The alternative comedy scene is, like the alternative music scene, well into its existence. There have even been big success stories who have ‘made it’, the Arcade Fires of alt-comedy, such as The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis (who just appeared in Arcade Fire’s post-Saturday Live special). But one of the most influential alt-comics is Eugene Mirman, who has been giving the world (or at least Brooklyn) a wide variety of great comics, both established & up-and-coming, in the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival at Brooklyn’s Bell House (QRO venue review) and Union Hall (QRO venue review). The 2013 edition had its regular ‘StarTalk’ edition with celebrity astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson (and special guest Jason Sudekis – a.k.a. MaGruber), ‘Invite Them Up’ with Todd Barry & Michael Ian Black (plus special musical guest Neko Case), ‘Hot Tub’ with Kristen Schaal & Kurt Braunohler, ‘Comics Marc Maron Will Probably Resent in the Next Couple of Years’, ‘Comics We Hope Don’t Move to LA (Though We Understand There Is Much More Work There)’, and even a celebration/performance for the Season Four premiere of Bob’s Burgers (that animated show between The Simpsons & Family Guy that isn’t King of the Hill, Futurama, or from Seth McFarlane). It all started off on Thursday, September 26th at Bell House with ‘The Urbane Comedy Hour: Non-Stop Courtesy and Culture Through the Prism of Comedy’, with Jim Gaffigan, Ira Glass, Eugene Mirman, Wyatt Cenac, Derrick Brown, Mike Birbiglia & more.
Hosting the first night of Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival this year was Tom Shillue, who opened up the show and also did bits in between most comics. This was different than last year’s opening show (QRO review), in that it wasn’t Mirman himself playing host, but Shillue did a great job. His observational bits were often about his youth and things from then that now seem shocking, and thus funny (though he did have good ‘meta bit’ before one comic, about wondering what to say when introducing comics) – inappropriate & racist old commercials (like ‘The Frito Bandito’), being afraid of his dad (and how that was normal), and not knowing what gay was growing up. However, his strongest routine of the night was very present day, and very local – about giving bad directions to a family of tourists on the subway in Manhattan; indeed, not just ‘giving’ but telling the lost family to follow him, and not just going the wrong way but across the East River and into Brooklyn (to be fair, he had been trying to save them from the confusion that is the Fulton Street subway station…). It was right after a weakly received bit on homeless people thinking that he’s not the kind of person worth asking for money – one of the hallmarks of the night was that NYC-specific humor went down very well on the ‘urbane’ night.
The first reference to the NYC MTA of the night, though, was from the first comic introduced, Mike Birbiglia. He joked about the subway not running in Brooklyn, having to take the bus, but the bus driver telling him, “I don’t know anything about the subway” – despite also working for the MTA (even having the same work shirt). But that was just an intro to his story of being on the bus and not staring at the pretty lady who got on after him (“And not just ‘bus pretty’…”), while another guy did. It all ended with him telling the story to his wife, who replied, “So you want credit for not being a creep?!?” “Yes!” The humor about being an awkward guy trying his hardest not to be a creep was strong – though undercut a bit by also telling the crowd that he was married…
The outlier of the evening was the following Derrick Brown. First, he entered with soaring recorded entry music, then told the crowd he’d forgotten his watch and asked for the time, but immediately cutting of the reply with, “Wrong! It’s Romance Time!” Not a comic but a poet (he recently won Texas Book of the Year for his poetry collection, Strange Light), Brown’s poems did have funny moments and lines, but just felt a bit off on the night (and like any poet, he read from his bookmarked books).
