Bienvenidos a Miami

A great philly comedian and rapper once said that Miami is a city where the heat is on all night on the beach til the break of dawn. This is true - Miami was sweltering. Our plan to visit cities based on warmth was going off without a hitch. However, as comedians, we can always find the copper lining. In this case, high temperatures also come with high sun exposure.

On the spectrum

Dan and I are always on opposite ends of any spectrum. In the personality spectrum Dan is outgoing and I’m reserved. In the emotional spectrum Dan is cheerful, I’m despondent. In Miami we reached a new antithetical plane - the genetic spectrum.

I’m genetically not a ‘sunlight person’ whereas Dan C soaks it up. He’s SPF 8 in a brown bottle with palm trees on the label, I’m SPF 85 in a kevlar canister with a tombstone on the label. His ancestors frollicked around sun-kissed Italian beaches whereas mine skulked around Hibernian mud bunkers with thatched roofs.

Darker skin gives Dan a level of ethnic ambiguity that I simply am not afforded. When people see him, they’re not sure if he’s an Italian mathematician or an a Middle-Eastern oil baron. When people see me, they’re not sure if i’m an Irish dock worker or an alcoholic Irish dock worker.

Owing to his Mediterranean ancestry, Dans skin is a natural ‘deep olive’. My skin, due to celtic ancestry, is an unnatural ‘bleached bone’. Despite genetic differences, the sun is actually a great equalizer in its ability to darken and radically transform our appearances. After an hour of direct sun exposure, Dan goes from vaguely Italian to 100% Indian. I go from 100% Irish to vaguely Martian.

Even audiences have opposite reactions to our skin. If I make jokes about being pale, the laughter doesn’t pass through a filter -- nobody has any qualms with laughing at a melanin deficient loser. But when Dan jokes about looking like a terrorist, everyone glances around the room first to see if it’s ok to laugh.

A big factor in how hard a joke hits is location. In DC, Dan ran jokes about being profiled as a terrorist and many struggled to stifle laughter through their hands - holding back in case the joke wasn’t PC enough. But in the South (and Colombia) those same jokes obliterated the room. Dan talked about his look being terrible for the airport and everyone had a seizure. They were practically rolling in the aisles. They almost laughed too  hard.

Showtime

One of the first things that struck us about Miami is that real audiences attended mics. Open mic is usually attended exclusively by comics waiting to go up, but in Miami the showrunners advertise really well. We were impressed!

Our first show was an open mic after a showcase. The showcase went from 8:00-11:00, so it was amazing that anyone stayed afterwards to continue watching. Watching comedy is like watching porn - after you’ve seen what you came to see, you don’t continue watching til the end.

One hour is the sweet spot for comedy shows; it’s no coincidence that most specials last about that long. Two hours is stretching the limit but still ok. Any longer than 2 - 2 ½ hours and audiences are basically fried.

We went midway through the mic and the audience had just about had it. It didn’t help that some idiot got up at the beginning of the open mic and walked the room. He had a shit set and went after the crowd saying “It’s not gonna get better from here, the showcase is over. It’s all mic’ers now”. Bomb with dignity, you fucking turd. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

We’ve learned that launching straight into material doesn’t usually go well in dead rooms and figured we’d use this set to practice crowd work and puzzle out how to revive a flatlining room.

The best resuscitation we’ve seen was at the Comedy Cellar. There were about 6-8 performers at that particular show and the audience was becoming restless after an hour and half. Godfrey took the stage and immediately cried out “Bar the doors! We’ve got 100 more comedians left. No one’s leaving”. Addressing the audience and acknowledging the collective weariness won the room back.

It’s Alive!!!

Luckily a comic had made it easy for us to revive the room on this night. Right before Dan was due to go up, a belligerently drunk comic performed and made spectacle of herself. Stumbling around and slurring for what seemed an eternity, the captive audience could only raise eyebrows and think “WTF?”.

Not only did she go over her time, but 30 seconds after leaving the stage she went back and snatched the mic from the host! She prattled on incoherently for another minute or so until the host managed to wrestle the mic away. After briefly addressing the awkwardness in the room, the host welcomed Dan to the stage.

Dan pulled a pro move and managed to breathe new life into the room with “What in the sweet fuck just happened? You run the light and come back? Where do we start now? Where do we go?” and the crowd loved it. Addressing that weird, shared experience was the key to winning everyone over.

Calling back to that weird moment made it easy to run jokes between spontaneous riffs. I went after Dan and was able to continue riding that wave. We both did well that night - well enough that another host put us on his showcase the following night.

Nevermind. Spoke too soon.

I’d love to say that we crushed the showcase and the crowd hoisted us atop their shoulders like Rudy, or that the previous nights lesson in crowd rejuvenation strengthened us to the point of invincibility -- but we did not crush. We went at the very end of the showcase and ate silence. We failed to zap the crowd back to life.

At the mic we were able to use the lemons that life gave us (drunk chick riffing) to revive the audience. We weren't able to replicate that in the showcase. Of course, we can't hope for a gift like that in every show. We need to learn how to make our own lemonade. It's something we're still learning. The more shows we do, the less we fear crashing and burning.

The following day we packed our bags and flew to Medellin, Colombia.