Comedy

Indulgence with Lucy Darling – Chicago Magic Lounge – December 4, 2019

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Arthur C, Clarke’s Third Law states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Carisa Hendrix, aka Lucy Darling, proves that the technology doesn’t have to be that advanced to seem like magic, which is defined as “the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.”

But, more importantly, she proves that what often separates the headliners from the run-of-the mill magicians is their patter and persona, especially when they purport to do comedy magic, as she does. Lucy’s talented, smart and funny. How often do you go to a magic show that includes a Chekov allusion about an illusion?

This was my second trip to the Chicago Magic Lounge, but first time at the main stage. It’s a beautiful room, and, if I may divert (and isn’t magic all about diverting your attention), the sliced potato pancakes were pretty darn good.

On the other hand, though Lucy is a cut above, her tricks are pretty standard fair. She does multiplying bottles, the linking finger ring, the any drink called for trick and one where she makes a book chosen by an audience member appear in a shopping bag. That last one didn’t fool Penn and Teller on their tv show, where, interestingly, the audience member chose the same book that was chosen at the Magic Lounge show. What would Arthur C. Clarke say about that?

I don’t know what P&T know, but it seems to me that Lucy could just hide a portable 3-D printer in the shopping bag, allowing her to produce an exact replica of the book in a matter of seconds during her stage patter. Or maybe she has an easier way.

Before she developed her current character, Carisa became a Guinness World Record Holder after holding a flaming torch in her mouth for just over two minutes. No torch this time, but the act is still hot.

Underground Comedy Club – September 16 and October 21, 2019

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The Underground Comedy Club literally is underground, in a restaurant/bar below street level. Figuratively, in its infancy, it unfortunately does not yet operate outside the current comedy club establishment, which based upon my recent experiences, too often relies upon vulgarity, sexual misadventures, and repetitive, I repeat, repetitive, storytelling that fails to overcome the contradiction of the underlying propositions that personal humor, as targeted by those whose imaginations don’t travel beyond their own daily routine, is found in situations that the audience can in some way relate to and, yet, that the audience has not heard in the same way before, so as to provide an element of surprise.

I won’t mention the names of the comedians I’ve seen at the club because stand-up comedy is hard and they deserve the opportunity to falter at a nascent venue like this. But I have no sympathy for the self-aggrandizing emcee, who hasn’t even made me smile, and who has committed the cardinal sin of suggesting that the audience doesn’t get his jokes, when that’s not, I would suggest, why they’re not laughing. Despite him, my excursions have been somewhat worthwhile thanks to the all-you-can-eat pizza.

Winning over audience members is tough under any circumstances, so, to the next group of performers I might see at the club, unless you’re Don Rickles, keep your attacks on the audience good-natured and gentle. And it’s okay to try to push the edge of the envelope if you’re George Carlin telling us what seven words you can’t say on tv, but swearing for swearing’s sake isn’t clever or funny, just boring, and jokes about Nazis don’t work unless you’re Mel Brooks.

Teatro ZinZanni: Love, Chaos, and Dinner – Cambria Hotel – July 28, 2019

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Described as The Kit Kat Club on acid or The Moulin Rouge meets Cirque de Soleil, Teatro ZinZanni is too long, but what a hoot. Even the lobby is fun.

If you see it, be aware that it makes a difference where you sit. You don’t need to worry about blue paint or flying watermelon parts, but some of the action in the middle of the spiegeltent flows over onto a table or two, and if you’re centrally located you’re more likely to become part of the show, interacting with The Caesar or Lady Rizo, who is part Janis Joplin, part Bette Midler.

If you’re follicly challenged, you may get your scalp rubbed by various cast members, and if you’re a woman of a certain age, you might find yourself being theatrically-wooed by The Caesar, whose wild patter is reminiscent of Robin Williams. If you’re a healthy-looking young male, The Caesar may pick you out to participate in a faux competition to be his successor.

Sitting in a back booth provides relief for the stage shy. And you might, as I did, wind up in a conversation with a sixth-generation circus-family contortionist watching her ninth-generation circus-family, body-juggling, crowd-wowing boyfriend from an area behind your table in preparation for joining the show herself in a couple months when the acts change, as they regularly do to encourage return customers.

Between aerial artists, rhythmic gymnasts, and dancing waitstaff, Joe De Paul sang a little like Frank Sinatra (backed by a band that never took a break), portrayed King Kong, and partnered with the multi-talented Mr. P.P. (if you consider juggling with your mouth a talent) to leave the audience in tears of laughter from their hijinks.

My only regret was that singer Kelly Britt, hitting a ridiculously high note, failed to break the wine glass in her hand. Had she succeeded, she might have brought me over to the dark side, or as it is more commonly known, opera.

Southport Arts Festival – July 13, 2019

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The Southport Arts Festival is a modest gathering, where free street parking is not that far away, at least in the daytime, and one location offers free beer.

But my main reason for going was to see Bill Larkin and his Comic Songs at the Piano (and one with a ukulele) at the Venus Cabaret. Larkin acts, including some shouting, as much as sings his original songs. I see a sort of combination of Lewis Black and Tom Lehrer in him, as his dark humor highlights people’s foolishness and foibles (including his own). The size of the crowd was disappointing, but Larkin wasn’t.