Every comic tells tales of woe, usually involving himself, but Wyatt Cenac seemed particularly down on himself, opening by saying that the former Daily Show correspondent doesn’t have a job (“Other comics have merch for sale – I’ll just be handing out resumes…”). However, most of his set was focused on his poor love life, at how being single effects other things – wedding charity gifts (getting put on mailing lists for causes he doesn’t care about), hanging out with married male friends (who take it upon themselves to be his terrible, unwanted wingmen), and needing a girlfriend just so he has someone to talk to after watching Breaking Bad & new fall season shows. But his strongest bit was about going to what he thought was going to be a gay wedding – but it turned out not to be, and thus that he had thought for five years that his friend was gay (she found it funny – her fiancé, not so much…). Hopefully the comic perks up a bit (and he does have a job hosting the ‘Night Train’ comedy night every Monday at nearby Littlefield – QRO venue review), or he’ll have to go back to doing the puppet version of former RNC chairman Michael Steele…
This being the ‘Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival’, of course the man himself had to perform. He had basically three long bits: first coming up with the unusual merch of frozen bull dicks with sayings on them, then a story about going to Peter Buck’s Todos Santos Festival in Mexico and getting arrested/mugged by the cops with Michael Stipe (“Lead singer of R.E.M., in case you somehow didn’t know anything about popular culture for the last thirty years…”), and a video called ‘Confused About the Details’, where he cried because he didn’t know if he could do things like fall in love under Obamacare. The story about getting frozen bull dicks was funnier than the actual bull dicks (‘unusual things with sayings on them’ is a Mirman staple), and the ‘Confused’ video went on too long, but the Stipe/Mexico story was priceless. Well, at least worth $100 – the amount that the cops, yelling at him & Stipe in Spanish took from Mirman (along with his Imodium AD), as his wife pointed out when he told her about it, “That story is worth a hundred bucks…”
While Derrick Brown did funny readings, Ira Glass had dancers! The host of NPR’s This American Life showcased one of his newest creations, a radio story matched with interpretive dance (“Two things no one wanted to be put together”). In this case, it was a radio story from a dancer, effectively a This American Life piece, but with two other dancers behind him. It was all about touring the country in Riverdance, and how tiring it is – the dancers were only energized by the prospect of winning the lottery, which they somehow believed they could ‘dance’ into happening. It gave the group their best show of the tour the night before the drawing – and their worst show after (“And the audience didn’t notice a thing…”). Meanwhile, dancers Monica Bill Barnes & Anna Bass danced away behind Glass as he chronicled the hardship of not just being a dancer, but having the dance ‘dream job’ that dancers had worked towards from a very young age. More story than comedy, Glass still ended it excellently in the night’s highpoint – joining the dancers in their routine!
The first night of the festival was listed as including “special guests”, and the special guest at this first night was the same as last year’s, Jim Gaffigan – but you can’t complain about getting some Gaffigan. Other than his opening bit on the difficulty of following Ira Glass, Gaffigan’s set was basically about two things: living in New York and food. The food material was classic Gaffigan (who even joked, in the aside ‘voice in the crowd’ voice he does, “He should talk about food more in his act…”), including donuts, biscuits & gravy (which make Southerners move a little slow), Kobe beef (who thought up getting a cow drunk to make its meat better?), and even fruit – but only to point out its inferiority to donuts (“That’s why there’s so many paintings of bowls of fruit – no one eats it. There’s no ‘donut art’ because it wouldn’t last that long without being eaten…”). Unlike locals such as Birbiglia and Mirman, Gaffigan hails from Manhattan, and didn’t pull bunches about Brooklyn, pointing out how hard it is to get there, whether by subway (“It’s easy: you just take the train and then walk for three days” – the walk to Bell House from the Smith/9th Street stop, over the Gowanus Canal and past what seems to be a storage area for commercial buses, is a creepy one…) or car service (with a great impression of a car service driver). However, he did take on at least one part of Manhattan, Times Square – “You ever accidentally go there?” The laughter at that question might have been the biggest of the whole night – everyone in NYC knows to avoid the jam-packed, tourist-ridden, immobile hellhole that is Times Square…
No festival can top itself, year after year, and the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival is no different – instead, it just delivers, year after year. The comics may change, or may not, and maybe one day they’ll even leave Brooklyn (or at least sister venues Bell House & Union Hall), but it’s always funny and a great time (and of course, ‘urbane’…).
