McGinn is Mayor
SAM Remix Hits Its Stride
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Ye Olde General Store
Requiem For a Dream Season
We caught one of those Sound of Young America stand up shows the other night at the Rendezvous, featuring three openers - ranging in quality from okay to just slightly less than great - followed by the hilarious, bordering-on-genius headliner Brent Weinbach. Someone named "Brian Palmer" accurately summed up Weinbach's surreal schtick better than we ever could in this intro to his interview with him from last year:
Onstage Brent Weinbach holds the microphone with a double-handed death grip. He talks in a high, clipped manner, and seems to be a bundle of nervous energy. And then, when he's telling a story about something like drive-bys in a rowboat, it's as if he is posessed by someone else. Weinbach's impressions, or "accents" as he calls them, are so spot-on that even if the jokes themselves weren't hilarious, which they are, he would still succeed in getting laughs.
We would probably only butcher the material if we were to try to describe such masterpieces as Republican slam poetry, or the "gay eyes" bit, promptly followed by the "psycho eyes" bit, both involving a long serpentine tongue of Gene Simmons proportions. What we should really try to make some effort to describe is Weinbach's strong, "meta" commentary on the lexicon of the nerdy stand up comic: the whiney, self-aggrandizing by way of self-effacing disposition - in voice, in content, in form, in posture - that seems to be some kind of universal constant for the professionally attention-starved joke crafters. "Obviously I'm trying to make fun of "hack" comedy," he says in the above-linked interview. Layered comedy like this is no easy feat, but he pulls it off gracefully.
The opening three acts were in ascending order of quality: Alex Koll made up for some weak material - something about a flock of bats farting cigarettes in to his mouth while he fucks a shoe and singing "I love black pussy!", which almost sounded like it was written by the dolphins on staff at Family Guy, pushing arbitrary word balloons down the joke chute - by compensating with a solid stage presence and a spontaneous contempt for the audience not laughing at his material. He kind of looked like Russell Crowe disguised as Woody Allen, seething with thinly veiled rage. We'd like to see more of that character and less of the other stuff.
Hari Kondabolu had slightly better material: a funny bit about MS Word always auto-correcting his name to Hair despite the fact that Microsoft is by now mostly run by Indians, as well as a very funny over-analysis of the inexplicable popularity of the Bryan Adams song "Summer of '69" in India despite the historic incongruities with the lyrics.
Moshe Kasher looks like he stepped out of the pages of Vice Magazine, and good for him. Of all the acts, his had the most spontaneous audience interaction, often stopping his routine to play off his own confused reactions to what the audience was laughing at or applauding. His content was good, but his style was a lot better.
The only real weak spot of the entire evening was at the end with the amateurish, never-ending (six minute or so) video send-up of Disney style 'tween TV shows. Sooooo bad. Seattlest made better video shorts than this in high school and we weren't even trying. Hopefully all these guys will stick to live comedy in the future and leave the home movies in the dorm room.
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