Comedy show, standup and improv at QED in Astoria.
Posts By Liam
0 End of the Line
0 Crowd Work Part 1
When I was seventeen or eighteen, I had dropped out of high school and was working nights as a telemarketer for the New York Theater Workshop. As far as these gigs go, it certainly wasn’t the worst. It was the year Rent was being workshopped in preparation for its Broadway run, and I can still tell you it’s “the rock opera version of La Boheme by the late Jonathan Larson.”
Thursdays we would get our paychecks, and I would take mine to the check cashing place and spend the evening at the Comedy Cellar. This was well before the Cellar was cool, and more times than not the woman at the door would let me in for free, especially if I got there late enough after the show started. I was an early fan of Dave Attell, Wanda Sykes, I saw Chappelle do a couple of drop-ins. I always meant to bring a tape recorder and bootleg a show so I could listen to it at home; this was well before YouTube, when nobody did this at comedy shows and so who would give a fuck. It never happened, though.
Anyway, I saw th same comics over and over but never really got tired of it. And if I did, I’d go to the Boston Comedy Club and watch Red Johnny and the Round Guy or whoever the hell was appearing there. But the Cellar was my favorite.
Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is there’s a few moments I still have burned in my memory, and one of those was the night some poor nameless comedian (and there were many of those, who I still only remember as “The Guy With The Bobbit Bit That I Recognized Back Then Was Hack But Which Also Always Killed,” or “That Fella With the Bit About Relationships Being Like A Game of Chess and Not Much Else.”
Anyway, there was this comedian who was not doing so well, and he decided to go into the audience and pick on people. And he started fucking with this one guy in a suit on a date. And he said, “What do you do?” And the guy said, “I’m a talent agent.”
And everybody laughed.
And then the comic said, “No really.” But, you could tell, with less bravado. And the guy said, “No, seriously.”
“What kind of agent?” “I book comedians for tours.”
And that was the end of it. The comedian did more time and got offstage, but he was a beaten man walking out of the ring. Like I said, I don’t remember that comedian’s name, but as a mental exercise when I’m walking down the street, I still sometimes go through that exchange and try to figure out how I would have handled it if it were me. It keeps me sharp for when I do have difficult crowd work.
More on an example of difficult crowd work this week, I think.
0 Broadway Comedy Club
53rd & 8th
0 Broadway Comedy Club
Broadway Comedy Club, on 53rd & 8th.
I tend to pop up here last minute so check the site.
0 Rob Paravonian’s “Don’t Feed The Musicians”
7:00pm at QED in Astoria.
0 Eastern Connecticut State University
0 Eastern Connecticut State University
Headlining a show. Not sure if it’s open to the public.
0 Reverend Jen’s Book Release Party/Show
at Lucky Jack’s in the Lower East Side.
Reverend Jen Book Release Party/Show
I’ll be at Rev. Jen’s party for her new book, June at Lucky Jack’s. I’ll be reading an excerpt, I think. The only thing guaranteed with a Rev. Jen party is that it will be wild and somewhat out-of-hand.
0 NEW EMPLOYEE MANUAL
Many years ago, when I was but a wee babe in the woods, I wrote full time for a dot-com called The Humor Network; a series of “joke of the day” sites that sent out daily e-mails with street jokes and Internet jokes and funny lists and all the junk your parents forward you in a desperate attempt to keep you remembering they exist. The e-mails would have ads on the tops and bottoms, and the idea was that since all these jokes were great, they would get forwarded and “go viral” and so every subscriber you paid to reach, you would also be reaching all their friends.
Our only advertiser was 2-4-1 Inkjets.
The company went the way of most of these companies, which was too bad. We had a suite of offices off of Times Square, and my job was so simple that I would generally be done within the first half-hour of working there. And while I wouldn’t say it was my best work, this stuff still, all these years later, continues to pop up in my Google Alerts. The following is something I wrote my first week there that is still getting passed around:
Welcome aboard! You are one of our most valued new employees. Enclosed please find some helpful guidelines to company policy.
OVERTIME: The Company has an optional overtime policy — you have the option of working forty hours of overtime or eighty hours of overtime.
PROMOTION: The Company rewards hard work and devotion. We like to think that if you work hard and devote enough time and energy to the company, you will be rewarded by being allowed to train the CEO’s son when he is promoted to Vice President over you.
STOCK OPTIONS: You may buy shares in the company when it goes public. So named because you’ll be working in the stock room at Wal-Mart when the company goes belly-up due to your incompetence.
401K: This is how much money you’ll lose under your “Stock Option” plan.
HELLTH PLAN: No, that isn’t a misprint; you now belong to an H.M.O. That stands for “Hell’s Medical Organization.” It was organized by some of Hell’s finest minds; Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Josef Stalin worked night and day to create a 162-page manual documenting the exact terms of your coverage, but it all boils down to three points:
1) You belong to the HMO. We mean that literally — as of now, the HMO owns you. To insure that you don’t forget your subscriber number, we will tattoo it to your forehead.
2) You have been assigned a primary care physician. You will not be told your physician’s name. You may never see your physician. Your physician is imaginary. If you see any doctor without express written permission of your imaginary primary care physician, you will be forced to pay full price, plus eat your weight in lard.
3) You are not covered under this plan.
TERMINATION: All employees will be given two weeks notice upon being fired. We like to feel that this gives an employee a “grace period” to steal all of the office supplies that he or she may have forgotten to take during his or her period of employment.
COMPLAINTS: May be made anonymously in the box marked “Complaints” in the employee break room. All complaints will be reviewed, processed, and fed to an angry Rottweiler named Frankie.
Liam McEneaney: Comedian, Writer, Producer 