This past Friday I had a gig that might be summarized as the perfect gig for me.  I was part of the Hoboken Comedy Festival (obscure comedy gig – check!) taking place at a movie theater (movie venue – check!) in a comedy competition of roasting/saying cruel jokes about another comedian (cruelty/trolling/insults – check!).  I was slated to go against Dan Frigolette, the founder of the festival.  So in preparation, I ended up listening and watching over 10 hours of on-line content in the two weeks before the roast to obtain any small fact or stories I could to cultivate a killer set of roast jokes.  The battle could not have gone better.  I won all three rounds and objectively had the best set of anyone involved in the show.  At one point I felt like Drago verbally beating Apollo to death in Rocky IV.  A highlight for me (other than getting paid $50 because I just assumed it was in keeping with my career of unpaid greatness) was having one of the judges of the competition, comedian Robert Kelly, tell me that I did a great job and also that he then realized I was the guy behind the Comedy Academy web series and told me that he loved the Dane Cook, Louis CK and (especially) the Gary Gulman impressions.   Felt good to get some validation from a big time comic.  Of course I anticipate this translating into zero dollars and zero club spots.  Before getting to the bigger stories of the night here are the jokes I used to win. Enjoy:

• Dan says he gets mistaken for many different races.  Sorry to break it to you Dan, but “rapey douchebag” is not a race
• Dan has been on a comedy tour called “The Best Kept Secret Tour”.  But the secret is out – you’re a terrible comedian
• Dan admitted to keeping a photo log of all his hook ups.  He’s like a sexual version of Memento – he constantly has to remind himself that he is a scumbag.
• Dan started doing comedy in 2001, a year of another American tragedy as well.  Not only does he look like he could be the 20^th hijacker, but his comedy has lasted 14 years. 9/11 had the decency to only be one day.

• Dan has 18 subscribers on YouTube, but he has only been on YouTube for 9 years so the jury is still out.  His on-line content is like kiddie porn, except more uncomfortable and with a lot fewer fans.
• Dan’s big credit is that he appeared on the Artie Lange show – making heroin track marks the 2nd worst thing to appear on Artie Lange
• Dan teaches improv classes for kids, so If you ever wondered “is there anything worse than Improv?” there is being taught improv by Dan Frigolette while he tries to fu*k your mom.
• Dan appeared on the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, but only lasted a few episodes because he was deemed too unfunny to star in a show about murder and corruption.

• On a podcast interview Dan claimed to masturbate 6 times a day.  With all that time spent jerking off it is quite impressive that he still manages to find time to be irrelevant
• Dan says that his favorite sound is the sound of someone trying to hold in a laugh.  His least favorite sound is someone telling him what the definition of trying actually is
• Dan’s favorite comedians are Louis CK and Bill Cosby.   One has been rumored to make women watch him masturbate and the other is a serial rapist.  Just imagine how much Dan will like them once he starts listening to their comedy!
• Dan said he would try porn but he is afraid to do porn because he could be tempted to do gay porn if the money was good enough.  Breaking news from the Hoboken Comedy Festival – for for a case of Axe body spray Dan will suck your dick on camera.
• Dan once wondered on a podcast “what if women found it sexy for men to taste their own cum?”  Women responded: “If you taking your own cum in your mouth would stop you from telling your jokes, then yes it’s a turn on”

So after I went up the main event featured two other comedians roasting each other, but it turned out they were a mix of drunk (I think) and unprepared, so they began to riff and roast the room.  Things were going OK (I think the burning embers of my performance were still making things difficult) until the comics turned their attention to a man who looked like a smaller, lighter skinned Richard Sherman.

I could not hear all that went on, but it seemed they wanted to engage the audience member in roasting – he launched some insults (called one comic a “milk dud head” and called the other comic garbage, but then after some more chatter I heard Light Sherman yell “ask your mom about my big dick motherfu*ker!”) At that point in comedy, when things get testy (PUN) with an audience member two things are possible – event staff remove him or, because it sort of happened at the comedians’ prompting, use humor to diffuse the situation and move on.  Neither of those things happened. Instead one comic elevated the hostility with a lot of “shut the fu*k up”s and “get the fu*k out of here motherfu*ker”s.  Granted one of the ways Light Sherman defended himself was with “I got 30,000 followers on Instagram!” which definitely deserved to be mocked, but he also said in the stream of expletives “y’all are wasting my money” (tickets were $20, though my performance was worth at least $25 by itself), which may have been valid considering that he was just being told to “shut up motherfu*ker”, which would feel like a poor usage of $20.  At this point I started to feel sort of bad for Light Sherman (I always assume the defense of comics in situations like this, but it felt like both sides elevated the situation to where both parties were wrong). He had  his girlfriend or wife with him, who was embarrassed by his antics and was probably the biggest factor in getting him to leave peacefully, but it felt like the largely white crowd was just petrified of the angry black man at this point, even though he never got physical and was definitely insulted outside the bounds of humor at least as much as he responded in kind.  He ended up leaving and the show ended without law enforcement.

After the show, I was was surprised by a buddy from law school, Jim, (once again law school always giving me the most consistent support for my comedy career) and went to a bar with his buddies after.  After getting complimented and doing my Donald Trump impression I went out in a cold storm to catch the bus to NYC (the PATH train, which seems to shut down anytime the weather veers from 68 and sunny, was shut down due to weather).  I reached the corner across from the bus stop and saw the bus there.  I got into the middle of the street and waved the bus down before it pulled out but it didn’t matter – he left.  Apparently he did not know that I was a Comedy Roast Battle Champion.  Well, turns out it was the last bus of the night (hey dude – if it is a hurricane, the train is shut down and you are the last bus of the night, try not to be a dick next time).

So I ran back to the bar to catch my buddy who would be heading back to the city later.  I reached the bar freezing and drenched and the bouncer informed me the bar was closed and I could not re-enter (the bar was a small neighborhood corner pub, not some douchey club FYI).  I said my friends were in there and I missed the last bus so he told me he would tell them (I didn’t want to flex my muscle and tell the guy I was a roast champion – no need to humiliate him for his obvious oversight).  He came back a minute later and said they were closing their tab and finishing their round and they would be out.

28 minutes later my buddy Jim emerged and we got in his Uber back to the city.  For those of you wondering why I didn’t get a cab home – cabs from Hoboken to the city are always insultingly expensive and I did not want to spend the lion’s share of my surprise $50 on a cab (and I don’t have Uber on my phone – UNION MAN).  So I got home around 3:15 am and went to sleep a champion. #Blessed