It Takes Two to Tango and Cash

Comedy is for Humans, Mundial (505 E 12th St), 8:00PM
Hosts: Baron Vaughn and Joshua Grosvent
Guest Director: Noah Starr
Guest Host: Brooke Van Poppelen
Sherwin Smith
Mandy Stadtmiller
Todd Womack
Allison Castillo
Nick Kroll

There's a Snapple flavored drink called What-a-Melon. That's a clever name. If there was a drink for today, I'd call it What-a-Wednesday, and it would taste like laughter! Wednesdays in the city are chock full of great comedy. Rififi hosts its weekly showcase event, Eugene Mirman and Bobby Tisdale's Invite Them Up, Todd Levin and Bob Powers produce their semi-regular reading series How to Kick People at Mo Pitkin's, and Like2Laugh.com presents its very own stand-up show, the Voodoo Luau at Otto's Shrunken Head. But tonight, I had made plans to see the latest addition to Wednesday's comedy workout, Comedy is for Humans. Hosted by Baron Vaughn and Joshua Grosvent, Humans features is different from most comedy shows in the city in that it features three comics doing 25 minute extended sets (the tagline: i like my sets long).

Baron and Josh are the first two people I really got to know in the downtown scene after I performed with Josh at an Otto's show back in January. I ran into him at Rififi later that week where he introduced me to Baron, and the three of us left together and split a cab across town to catch a show at the People's Improv Theatre (PIT). Closed out of the show, we settled for a late night dinner at a nearby bar and grill popular among the PIT actors. We entertained ourselves with fruitless waitress flirtation and stimulating conversation about comedy and music. I had an amazing night talking shop with those guys and I was blown away by their collective knowledge of comedy history - between the two of them, they must have seen every sitcom and every stand-up special of the last thirty years. When the show ended and the actors trickled into the bar, I was introduced to Shayna Ferm and Kurt Braunohler and others whom I can't remember (Shayna gave me her business card. Shayna's pretty). The best thing to come out of that storied evening? At the urging of Baron and Josh, I signed up for a MySpace account as soon as I got home.

The two have been nice enough to keep in touch since then while I spent the semester in Denmark and they busied themselves with comedy festivals and regional tours. They teamed up to create Humans and presented their first show back in March. Tonight's show was scheduled to start at 8:00, but as with most small, independently produced shows in the city, the start time was pushed back so as to allow the tardy audience to assemble. The Wu-Tang Clan kept my date Robyn and me company until Josh and Baron got the show going at around 8:30 with a sketch involving guest comedian Noah Starr in which Baron revealed his natural accent to be that of an aristocratic Englishman. Chicago-native Brooke Van Poppelen took the mic as guest host for the evening. After venting about the absurdities and frustrations of catering to elderly, affluent women as a waitress in an upper east side vegan café, she brought up Sherwin Smith, a low-energy, bearded comic who didn't seem entirely comfortable under the lights. Sounds an awful lot like somebody I know... somebody named SCOTT ROGOWSKY! It was a strange moment of self-recognition for me, as Sherwin looked and sounded just how I imagined myself looking and sounding during my most uncomfortable performances. His mannerisms, his speech pattern... I bet we even prepared our material the same way, him carefully writing out his shit word for word and repeatedly going over it in his head right up to the moment before stepping up onto the stage. He closed his otherwise decent set with a very funny bit involving audience participation, a quiz game called "Black Name or Prescription Drug." The audience member incorrectly guessed Plaxico and Flozell to be prescription drug registered trademarks when in fact they are the Christian names of professional football players Burress and Adams, respectively.

The first of the long-set comics was Todd Womack. Baron told me before the show that he was a New York guy who moved to LA but came back to New York for want of more stage time, and that's just what Baron's show gave him. Todd, throwing convention to the wind, took a seat on the stool and delivered a sit-down set, which included a great impression of a whites only dance club in the 1920s. Allison Castillo, co-host of Sweet Paprika Comedy and a former Premium Blender, followed with her own long, mostly depressing set. She had some funny lines mixed in with affirmations of self-hate and several allusions to suicide. I was looking forward to Nick Kroll's closing set to save the night, or at the very least work Robyn into enough of an endorphin-flooding giggle frenzy that would set the table for the possibility of uninhibited bathroom sex. But the audience's lukewarm response to Nick's proven material served to teach me a valuable lesson in contrast. Nick delivered mostly the same set as his Monday night slaughter of Crash Test - all of it practice for his big show on Friday opening for Michael Ian Black in Hoboken - but it lacked the energy and confidence of his UCBT stint. And what's to account for the stark difference between gigs just two days apart? Audience. Nick was feeding off the wild energy of the Crash Test, performing to a packed room full of hip comedy loyalists who came to bust a gut. He paced about the expansive stage, expelling his own nervous energy and giving full treatment to the acting out of his animated stories; enabled by an encouraging audience, he performed to his fullest, funniest potential. At Mundial, he was visibly less comfortable in front of a sparse crowd mostly populated by friends of the performers. Tonight's set lacked the focus and tightness of Monday night, and many of the voices and expressions so key to his talent as a storyteller were absent. On the other hand, the informal, intimate setting allowed Nick the opportunity to break from his normal routine as he dialogued with audience members and even took the mic outside for a brief, impromptu street show. He also threw in a few jokes that were not performed on Monday, including one to which I could especially relate. On growing up in neighboring Rye, "I come from a privileged background, but don't think it was all easy. I didn't even have my own tennis court. I had to take group lessons, and my backhand suffered for it."

I walked away from tonight's show with a keener perspective on the interplay between comedian and audience and how audience can affect performance. I'm sure many of tonight's sets would have gone over much better on a larger crowd, if only for the simple statistical reasoning that more people means more chances for laughs. And in a larger room or theatre show with hundreds of people packed together and focused on the performer, laughter comes more readily and intensely, either as a result of increased peer pressure to laugh or the opposite circumstance of peer release whereby individuals feel comfortable to react loosely and honestly. Whichever the phenomenon, it is best illustrated on many of Comedy Central's mediocre stand-up specials. How is it that TV comics never bomb when some are so painfully and obviously unfunny?

I have only to look at my own experiences on stage and the very evolution of my short career to draw a parallel to Nick's situation tonight. My first ever gig was in front of 300+ students in a packed theatre at school. I was the last to perform and, if I don't mind me saying, I brought the house down with my five minutes. After that show, I felt much like Nick told me he felt after Crash Test - "like the best comic in the world." The energy in the Arellano Theatre that night was electric and I was getting laughs every time I opened my mouth (there might have been something in my teeth). It was the strong response to my set that inspired me to seriously pursue stand-up, and a year and a half later I'm doing just that. But when I returned home to Westchester and started performing with Josh Filipowski in his Like2Laugh.com productions, I was routinely playing to near-empty bars and inattentive audiences. The very same jokes that absolutely killed in that first show were met with coughs and blank stares in these small rooms. The audience reaction affected my ability as a comedian, contributing to a lack of confidence on stage and increasingly lower-energy performance. Back at school this past fall semester, I opened for UCBTourCo in a large auditorium with a student audience of 150, and all of the sudden I was back in top form. The jokes were getting laughs again, and the confidence surged.

That wasn't a particularly funny post, but it made me think.