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Weekend Comedy Recap: Albany Anonymity

This week took me back on the road to Albany, New York, home of grey skies and the Albany Funny Bone. The week has been unique for its general lack of eventfulness or even humor derived from awkward or uncomfortable circumstances.  Some cuck once said “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.” Now I believe that he was completely wrong, but assuming Elie Weisel was correct, then Albany has had very little love for me this week.  I am writing this just before the final show on Sunday, so that should demonstrate how little I feel another show will change the tenor of the weekend.

I took Amtrak up on Thursday drenched in sweat. I was lugging a suitcase and a backpack and also a small bag full of CDs for sale. And it was 90 degrees in NYC. So by the time I settled into my seat on the train I had the brown complexion and sweaty gloss of someone who was nervously preparing for jihad. The train made it to Albany on time and I was picked by the manager and taken to the Hampton Inn near the club.

The Thursday show was a smaller crowd, but I ended up making two sales and offending no one. I figured that was a good omen for the main part of the weekend – the two shows Friday and two Saturday. And like every other business instinct I have had in 14 years, 11 months of performing stand up comedy, I was mistaken.  On a bright note I shared a brief clip of myself on Twitter the next day and Jim Gaffigan liked it which then propelled it to well over 10K views.  I have never worked with the great Gaffigan, but he pays me a compliment or shares some piece of my comedy content a few times a year, which makes me think we will never work together, but out of respect he will be the celebrity that pays for my funeral.

Friday’s early show was fantastic. Big crowd, big laughs, zero sales.  And almost no acknowledgement – in an age where it feels like more and more audiences care about the fame level of the people performing, being a middle act has begun to feel more like club staff than one of the entertainers in terms of post show reception.  And I would admit it if I were having bad sets, but these are the reactions after killing sets, which makes it all the more disheartening.

The late show Friday is often the show that is most predictably terrible. It is usually people who have had a long work week and decide, “Hey, can we drag down any struggling entertainers with us?” This late show was no exception. And they were led by an older drunk lady (she was the type where you didn’t know if she was a 38 year old who had been through the ringer or a 55 year old who was just taking a break from banging her middle school students in northern Florida.  She had the orange complexion of a woman who either tanned too much or had just finished tossing Donald Trump’s salad (hence my nickname for her, “Trunt,” as in Trump/C- you can figure it out).  She was loud, drunk and threw the show off repeatedly.  And even worse, she spent 15 minutes after the show at the headliner’s merchandise table repeatedly saying “Oh my God, they hated me – I was getting reprimanded!” in that way that let’s you know she didn’t actually feel bad – she just wanted to remind everyone that there had been focus on her.  In better news, one couple bought the three albums I had for sale.  And making the evening a complete disaster was the Utah Jazz getting annihilated by the Houston Rockets in the western conference semi-finals.

Saturday I got up early, eager to change my luck. So I GPS’d the nearest gym, which was a Planet Fitness 2.6 miles away.  I started walking figured that walk would be a good warmup before some light exercise and ice cream sundae eating at America’s most embarrassing gym chain (pizza day and bagel days are real things at PF). When I was .6 miles away all roads disappeared.  Much like a lot of fat America, New York above New York City apparently becomes a place where you need to drive everywhere. So I walked back to the hotel, gathered my computer and went and finished my next YouTube masterpiece (142 views at least), “Comedian Combine,” which should be filmed and launched in June.  I then made my way to All Saints Parish for Saturday evening Mass to pray for album sales and Donovan Mitchell’s jump shot.

Saturday night I had two great sets and sold zero albums. I went back to the hotel and had a chipwich and promised myself that if I experienced this disappointment another 322 times then I might have to call it quits on my comedy career.

Sunday I made a guest appearance on The Black Guy Who Tips podcast and then went to Dave and Busters with the headliner Dale Jones.  We got a Lyft from the hotel because it was raining and here is the conversation we had with the driver:

Me: Just two grown men going to play video games.

Driver: Haha well it’s a good day to do it. Where you guys in from?

Me: New York City

Dale: Los Angeles

*brief pause where driver realizes how weird it is for a 39 year old man and a 48 year old man to be from opposite coasts meeting up to play video games at a shopping mall. Moment of contemplation if this is a new tactic used by closeted married men and wondering if Albany is a new hotbed for down low activities #TheNewAtlanta*

Driver: What are you guys in for?

Dale: We are both performing at the Funny Bone.

Driver: OH! (puts away Grindr app)

So we played some video games, ate some Pizzeria Uno and now I am back writing this masterpiece.  Tonight I have one show, but cannot stay to sell CDs (HAHAHAHAHAHA) because my train is at 9:15. So if all goes well I will have a good set, get on the train and watch the Utah Jazz win on my phone on the way home.

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The Award For Biggest Charade

The Christmas season is a time when awards and end of the year honors are talked about.  Whether it is the Golden Globes, Time’s Person of The Year or the Oscars this is the time of year when people suggest and nominate people for excellence or notoriety in the past year.  Of course there is a set of nominations named at this time of year that are nominally more relevant to me than the Golden Globes, but for which I have as good a chance of winning as I do an Oscar – the ECNY Awards.

