Comedy Competition

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover. -- Lenny Bruce

Sunday, November 12, 2000
One year ago: Orycon I
Two years ago: A Coach Bag

Jack did his laundry today, while I wrote some journal entries. Would I be able to keep caught up, if I carried a small laptop computer or PIM, like tracing does? (But she has a problem getting her entries posted in an expeditious manner.)

I'd decided to spend Sunday night up here, because when I'd forwarded a notice from my buddy Wally Glenn about the Seattle International Comedy Competition, Jack had immediately sent it to his Bellingham friends and suggested it as a group outing. So I guess I needed to be there too!

Jack had called about tickets, since this event sells out regularly. We'd stopped by the mall yesterday morning and bought them; I combined a shopping spree at Lane Bryant with this errand. The bartender said that arriving early was a bright idea, if we wanted good seats. No reservations, and not even the offer of a bribe to the bartender to save us barstools worked.

So I drove up to the mall around six o'clock, to the Elephant and Castle. This is a "pub" type of place that's attached to the mall's food court. According to Wally, they've held the contest out in the mall in previous years, but this time it was inside the restaurant. We grabbed a two-top in almost the front row; the table was at the front, but there was a foot or two between us and the stage. We were to be grateful for this later.

We had two hours to wait until the show began, so we didn't hurry over dinner. We split calamari to start. I had some Guinness beef stew and Jack chose Yorkshire pudding stuffed with roast beef, after I explained that the pudding wsn't the dessert kind. It came back to me that the restaurant I used to work at back in the eighties, Clydes of Tyson's Corners in northern Virginia, had served popovers (the same sort of thing as Yorkshire pudding) in the fanciest of their dining rooms. Good, hot and rich.

Jack did get up and go for a walk after a while, but the mall stores were all closed. He had to walk a few blocks on the main drag outside to get the little cigars he was looking for. (In the event he didn't smoke them after all.) When he returned, a woman at the next table, all blond teased hair and jewelry, laughed and said that she'd wondered if he'd gone off and left me!

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Of course, Wally didn't appear until I was back in the restroom. Jack called him over, said hi, and reminded him of how they'd met before. I returned in a few minutes and gave Wally a big hug. He was looking good, though a bit tired. He's following this contest all around the state, almost every night this month, which would certainly exhaust me.

Finally it was time to start the show. There were fifteen comedians doing five minutes each, with local radio person Amy Alpine as emcee. This was where I was glad we weren't closer to the stage. Each group at a table that was touching the stage, and the ones behind the stage, came in for a grilling of "insult" comedy. It was fairly mild, compared to what you might hear on cable TV, but I didn't mind being out of the line of fire.

Most of the comedians were fairly funny. I think that four of them talked about how their old, clunky cars were repellent to women and made it tough for them to get dates. This seemed like an odd coincidence! The comic that really seemed to make folks uncomfortable was a woman who talked about being a cancer survivor. This is a topic that might need more than five minutes to get the crowd going. The rest of her act was very LA oriented, which also didn't connect with the northern Washington state audience.

On the other hand, the winner for the evening had us roaring from his very first word. When Heneghen found out that the comic who was supposed to go before him wasn't there, he shambled on to the stage, picked up the mic, and shouted, "FUCK!" He had a very funny style of storytelling -- I had tears in my eyes when he described his reaction to being asked to take a drug test for a job. "Pee test?! You want to see if I can hit the cup? Ok, sparky, hold it out there, and I'll go for distance!"

The evening went smoothly, and was over by ten thirty, which I'd been worried about. Here's Wally's account of the proceedings.