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Doing The Same Thing And Expecting A Different Result:…

It is hard to believe it has been one year since I lost to Myq Kaplan at Caroline’s in the Final Four of March Comedy Madness 2009.  The road to the championship each year for its first three years has gone through me.  Year one, I lost to Julian McCullough in the Sweet 16, who went on to win the title.  One month later my brother named his second son Julian. Coincidence?

The next year I lost to Liz Miele, who is the girlfriend of Reese Waters, in the Elite 8. Liz did not win the whole thing, but Reese did, so close enough.

And last year I lost to Myq Kaplan, who won the whole thing, in the Final Four, and has since gone on to be on The Tonight Show.  So basically my comedy career has turned into the equivalent of Jennifer Aniston’s vagina: once you have been through me, greater success for you or those close to you is all but assured.

Last night I felt so tired on my way to Comix.  I had already resigned myself to not winning, but seeing someone beat me and attain new success.  I was also exhausted from a day of watching Six Feet Under (great show).  But when I got to Comix (the sight of March Comedy Madness this year) I felt the competitive juices and hope stirring again.  The crowd was buzzing and looking good, (the only comedy club in the meatpacking district, Comix audience members tend to be a hybrid of comedy club goers and women you’d fu-k if your father ran a hedge fund. At least that is what I usually see when I am slaving around in Ochi’s – Comix’s alternative venue in the basement, where I rant and rave, while feeling like my comedy career is Sloth from The Goonies).

Well when I got on stage my jokes all hit exactly as expected (but I had to go first, which meant when the audience votes, my competitor gets last licks, so they can measure how I do and try to do better).  My competitor got a nice reaction from the crowd, but when the voting occurred, something unexpected happened: a tie.  Then after another round of applause voting, another tie.

Now in every college basketball run to the title, there is always a clutch play that allows the eventual champion to continue playing.  Tyus Edney is still the one that comes to mind in 1995 for UCLA.  Well, due to the tie, we had to do a 30 second joke-off. And like Mariano Rivera out of the bullpen for the Yankees, I dropped my Obama impression for 30 seconds, which saved the day.

So now, after a year of recovery from the bitterness and rage that always consumes me after I lose or miss out on anything (I put a friend on two weeks video game suspension when he beat my In NBA Live and did not offer an immediate rematch) I am back and ready to make someone the next champion of March Comedy Madness.  Next Wednesday at 930 pm at Comix I square off against Alex Grubard.  Could he be headed for The Tonight Show, Comedy Central or a intimate relationship with the next winner?  You have to be there to see it.

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Dishonorable Discharge

Last night I did a show at a club in Princeton, New Jersey.  I was the feature act (the middle act doing about 25 minutes) and it went so well that I woke up with an e-mail from the owner/manager telling me that I was now demoted to emcee the shows tonight (instead of featuring) because I did not “look comfortable” and referred to a cheat sheet on stage.  I think I would have been happier if I were banned from the club and arrested for indecent exposure than being demoted.  Unfortunately, being demoted to emcee one night after featuring (with the same headliner) is like being fired from a job, but then still having to show up to work for another couple of weeks.  Obviously an awkward situation.

The sad part was last night’s show did not resemble a club gig.  That is because 65% of the 30 patrons were all doctors in some medical consortium.  Their average age was 55 and their favorite topic was themselves (for the record, the headliner is pretty dirty, but she scored big time points with the crowd by doing, drumroll please… lots of crowd work).  The emcee automatically does crowd work as part of his/her job description – “get the crowd involved and excited” and the headliner can see the tone of the show through the feature, which leaves the feature to figure out where he or she can go.  Sort of like being a set up man in baseball.  Your job is just not to fu-k up the show before Mariano Rivera.

So after my first four jokes (tried and true from San Fran to Denver to Boston and every sh*thole open mic in NY so like I said, tried and true) fell flat I realized that just a handful of people and the comics were giving me any consistent laughter.  So at that point I took a long hard look at my set list.  Far from a memory helper it was more like a temporary examination of the choices I have made in my life.   Then I just continued to rip through jokes that usually work with everyone outside of conservative medical professionals staying at Princeton, NJ hotels.  I was comfortbale the whole time, but I guess I can’t say the same for the crowd.  Some things went well and they even laughed a lot at the Obama impression (despite being almost unanimous in their displeasure for him – aside – I hope most of them lose their jobs with a public option if that is possible), but their laughter stopped just in time to give me an awkward exit off of the stage.

I think my main problem is that I confused the show’s proximity to New York as “non-road.”  With my exponentially heavier travel schedule this year I have seen what works and what doesn’t work outside of major urban centers.  Sometimes I have been surprised (Denver in particular), but most places and most people are content with the same old stuff (blacks and whites are different, black comics who are loud and animated versus calm and thought provoking, crowd work, women and men are so different, etc.).  It is as if people do not go to comedy clubs to hear something original in these places, but to hear the same jokes that they have always liked from different people.  This is not necessarily “wrong,” but it is irritating. Oh, fu-k it’s wrong. Dumbasses.  Buy a CD if that is what you like.  But either way it would have been nice to have one show to make the adjustment from “comedy club set” to the “older white people who do not get pop culture or sports after 1985 set/love crowd work about themselves and are possibly the intellectually slowest group of doctors in America” set.  I guess not.

