This weekend I performed at Wisecrackers in Scranton, PA.  Here’s the re-cap:

The Trip

Being only two hours, fifteen minutes from NYC it was obviously a Greyhound trip.  Fortunately, since Greyhound knows of my love for long, uncomfortable rides, they decided to leave 40 minutes late.  Other than that the bus trip was uneventful.  In fact, Greyhound buses now have nice leather seats and extra leg room, which must be nice for the people six-three and shorter who benefit from the extra leg room.  However, Greyhound continues to discriminate against the exceptionally tall.

The Hotel

The Wisecrackers in Scranton is located in a Clarion Hotel.  My warning that I was no longer in metaphorical Kansas (but much close to the mindset of Kansas) was the sign outside the hotel:

Now gun lovers and “real Amurrrricans” are big fans of saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  But for such inactive objects, apparently guns can still have a show and get top billing over the comedy show.  As expected I did observe several guys who looked like Larry The Cable Guy in sleeveless shirts and camouflage pants.   I was just happy none appeared to go to the comedy shows.

My hotel room was nice enough and as a bonus they didn’t even require me to use a black-light to see the stains on my comforter:

The Shows

Friday’s show was fantastic.  Overcapacity and very receptive crowd (the emcee did a great job getting them to settle down and focus on the stage – for a while it seemed like it was going to be a crowd full of people going, “Watch this I am going to make this show better by shouting things and talking” kind if crowd.”).  The show was so good I celebrated like a rock star with my favorite post show beverage:

Saturday’s show was a lot tougher.  I would rate Friday’s an A and Saturday’s a B+/A-  I did manage to get away with calling the crowd racist in four different ways without losing them so that was a definite high point (my favorite being “Everyone calls Obama a black President, but his Mom is white.  Now I know in 1950s America or 2011 Scranton he would have to use a different water fountain, but he is half-white.”).  But I will give Wisecrackers-Scranton some credit.  For the two shows there were 2 black audience members, 1 Asian man and scores of white people.   Almost always a crowd that homogeneous, my humor doesn’t hit well.  There is often a series of correlations:

• All white crowd = all white community
• All white community = afraid of minorities
• Afraid of minorities = ignorant
• Ignorant = give me simple, or goofy or unoriginal humor
• Give me simple, or goofy or unoriginal humor = rough sets for J-L
• Rough sets for J-L = bad few days for those around J-L

But this chain was broken.  Somehow this was a segregated, white community (some of whom did boo non-political Obama references) who had more sophisticated senses of humor than expected.  So maybe they were not afraid of minorities after all!  Or there actually were some people from the gun show at the club and their heat gave them courage.  Either way thanks Scranton!