Later in the day, Neal Tobin, Necromancer, took the same stage. Necromancy is a practice of magic involving communication with the dead. After only 15 minutes of his act, Tobin made me wish I were dead, so I got up and left, thinking that his act was not worth the free price of admission, and not worrying whether he could read my mind in that regard.

As with most street fairs, there were a variety of artists and artisans displaying their work. Three attracted my attention. Time After Time, it turned out, was not selling Cyndi Lauper CDs or DVDs of H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper, but rather Historic American Rephotography, where Mark Hersch merges 100-year-old photographs with photographs he takes from the same vantage point to create a single image.

Robots in Rowboats also misled me, as most of the robots were not, in fact, in rowboats, but I guess you just can’t pass on a good alliteration.

Finally, By The Yard sells outdoor furniture recycled from plastic milk jugs. Really. Afterward, it occurred to me that I should have asked whether there was a quality difference between pieces constructed from skim, 2%, and whole milk containers.

Improvised Shakespeare Chicago – The iO Theater – June 28, 2019

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There appeared to be many repeat attendees at the performance. When the cast asked the audience for suggestions for a title for that night’s play, they were ready with a host of responses clearly thought out ahead of time. Otherwise how would you explain an immediate shout out of the chosen title – The Gift of the Gobbler? One doesn’t come up with that out of thin air in a split second.

So, given that the premise of the performance is not taking a named Shakespearean work and riffing off of it, which I would have known had I read that part of the promotion that said a “fully improvised play in Elizabethan style using the language and themes of William Shakespeare”, what makes this show Improvised Shakespeare? Nothing. That’s just to draw you in, which I’m glad it did.

So what made the product Shakespearean? Well, they used the word proffer a lot even though there weren’t any lawyers or courtroom scenes in the show.

There was a woman playing a man and men playing women and none of them were named Yentl or Tootsie.

There was British royalty, scheming, and a lot of rhyming, but no one named Hamilton.

Enough people died that it suggested either Shakespeare, George R.R. Martin, or Quentin Tarantino, but there wasn’t any nudity, so not Martin, and there weren’t any profanities or racial slurs, so not Tarantino.

Though many of the characters died on stage, none of the actors did, relying on their perseverance, skills and tricks of the trade (both short and long form improvisation “need a mechanism in place to relieve the audience of the excruciating pain of a scene that is not working”) to entertain and move the story forward.

As is often said, dying is easy, comedy is hard.

The Paper Machete – Green Mill – February 16, 2019

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It’d been a little over a year since I first went to see The Paper Machete live magazine at the Green Mill on a Saturday afternoon. I learned from that experience that seats are hard to come by (the Wednesday evening show, at least the one time I went, isn’t as crowded), and so arrived an hour and a half before show time, which was only 15 minutes earlier than necessary to avoid unintentionally making lots of new friends among a crowd of people standing around, pressing their bodies into an insufficient amount of space.

Getting there early also affords one the opportunity to watch emcee Christopher Piatt, standing behind the bar, trying to not so subtly rehearse his frenetic Danny Kaye court jester lip-synching routine.

Piatt is a constant, but the rest of the cast of The Paper Machete changes from show to show, so it was an amazing coincidence that Becca Brown, whom I saw perform there a year ago, was again on stage, showing off her strong singing voice.

The comedy also was good, as before, but I was there primarily to see Big Red, that is Meghan Murphy, do her thing, as I have done at Theater Wit, Steppenwolf, and Venus Cabaret.

She didn’t disappoint, capping off her performance by holding the last note of her set long enough that I could have read a couple chapters of a book, had I brought a book.

Piatt, in thanking Murphy and expressing his admiration of her talents, referred to her as the personification of Jessica Rabbit, which seemed to please Murphy.

Fanboy that I am, I couldn’t resist approaching Murphy after the show as she sat at the bar drinking with friends. I introduced myself and fawned over her for a respectable, but not creepy, amount of time before going on my way.

Adult Seminars (Classics of Comedy and Wonderful Town II) – Newberry Library

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As Justice Potter Stewart might have said, I may not be able to define comedy, but I know it when I see it (or hear it, or read it). And I’m quite certain I know what is meant by a classic. So I was somewhat taken aback when the instructor for the Newberry winter seminar on Classics of Comedy picked as our first reading a short story no one in the class had heard of, by an author none of us (or the internet based on my search) had heard of, and that wasn’t funny, except to the instructor.

So it didn’t come as a shock when the instructor informed us that the author was a friend of his who, the instructor (and presumably the friend/author) believed, hadn’t received the recognition he deserved. Now that’s classic, but not why I enrolled in the seminar. So I left during the break of the first class to claim a refund of the registration fee. I imagine the instructor didn’t think that was funny, but I did.

I also enrolled in a Newberry winter seminar called Wonderful Town II, about music from New York in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. What a difference. The instructor, Guy Marco, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of those years (which he experienced first hand, as he is 90 years old), from Broadway to classical to pop to opera. When I asked him how many rooms his music took up at home, he answered “all of them.”