What’s absurd is that although I feel my stuff is on the whole fairly original, I am not re-inventing the wheel on stage.

I guess what I have to figure out (and what I fought with my girlfriend about – I turn into a verbal Jake LaMotta after a bad show) is how to get paid: infrequently for somewhat original concepts, without being a self-righteous Hedberg or Carlin rip off that abound in “alt” scenes or more frequently for a routine that makes me want to kill myself but that comedy “fans” eat up on the road while I hope for a big break that will allow me to be my own voice.

But first I have to sludge through rain/snow to host two shows tonight.  Cold, wet and demoted – sounds like I’ll be much more comfortable tonight.

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The Cleveland Show

Important statistics from this week:

  • 1 show at the Cleveland Improv- 15 minute set
  • 24 hours on Amtrak to and from Cleveland, Ohio within a 51 hour span
  • 1 cold/flu obtained
  • 700 page book on basketball read

On Tuesday I set off on Amtrak for Cleveland, Ohio to do a set at the Cleveland Improv.  It was a 3:45 train, which was scheduled to arrive in Cleveland in a manageable 11 hours, 42 minutes.   I really like the train.  Anything under 12 hours I consider enjoyable.  It has an old school charm, in a way, but instead of travelling the rails with people who look and dress like Don and Betty Draper, it now really just consists of people who cannot fit in airplane seats (the morbidly obese and in my case, the semi-freakishly tall) and those that want to avoid TSA for profiling and legal status related issues.

On the train ride to Cleveland I managed to write the next brilliant, but under-viewed and underappreciated JLCauvin.com sketch and read 300 pages in Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball.  About half way through the trip I felt the symptoms of a cold coming on, which I blame half on my Atlantic City drinking binge/sleep deprivation last weekend that may have left me susceptible to illness, and the health industry’s biggest customers that I was entombed with on Amtrak.

I arrived at the Doubletree in downtown Cleveland at 4:10 am.  I fear that one day my nomadic travel schedule and odd hours, along with my menacing frame, will lead me to be the chief suspect in some disappearance/serial killer case.  “The last I saw Mary Jo she was coming back from the bar around 3 am.  To think of it I did see a rather large, rather unhappy looking man around 4 am that same night.” NY Post headline the next day: Comic Kills!

The next day I hung out most of the day at The Cleveland Improv (extremely nice club) and at the Rock Bottom restaurant above (I am sensing a message from above since I keep ending up in that restaurant chain in different cities).

The show that night was an open mic night where local comics are given 4 minutes each and a few visiting comics are given longer sets to audition for emcee and feature work.  4 minutes may not seem like a long time, but the good news is the club does not make it a bringer for the young comics, so unlike other places, dreams are not manipulated and raped by club owners.  Not to mention that the booker of the Cleveland Improv has without question the best track record in returning phone calls and e-mails of any club with which I have dealt.  But it’s like Sinatra said about NY, “If you can, duh duh, make it there, then you are probably with the right booking agency or sucking the right di-k.”

For my set I got to follow an older comedian with Cancer who is undergoing chemo.  In one of my best off the cuff comments of my career so far the first thing I said on stage (with a well timed sniffle) was: “Well, I though I might get some slack from you guys because I have a pretty bad cold, but I guess that excuse is fu-ked now.”

I went through my set doing quite well until about the 11 minute mark.  Then 2 of my last 3 bits (including the Mariano Rivera of my set – Obama impression) fell flat.  There were three forces at work that I believed caused this: the checks were getting dropped on tables, my voice was dying on me and as the booker told me, Midwest crowds are slower, belly laughers (this last one may be the greatest euphemism of all time).  Overall it went well and I think it was worth the trip.  At least the trip going.

The trip coming back (a 5:20 am Amtrak the next morning, arriving at 6:25 pm in NYC) was like being Joel McHale’s character on Community.  I don’t like to pick on special needs folk, but about three seats back from me was a man by himself who literally spoke for about 4 hours with very little break to an elderly couple who were sort of being polite.  The main problem was that, as if some sort of stereotype from a Carlos Mencia bit, he just kept shouting out things like, “I like the train more than flying,” followed quickly by non sequiturs that expressed interest or joy in something.

The stars of the trip were not that guy, but the crazy (literally) guy who kept walking from the cafe car and back talking to himself and the woman who sat in front of me and kept having incredibly loud cell phone conversations.  Here was my tally of phrases she used and how many times she used them on the train:

  • “You know what I’m sayin” – 1,187
  • “He think he can play me but I’m playin’ him” – 66
  • “Sorry, but she caught me on the phone and I was like ‘I need to go'” – only 1 time, but this is funny how she was blaming her her other friend for keeping her on the phone, even though it appeared that her friend said almost nothing.

So I can tell you when I need to go back to Cleveland for more extensive work I am definitely going to upgrade and take Greyhound.