is an undesirable slot, so The Comedy Store offers it as a free show (as free as a two drink minimum can be at a place that charges $9 for a Jack and Coke), more or less an open mic night situation, from 7:00 PM until 2:00 AM – 40 consecutive comics, most of them amateurs with a few small to medium names sprinkled near the middle.

Patrick and I went into this sort of expecting to see some bad comedy. Hell, we were almost looking forward to it, at the time – it’d be a good ego boost, seeing how much funnier we were than the guys up on the stage. Besides, what’s wrong with spending an evening watching a bunch of court jesters trying to entertain everyone? As somebody who spent most of high school trying to make girls laugh hard enough to spontaneously decide to French me,* it would be fun to be on the other side of the situation for once. Sans Frenching.

*Mission failed.

Oh, right, like she would've married him if he wasn't funny. Hair only gets you so far, people.

As it turns out, though, bad comedy is even harder for me to handle than Tommy Wiseau’s guest appearances at The Room showings. When a movie sucks, it can’t tell that you hate it. When a standup comic sucks, he’s a few feet away from you, sweating, white knuckling the microphone, staring at you with big, scared eyes.

”C’mon, man!” He’s saying. ”I’m a funny guy, right? TELL ME I’M A FUNNY GUY!”

It was less a free show and more a free chance to watch souls get destroyed, which I don’t really enjoy unless the person on the receiving end is a University of Washington alumnus.

FINISH HIM.

Here’s how you know a person is a bad comedian: When they make jokes about Facebook. The first ten or so comedians all ran with pretty Facebook heavy sets, which, let’s be honest, has become the new airline industry punchline. We get it – poking is sexually ambiguous and it’s bad when your Mom is on Facebook. You can stop telling jokes about it now.

Also, some of the people on stage were perhaps the only people less enthusiastic about the performance than the people in the audience. Multiple performers openly admitted that they were high, giggling through sets interspersed with sidelong rants about how hungry they were and their love of the McDonald’s value menu.

One old, fat guy with long greasy hair and a beard of equal length and greasiness stumbled onstage, grasped the microphone, and muttered several barely coherent sentence fragments. He exhaled deeply into the microphone a couple of times, moved it into a position that warranted a blast of feedback, then started to step away before regaining his confidence and coming back long enough to say,

“H-have you guys been watchin’ the Internet recently?”

The loudest silence of all time was his response.

“Thankyou.” He whispered into the mic before all but running off the stage and disappearing into the darkness.

It couldn't have been him. The Dude has a great sense of humor.

Another guy took the stage for his three-minute set carrying a big dry erase board and pen. He produced an easel from behind the stage curtains and spent 30 seconds setting it up, then placed the board on it, revealing a series of blanks.

“Hello.” He said. “Let’s play Comedy Store hangman. Somebody shout out a letter.”

There were about six audience members there, counting us, and nobody responded at first.

“Quick, now.” He said. “I’m running out of time.”

We started yelling letters, and as he began to fill the right ones into the board it became clear that the puzzle was spelling out his name. Yes, that’s right – this comedian finagled a three minute set at a comedy institution so he could go onstage and berate a tiny, disgruntled audience into yelling out the letters of his name, not necessarily in the right order. What was his name? Hell if I know – I forgot it as soon as the emcee said it, and even when it was sitting there in front of me I didn’t give enough of a shit to read it.

So I guess the joke’s on you, Hangman Comedian. Go to Hell – unfortunately, as I would later discover, Hell is The Comedy Store on Sunday.

"Stand still - Hieronymous Bosch is still setting up his canvas."

As we got into the 9:00 PM range, the room filled up a bit more and some more talented comedians began to grace the stage – a relevant and hilarious pit stop on the bumpy highway to 2:00 AM bullshitville.

One of the acts I particularly enjoyed was a woman whose thoroughly amusing set was anchored by jokes about the South and how many of her high school classmates are married or pregnant, which is really my comedy reservoir as well. Also, like most attractive female comedians, her set got me wondering whether I had a chance with her, and I spent some of the lamer sets of the evening imagining situations where I bumped into her and casually mentioned that I was a three time after dinner speaking state finalist, which would convince her to spontaneously French me.

In High Fidelity, John Cusak and his music nerd friends fantasize about dating a musician, and likewise I’ve always fantasized about dating an attractive lady comedian. I could see myself lounging around her house working on blog entries, coming up with jokes together, or the two of us going out to dinner and spending the entire meal quietly mocking foreigners and overweight people outside. Plus, I think we can all agree that I’m a comedy goldmine that no other girl has had the presence of mind to capitalize on just yet.

See? SEE!?

So all I’m saying is, if you Google your name and find this blog, Sarah Tiana, you should drop me a line even though I’m 11 years younger than you. That picture at the top of the page? That’s my actual hair. We both know you can’t walk away from that.

By about 11:00 the sun had disappeared and dark clouds were pouring down a torrent of increasingly bizarre crap. Audience members began to filter out, only some of whom were replaced by new, drunk, heckle-oriented arrivals. Patrick and I, sitting almost front and center, were the target of multiple jokes from the increasingly bad comedians onstage. Most of the jokes implied that we were gay, and one joke implied that we liked Ben Folds, which I found to be in very poor taste.

I had to listen to November Rain twice after just LOOKING at this picture.

