Memorial Day: Laugh it Off!

Tell Your Friends!, Lolita Bar (266 Broome St), 8:00PM
Host: Baron Vaughn
Christian Finnegan
Liam McEneaney
Todd Barry
Tom Shillue

Crash Test, Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre (307 W 26th St), 11:00PM
Host: Aziz Ansari
Nick Kroll
Eugene Mirman

Today was one of those days, one of those days when you remember the veterans. How did I do it? By laughing my ass off! Well, first I watched Saving Private Ryan on TNT. Not too much to laugh about there. But after paying my respects through television, I caught the 6:23 into Grand Central for a night of great comedy. First stop was the Lolita Bar for Liam McEneaney's weekly show, "Tell Your Friends!" I was excited for the line-up which featured the guest hosting of my (MySpace) friend Baron Vaughn who I hadn't seen since my coming back from Denmark. During the interim, his rising star has included a performance at the prestigious US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and the launch of his own bi-monthly show, Comedy is for Humans, hosted with Joshua Grosvent.

After getting lost amid the named streets of the West Village, I found the unassuming Lolita Bar and was happily surprised to learn that the show had yet to start on account of Baron being stranded in the subway. I took the opportunity to introduce myself to Liam, a comedian who I had seen on Comedy Central's Premium Blend and live at Rififi over the winter. I have also been a repeat visitor to his blog where I've admired his joke-writing and absurd yarns in the style of Woody Allen. He was a real nice guy, and we reminisced on the e-mail I sent him with regards to establishing a sports comedy show in the city, tentatively titled "Twelve Angry Mascots" I had originally contacted Liam based on the following joke I heard him tell, "When you're having sex, in order to 'hold back,' they say you should think about a baseball game. My problem is that I'm a Mets fan, so I'll find myself in bed with a woman, and I'll start screaming, 'No no no! Go back! GO BACK! What are you doing? Run it out, asshole! Goddammit. Okay, I'm going to get a beer, do you want anything?'" Yeah, he's a funny dude.

Baron finally arrived and made up for lost time by immediately busting into hilarity. Baron is a proficient writer, but beyond that, a captivating performer. Between his jokes, the guy will break into song and dance, use different voices and accents, and even drop some sick beatboxing (true to his eccentric form, he started tonight's show by singing the theme song to DuckTales. The last time I saw him before I left for Europe, he inexplicably peppered his set with bizarre vocalizations, including a sing-songy rendition of the Spanish-language soap opera, "Carousel Domingo"). He makes for a great host, spicing up those downtimes between sets, and tonight he had the pleasure of introducing some pretty damn fine comics. Christian Finnegan was up first and did a mostly different set from what I saw last week. He made a great observation of the venue - a tiny, oblong basement/bomb shelter similar to what could be found in most Baltimore rowhouses - as the hideout for the only survivors of a vampire attack, and then imagined the ragtag group of distraught refugees banding together, "I'm a scientist!" "I'm a retired football player!" Todd Barry took his own clever dig at his surroundings, "You always hear about those organizations like NAMBLA but you never know where they meet. I think this is the place, people." Tom Shillue didn't make any quips about the basement, but he tested out some new material on the O'Reilly Factor and shopping at the hardware store without a clue. Funny, funny stuff.

Let's stop and take stock for a moment: I just saw five of the best comics in New York perform for twelve people in a basement hideout presumably reserved for the social gatherings of pedophiles. Wow. Finnegan is perhaps best known as the face of VH1's Best Week Ever franchise, and his cameo as Chad (the white guy) in The Chappelle's Show's "Mad Real World" sketch had all the frat boys talking around the water... keg. But his stand-up is equally as impressive as his TV credits. His setups are sometimes a bit long, but they payoff with a powerful joke, often compounded with a reference to pop culture or with an odd facial expression. The man is very good at what he does. Todd Barry is a national headliner with two half-hour Comedy Central specials under his belt and two comedy albums to his name. His sarcastic, low energy delivery is best experienced in person, however - a privilege that comes with living in New York for the summer. Todd likes to shit on hipsters and the very same East Village scene which he inhabits, and a good portion of his material is derived from his interest in music. It's nice to hear a comic who can make fun of the Allman Brothers for having two drummers. I've seen Todd a bunch of times already and I'll likely be running into him again and again, quite literally! Yes, just this very evening, I bumped into Todd as I was coming out of the bathroom. I introduced myself to him soon after and made a corny joke about him not washing his hands. I don't know why I did that. NEW YORK!

