The city of blinding lights
Being an up-and-coming comedian in a place like New York City is a struggle. There’s a long, long food chain of people all waiting for their turn. Hours of standing on corners asking people to take flyers for a show full of shitty comics, or paying $5 to a booker just so you can get five minutes of stage time to work out material in front of an audience of other comics who don’t really want to hear you talk about Mike Tyson’s Punch Out because they’re waiting for their turn on the mic. It’s an arduous, almost soul-pummeling experience, to be certain; you’ve heard all the stories before.
However, there are some nights when all that ridiculous energy converges and magic happens, like the night I am about to describe.
When doing an open mic in this city, you’re prone to seeing some really, really terrible shit. It’s just the math of the situation. Collective Unconscious, a nice little TriBeCa performance space that hosts open mics on Wednesdays, was no different: I was set to go up after a guy who looked like a transient in off the street - late 40s, drunk, one pant leg up, most teeth missing, a suit jacket, sunglasses, a pink lace scarf, and headphones that weren’t connected to anything. I knew it would be interesting when, while signing the list, he turned around and said “Hey, wanna see a George Bush impression?” and just handed me a pen. That, my friends, was the impression.
Most people there already knew who he was and wanted him out ASAP, since he was wandering through the audience and trying to get people to give him booze, rambling while other people were on stage, and just being a general nuisance. Originally scheduled to go up right after the 10 minute mid-show intermission, the host decided to put him up right before the break so he would leave right after. This places me immediately after the break.
Hobo the Clown gets onstage and of course spends six minutes rambling about nothing and antagonizing the audience by saying they’re all jealous of him, that the women weren’t as pretty as him but he’d still fuck them, etc. The longest six minutes ever finally ends, but our hero doesn’t want to come off stage, so he starts his REAL shtick, which is apparently being a really shitty Elvis impersonator (as if you couldn’t tell his impersonations sucked from the boffo George Bush one he pooped out earlier). The house cut his mic, brought the lights up and went to break.
And then the fun happens.
Impressy McPresserson was standing near the performance area, arguing with someone five rows back in the audience (the audience member looked to be in his early 20s, so it’s young righteous strength vs. hardened old-man strength in this battle). I zoned out for a second, looking over my notes, only to come back into the situation when I hear someone yell “Shit, he’s got a taser!” I look up and the “comedian” has a taser that he’d pulled out of his bag and is brandishing it at the guy that’s about 20 feet away from him. The guy on the pointed end of the taser picked up his chair AND THREW IT AT THE GUY WITH THE TASER. It hit taser-guy in the face and he collapsed like a debutante into the arms of her modern lover. Taser-guy then got up and spit out what looked like one of his nasty teeth, while the audience member kept screaming “He pulled a taser on me!” Personally, this seemed like an over-reaction since a taser is a close-quarters weapon. If you tried to use it from a distance it wouldn’t be as powerful due to Taser Lag. (BWA BWA BWAAAAAAAA!)
Anyhow, both of them got ejected from the show, with the taser impressionist yelling that the only reason he was being made to leave is because we feared his talent. It would have been funny in a performance-art kind of way except he had that wild-eyed look of insanity on his face that made you KNOW that he was serious.
Then it was time for me to do comedy. Yeah, not so well I did, because honestly, how can you follow something that funny?
Post Script: It turned out that the two people in the altercation are neighbors. They’ve known each other for some time, and the cops were at their apartment building the night before, and they had decided that the best place to continue their fued was at an open mic comedy show in TriBeCa.
God, I love this place. There’s always a silver lining.
- Matt Little is a stand-up comedian in New York City