ECNY awards stand for “Excellence in Comedy, New York.”  Now, I am unabashedly competitive.  I have always been competitive – academically, athletically, even when walking down the street and I feel like someone is trying to pass me and walk faster.  It is why I have repeatedly entered comedy contests to the point of possibly being insane;I hope and want to win (and win money).  If I was less competitive I would probably be a happier person with my comedy career and wouldn’t go ballistic whenever read a Facebook update about someone booking clubs or shows that I have not/cannot.

That’s me.  Asshole?  Perhaps.  But I admit who I am.  One problem I have with comedy awards is that this business is so littered with “real people” who pretend to abhor awards and competitions.  They are the folks who will strut around saying “awards have no place in comedy” and “competitions are stupid” and “how do you judge comedy with awards?” but then cannot wait to seek validation through giving and receiving these awards.  Comedy is like the acting world, but with less transparency of people’s ambitions.  The whole scene reminds me of the goth kids on South Park, who considered themselves too cool for mainstream and think that they are incredibly unique and uncompromising individuals, not realizing that they themselves had participated in forming their own group-think and cliche.

There is a parade of nominations that occur and I think a couple of people have nominated me for a few things, and I nominated my Brett Favre video (hey can 5,000 YouTube viewers be wrong?  absolutely).  But like TSA at airports, I believe the nomination process is cosmetic.   Any comedian on Facebook in the NYC area should be able to predict who will be nominated for these awards.  So with that said I will be re-naming some of the awards to reflect my predicted nominees.  Of course, this is (mostly) not aimed at the nominees, but simply at the process, for which the dye is already cast, and at the people who would act above awards and pretend to be artists but because of industry carrots dangling before them, are unabashedly competitive.  Your categories are:

Best Male Comedian – “Who has the most television appearances this year – Comedy Central Presents a Plus, Comix appearances also a plus.”

Best Female Comedian – see above

Best Host – “Who runs the shows most heavily promoted by Time Out NY”

Best Podcast – “All comics listen to Marc Maron, right?  So how about him and 4 others.  Did he already win? Fu*k.”

Best Sketch Video – “Have the people nominated last year done any new videos this year, because it would take too long to watch lots of videos from people we do not know.”

“Best Improv Group” – “Improv is painful most of the time, but to look all-encompassing as a comedy awards show here ya go”

Best Website – “What websites, regardless of design and innovation, are the best at promoting already established acts or acts with sufficient industry heat behind them, while never critiquing or offering substantive industry commentary or criticism beyond consensus beliefs for fear of risking their own access to events?”

Outstanding achievement in tweeting – “which hyper liberal with possible Comedy Central connections do we like?”

Emerging Comic – “If you are on Facebook enough and get enough invites to Time Out NY-favorite and Comix shows you will know at least 3 or 4 of the nominees (New York’s Funniest finalists from the contest preceding the NY Comedy Festival a definite plus.

Now of course, most of the people nominated will be talented and funny and I do not mean to disparage them.  And I have no problem with awards shows.   But the charade of a nomination process (sort of the on-line version of “open call” casting lines) coupled with the “awards are beneath comedy” hypocrisy make this sort of an offensive exercise.   Do you really think dozens of podcasts are being reviewed for quality, humor and insight?  Or that hundreds or maybe thousands of YouTube videos are being watched?   It is not that seeing 5 talented comedians get nominated is a crime – no one will be upset with the eventual nominees.  But the injustice is in promoting a charade as some egalitarian and official process, while I believe that if even one good comedian (let alone dozens) is not given equal recognition and consideration for his or her nominated work then the whole process is corrupt.  But there is some industry presence at these awards, which combined with an outpouring of delusional submissions for nominees gives an air of legitimacy that is far bigger than it should be.  I would have no problem with a committee picking all the nominees without an open process.  But like Presidential and Congressional elections, the powers that be need the proletariat to engage in the process to give it legitimacy, while simultaneously undermining their own interests by participating.

But a sincere good luck to most of the eventual/already decided nominees – you all work hard at what you do and comedy is a great thing, even if the comedy business sucks.  But if we can be honest about this: there is a new award category this year for the ECNYs – where people can nominate their own category.  How about: “biggest charade.”

But here is the most telling thing I learned about comedy over the last couple of years.  I wrote a blog not so long ago that basically denounced the comedy industry (not comedy itself) as just a microcosm of American capitalism run amok.  I bashed bringer shows and open call lines in particular, but generally the culture of a profession that could take people’s dreams and personal work and manipulate those for one-sided financial gain.  The blog was forwarded around extensively and I had many people comment on it and tell me in person that they thought it was great.  The thing you need to know about comedy is this – over half the comments posted to the blog and supporting what I had wrote were left under pseudonyms or anonymous.  Good thing there’s no award for courage in comedy.