Comedy Tonight

Day 7: Fall is in the air.

I suppose a more apropos title for today's musings would be "Comedy Last Night," but then the reference to the song would fall apart. At any rate, last night was open mic comedy night at The Barking Kudu, and Lovey & I went to see our friend Jack Roberts perform his routine. While Jack was very funny, as were a couple of others, the overall impression I got was that the new generation of up-and-coming comedians (at least the ones doing open mic on Mondays at the Kudu) seem to think that mere repetition of profanities will pass for comedy.

Lest I appear hypocritical, I will freely admit that I can have a potty mouth. I also enjoy crude humor, but there is a BIG difference in vulgar comedy and plain vulgarity. Richard Pryor used every word in the book in his act, and some of his material was absolutely filthy, but it was hilarious because of the strong (sub)text beneath the language and subject matter. When there's nothing funny in the routine, however, tossing in a few dozen GDMFs does very little to help.

One of the things that impressed me about the good comics (Jack included) was the obvious preparation that they put into their acts. Stand-up is deceptively simple...like improv, it has to appear effortless, yet requires a huge amount of technique and talent. It seemed last night that there were several people who literally just wandered up onstage and started talking about whatever came to mind.

Not that they asked my opinion, but I think The Barking Kudu could actually turn this into something quite good. Although it is technically "open mic," there should probably be a screening process of sorts just to weed out the 20-year-old college kids who think mumbling about sex and drinking and saying f**k 300 times in one sentence equals inspired comedy.

In today's News From The Motherland... a mayor has underwear issues...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/8219619.stm

Cheers!
FLT3