Bright lights, big city

After Asheville we took two weeks to recharge in Philly. When that got stale we packed up the van and headed due North with sights set on New York City. As we pulled up outside Dan's sisters apartment in Brooklyn, we noticed a sign saying “no parking between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. for street cleaning”. We found it strange, but figured there must be a sensible workaround for traffic. There wasn’t. Everyone moved their cars to the other side of the road, double or triple parking to create a masterpiece of gridlock. I guess it’s worth it, the streets sure do look great.

I’m not trying to say Philly is cleaner than New York, not at all. We lived on Girard avenue in Philly - which was a swirling vortex of trash. Every time a breeze rolled through, it was like that windy movie scene where someone gets nailed in the face with a newspaper.

Open Mic 101

The first mic we hit was at a comedy club. There was a $5 cover and one drink minimum, which equates to paying $10 for stage time. Our non-comic friends are always surprised to hear that comics occasionally have to pay. They ask “Is there at least a good crowd?” Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Open mic seems to be a world unknown to most people, so we want to take a minute here to briefly explain what it’s like.

In broad terms, open mic is a room of comics waiting for their turn to go up. Aspiring comedians perform in bars and clubs almost exclusively to other comedians (if any audience at all). Attendees are there primarily to practice material, not necessarily to laugh and enjoy as if it were a headliners show. It’s like practicing baseball at the batting cages. While waiting for your turn, you’re focused on your own swing more so than cheering batters on.

Sets typically range three to five minutes, and skill levels range from absolute novice to professional. On any given night you see people crush a room, bomb, work through new jokes, or ramble about their day. You may see musical comics, prop comics, and a smattering of crazy people who just want to speak into a microphone. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s terrible. The point is, unpredictability causes relatively low non-comic attendance.

At professional shows, everyone pays good money and knows what to expect -- a few openers and a headliner. The openers are all going to be good, at a minimum, if not great. The Headliner will usually tear the place down. All said and done, the show is an hour and a half of laughs. Open mic, on the other hand, has no headliner, no guaranteed laughs, and can run for three or more hours.

Showtime

This first mic was all comics, which is commonplace for New York as mics happen at all hours of the day and night. No one in their right mind would rush to mics at odd hours if they weren’t comics themselves. All-comic mics are great for determining what jokes will work in real shows. A small chuckle from a room of exhausted comics typically means a big laugh at an actual show.

Dan C went up third, I went up much later. This is par for the course when names are drawn at random. There’s some kind of universal cosmic balance that when one of us is selected in the first 5, the other is guaranteed to be selected in the last 5. We got chuckles on a few new jokes and connected with local comics after the show, so it was a success. We even met up with some of the comics from this show at other mics later in the week.

We only had fifteen minutes before the next show, so we zipped over to Dominos across the street and asked for the fastest item. About five minutes later we were handed a steaming cardboard box of garlic bread. With no dining room, we went outside to eat in the cold. We were a pitiful sight -- two grown men huddled over a greasy box, ravenously devouring paper mâché that was both our dinner and heat source. When passersby made eye contact they quickly shifted their gaze or said “sorry, no change”. We should’ve lit the trash can next to us on fire to complete the picture.

We ran back across the street and headed into the mic. Now we were just the weird, garlicky-smelling comics from Philly. It worked out though. Everyone at the next mic was strange. One guy talked about how he was raped in prison, another talked about how he farted on a grandmas face in the subway. A lot of the jokes were bad, and the comics pulled that shitty move where they scold the audience for ‘not getting it’. Challenging the audience can be really funny when done correctly, but this was just uncomfortable. We didn’t hang around after that show.

The real deal

After doing a few mics the following day we decided to catch a show at the Comedy Cellar. We put our names on the standby ticket list and walked around the block a few times. We noticed a guy barking for another comedy club and went over to chat with him. We had a bunch of questions but it turns out he wasn’t even a comic. Barking was just his job.

We managed to get tickets at the cellar and the show was amazing. After countless open mics, it was refreshing to see pro’s in action. We thoroughly enjoyed the sets, but we didn’t enjoy the constant echo of chatter from the people sitting next to us.

There were two Germans at our table. One of them spoke English, the other did not. So for the entire show we heard the comic deliver a joke, followed shortly thereafter by a German translation. Nothing says “funny” better than taking a joke, removing the cultural context, and translating it as fast as possible. Leave it to the Germans to engineer the most efficient method for humor extraction. They're just a barrel o’ laughs.

What the hell were they thinking? Selecting a language comprehension activity without knowing what words are is like entering a math olympiad without knowing what numbers are. Maybe after the show they watched a book-on-tape in Chinese Braille.

They probably wanted to show that they’re hip. Germans have been working diligently to rebrand themselves. They were tired of the stereotypical global perception that they are serious, humorless, and brooding people, so they released a show on Netflix and called it … Dark. A dude hangs himself literally in the very first scene of the show. I wonder if in Germany it’s broadcast with a laugh track.

After New York we went to Providence.