My Monday night didn't end at Lolita, ohhhh no. I said my goodbyes to my new MySpace friends and made the trek by foot to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre for Aziz Ansari's Crash Test. It was a pleasant walk around lower the lower west side (is it just me, or did 8th Avenue between 15th and 23rd get a whole lot gayer?), and I arrived at the theatre just in time for the 11:00 PM start. I had seen Crash Test once before and caught an amazing show hosted by Rob Heubel and featuring Chelsea Peretti, Brian Huskey, Andy Blitz, and Eugene Mirman. But I was looking forward to seeing Aziz Ansari after hearing about all the hype and enjoying his Shutterbugs mini-series. He's a young comic who rose remarkably quickly through the New York scene, mostly on the strength of his joke about Texas Senator John Cornyn marrying a box turtle, and then snagged a spot on the most recent season of Premium Blend. He also tied with Mitch Fatel for Best Stand-Up at the US Comedy Arts Festival in March, no small accomplishment. Allow me to rephrase - that's a very big accomplishment.

The UCBT was packed out, probably one hundred and fifty people strong. I say "people," but these are no ordinary people attending Crash Test. They are hipster incarnate: the guys in tight, raggedy clothes and thick-rimmed glasses, the girls in vintage sun dresses and thick-rimmed glasses; and they came to laugh tonight. Aziz Ansari stepped out from behind the black curtains with a glass of red wine in hand to wild applause. He is so absolutely beloved on his home turf that he could hold a five-minute phone conversation on stage without his audience thinking twice, and that's exactly what he did! Aziz didn’t perform any of his material, but he did find out that his friend Paul Scheer (UCB, Best Week Ever, gap-toothed) left his cell phone in a cab earlier that day.

Nick Kroll is a funny guy who happens to belong to my synagogue. I happened to find this out one night in talking to my parents about some of the comedians I had been seeing when I was home for winter break. “Nick Kroll? From Rye? We know his parents. They belong to the JCC.” I never thought my Hebrew School teachers would facilitate a showbiz connection, but lo and behold.

Nick hosts a show at Rififi with John Mulaney on Thursday nights called, “Oh, Hello” in which he and John portray fifty-something divorcees who live on the Upper West Side and worship Alan Alda. It sounds strange, and it is, but it’s also some of the funniest shit I have ever seen, and no, I couldn’t put that more eloquently. Nick is also known around town for his characters Fabrice Fabrice and Enrique Goldfarb, and he delivers a consistently hilarious performance as Catskills comedian Morty Chucklestein in Comedy Central’s Motherload feature series I Love the 30s, so it was a surprise to see him on stage playing the hardest character of them all, himself. Nick took the mic and proceeded to kill. He began with a story about a recent trip to Atlantic City that encouraged him to consider the question, “In what year did cocaine invent the bachelor party?” and he finished with an embarrassing shitfaced story from freshman year of college that I completely related to, besides the being shitfaced part. He seemed incredibly comfortable on stage, feeding off the palpable energy in the room, delivering facial expressions and voice impressions with expert hilarity. And when asked during the post-set interview how we spent his Memorial Day, Nick quipped a fine quip, “I remembered the veterans. And then I bought a futon for half off.”

Eugene Mirman closed the night with more funny. If you’ve never heard of Eugene, stop reading and visit his website. Watch his videos and discover the genius. That’s how I first got turned onto the absurd nightclub comedy of Eugene Mirman (coincidentally, the name of his first album). My roommate Aaron and I would watch them over and over and over again to the point where he became this huge celebrity in the part of my mind that gives a shit about celebrities (a very small part). So when I first met him back in January, I could hardly contain my giddiness and sheer amazement that this movie star was just a normal, personable guy who sold me his debut CD right out of his backpack. I’ve seen him so many times since then, and we’ve exchanged so many awkward hellos to the point where he has become more of a good old friend in the part of my mind that thinks I’m friends with famous comedians. Eugene told a few jokes and read a letter he wrote to the Philadelphia Hilton Garden Inn in which he often used the word “blowjob” to comical effect. I laughed all the way to the bank, and then to Grand Central Terminal where I caught my ride back into the dark, suburban milieu. Nice, huh?

BONUS: At Liam’s show, I met Maryanne who takes pictures for the comedy siteDrink At Work. She gave me the rundown on the next Drinkatwork.com Presents… and highly recommended the band Pela. She was very nice and seemed interested in checking out my stuff. Who knows – maybe this contact could lead to a spot on a future Drink At Work show. If nothing else, I can chalk it up as one more MySpace friend.