The acts became more and more avant garde. One of the only good acts after midnight was a freakishly tall – I’m talking Stephen Merchant tall – guy in basketball shorts and a T shirt who started his set by announcing his phone number, standing on a table at the front of the stage, and making snarky (frequently hilarious) responses to durrogatory text messages sent by members of the crowd. The crowd didn’t find him as funny as Patrick and I did, and when a woman at the back of the room yelled at him to “Get off!”, he stared at her, wide eyed, and described himself masturbating while fantasizing about killing her.

When he finished his violent diatribe, he smiled and said, “Now I can get off.”

At that point it was 12:30 and I tried to leave, having seen enough ill will and human suffering for an evening, but Patrick followed me outside and in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette convinced me to come back in and finish the night.

As we rounded 1:00 AM, the room was empty save for comedians waiting to go on stage and Patrick and I, at which point it became less a comedy show and more of a one sided conversation. One lady comedian in her mid 50s started her set by marveling at some length at how Patrick and I were both young enough to be her children and how she really wanted to take us both home for a night of ‘hot fucking’ and then make us both peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Then she branched into a very detailed monologue about her pubic hair.

I kept an eye on my watch, waiting for 2:00 AM. When it finally arrived, on the heels of an almost tragically unfunny 18 year old Jewish girl, I began to tense the muscles in my legs in order to leave, but then the sleepy yet foulmouthed emcee was onstage again, introducing the next comic through a torrent of jokes about vaginas and requests for two audience members to come and have sex onstage.

A black guy got up and spent most of his politically charged set mocking President Obama for not cleaning up the oil spill, as though he blamed Obama for not renting a boat and spending a few months personally skimming oil himself. Meanwhile, a man dressed as Jesus – white robes, sandals, long hair, beard – entered and waited at the back of the room, while his groupies – three drunk black women, two drunker Irishmen, and a fat middle aged white guy in glasses who claimed to be one of the girls’ ‘acting coach’ – had a seat behind us and began to heckle.

Wait. Long hair, robe, sandals OH SHI-

The circumstances of my life had at that point grown so bizarre that I began to wonder if I would ever return to a world that was even halfway recognizable to me, populated by familiar objects like marching bands, The Mystery Wagon, and Battlestar Galactica. I was depressed, dear readers – as depressed as I’ve ever been.

I was watching a sad parade of society’s dregs onstage before me, comics so bad that they couldn’t even perform on Sunday night but rather early Monday morning, comics who knew how bad they were but soldiered on ahead anyway, even though they were playing to an audience of two. I wanted nothing more than to go home and forget that such people existed; to pretend that I lived in a world where everybody who was talented at comedy succeeded, and everybody who was bad got the hint quickly and then went back to business school.*

*Ha ha, kidding! Everybody knows business majors are only funny when we use them as a punchline.

The emcee introduced who I thought was the last comic as a ‘professional model,’ perhaps as a means to quiet the increasingly rowdy crowd of drunk Irishmen and (potential) prostitutes. The woman who took the stage was indeed attractive, wearing a nice patterned dress and high heels, but I could tell from the way she flounced that she was not the sort of lady comedian that I fantasized about.

“Hi!” She squeaked into the microphone in a voice that was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Minnie Mouse. “I’m a girl!”

She then awkwardly curtsied several times, produced a notecard from her bra, and began to read off of it.

“Do you want to hear a joke about high heeled shoes?”

It’s painful for me to remember – hopefully you get the gist of the character she was trying to play. Picture female Andy Kaufman, only not funny. If you’re not an Andy Kaufman fan, imagine someone far less funny than you think Andy Kaufman is, playing to seven people, the majority of whom are drunkenly heckling, at 2:30 AM in a deserted comedy club on Sunset Boulevard on a Monday morning.

"Hey, waddaya mean 'thank you very much', asshole?"

When she was done (her set ended with her ‘dying from lack of attention,’ only to be revived when the emcee stormed onto the stage to demand that we bring her back to life by giving her a round of applause) Patrick and I locked eyes.

“Time to go?” Patrick said.

“Yes.” I said.

We got up and began to thread our way out, to the jeers of the drunk Irishmen.* The emcee took the stage once more.

*And fuck those guys, all being from a country far inferior to Scotland. Yeah, I said it.

“Hey, are you guys leaving?” He asked over the mic. “We’ve still got one more comic!”

I could see Jesus, waiting on deck in the shadows beside the stage. Patrick stopped and looked at me.

“You got one more in you?” He asked.

“No!” I said, emphatically, both to him and the emcee. “I’ve watched eight and a half fucking hours of standup comedy tonight. I officially hate standup comedy now.”

Everybody seemed to understand. Well, I didn’t see Jesus’ reaction, but based on his reputation I think he’d have been cool with it. And Patrick seemed just as happy to leave then, anyway, being as he had to get up for work in four hours. The Irish guys called me a pussy, I think, but they’re from a country that didn’t invent the deep fried cheeseburger, so the joke’s on them.

All the drunkenness of Ireland, only the food is better and they've got their own parliament.

In the parking garage, thankful to be surrounded by things that weren’t trying to tell us horrible jokes, Patrick fired up another cigarette and we got to discussing the evening.

I scolded Patrick for not letting me leave at 12:30. Patrick pointed out that I would have regretted leaving, and he was right. I said that eight and a half hours of comedy is a fate worse than death.

Patrick tossed his cigarette butt on the ground.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “I think I’m going to do this again in a couple weeks.”

Truman Capps doesn’t know what the deal is with airline peanuts, nor will he ever.