He even made the mercifully short operatic selections tolerable (which is saying a lot coming from me) with his detailed and humorous analyses, such as his observation in one instance that there was no way to determine from the story line why a particular character had died. And he signed off the last class doing his best Benny Hill impression. His dry wit led me to think that he also should have taught the Classics of Comedy seminar.

The Nerdologues Presents: Your Stories: Cast Away Edition – American Writers Museum – March 30, 2018

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We missed some of the Nerdologues program out of fair-weather fan loyalty to the Loyola basketball team, watching the entirety of their defeat at the hands of Michigan. I didn’t mind showing up late, as the Nerdologues program was scheduled to last three hours, which seems like too much of anything, except Lawrence of Arabia, which flawlessly clocks in at 3 hours and 48 minutes. (How did Peter O’Toole not win the Best Actor Oscar?)

We got to the program at intermission, which was perfect timing. It gave us a chance to have a conversation with Kevin Turk, one of the founders of International Tom Hanks Day (ITHD), which was being celebrated by the Nerdologues in this special edition of their weekly podcasts.

Kevin gave us the history of ITHD, how it started as a college keggger, an excuse to drink and watch movies all night. Four years in, Hanks found out about it and the rest is history, as the event has turned into an annual charity fundraiser. The night’s raffle prize was a DVD of Saving Mr. Banks, which the Nerdologues made fun of, but I admit I liked, which must put me on the extreme edge of nerdom.

Attendance was sparse, probably due to the mystical convergence of Holy Saturday, Passover, and the Final Four. Instead of hearing serious stories handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years (or in the Loyola Ramblers’ case, 55 years), we heard four storytellers, three of whom were very funny as they related first-hand experiences of ramblin’ man road trips and raunchy parties (the fourth merely rambled on incoherently).

We also heard a few songs, including one that included a nice Roy Orbison impression, and one that featured someone playing a melodica, a wind-powered portable keyboard instrument that looked like a tricked-up hookah (see picture).

Louder Than a Mom – Martyr’s – March 19, 2018

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I went to see my former storytelling teacher (see my January blog about the class) tell a story, proving beautifully, at least in her case, that those who teach, also can do. Martyr’s is the fourth different venue I have been to for storytelling. Four down, a hundred zillion to go.

The quality of the storytelling was high and the humor was rampant. Not knowing how crowded it would be, my friends and I got there two hours before showtime. No one else showed up for another hour. This allowed us to get the full attention of the waitress and acclimate ourselves to the almost complete lack of lighting in the venue. It’s not a good place to go if you have cataracts. Our smart phone flashlights really came in handy for reading the limited menu.

Next time I’ll eat somewhere else first. They didn’t even have mustard, though at least, unlike the restaurant the night before, they weren’t out of chicken. We all agreed that ketchup on chicken was a nonstarter, although the waitress said she has witnessed it. Perhaps she can get counseling for that trauma.

My former teacher, MT, introduced us to one of the hosts of the event, Kate, who encouraged us to tell a story at a future event. Though one of my friends and I were two of perhaps six men, one of whom was the bartender, at this well-attended event, Kate assured us that we would be welcome additions and that you don’t need to be a mom to participate. In fact, one of the eight speakers that night was a man, though his story was about the birth of his child, so, you know, kind of a mom story. Actually, he gets a pass on that as his story was about how ugly newborns are. (If you need a refresher on the Seinfeld episode, the Hamptons, about a “breathtaking” baby, you can find the script at http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheHamptons.htm).

Julia Sweeney, Older & Wider – Judy’s Beat Lounge – March 11, 2018

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We had dinner at Topo Gigio, where, fortunately, the service was a vast improvement (or we wouldn’t have made the show on time) over where I dined the night before, where we sat for an hour before the waiter brought the check, without having brought the food (picky, picky, picky), which reminded me of the Steve Martin short film, The Absent-Minded Waiter (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsh47iNVRkM).

Judy’s Beat Lounge is a casual 56-seat space at Second City, with general, unreserved seating. We got lucky with four seats together along the side wall, with no sight line issues, even after two of the people in our group were told at the door that their tickets were for a different, prior night (oops). Fortunately the box office was willing to sell them two more tickets (very generous).

Sweeney, who is most famously known for her androgynous character Pat, as a not-ready-for-prime-time player on Saturday Night Live, has been living somewhat under the radar in a northern suburb of Chicago for the last 10 years, apparently for the sole purpose of raising an adopted daughter who provides her with an endless source of material for her routine, including the two most memorable lines of the night – one about her daughter intentionally bringing an uncomfortable dinner conversation to an abrupt end by announcing that she was experiencing a heavy flow and the other about how Sweeney’s husband started calling their daughter’s boy friend Rolf (as in The Sound of Music) in response to information about his politics.

The show is billed as a stand-up work in progress, but, except for Sweeney’s occasional glances at her notes when changing topics and occasional comments about whether a bit had worked or not, it seems ready for prime time to me.