"Damn! You were here last night? Now I've got to tell new jokes," Chuck Nice told the fans who said they came back for more tonight (which is now the first minutes of Thursday morning). "I was drunk last night. What'd I talk about?"
So he asked for a beer and a Scotch. "I've got nothing to hide from you people," he said. "I'm like the black Lindsay Lohan. Just without the freckles, and the red rug going on down here."
Within the past 15 minutes, seemingly half of the capacity crowd has made their moves for the exits, following Jeffrey Ross toward the door at the end of his 50-minute set. I happen to be in the lobby when this happens, having filmed a short improvised riff with Rory Albanese and Mike Birbiglia, followed by a two-camera interview with Marina Franklin. Franklin performed three sets here today, one in the early morning, another in the afternoon, then finally a sweet set in the 9 o'clock evening hour. But Franklin wanted to get me on camera to capture how I look and act after staying awake for the past 38 hours. I'm punch drunk on a combination of Red Bull, adrenaline and willpower. Sitting here at the computer is a lot easier to handle than walking and talking, it seems. No. It doesn't seem. It is that way. Is it Thursday yet? Almost. Almost.
Mike Birbiglia goes onstage and immediately fills the audience in on my presence liveblogging the event. The lights go up. A couple of hundred heads swivel my way. "So what's been the highlight so far?" Birbiglia asks me. Pause. "Well, I guess this would have to be the highlight," I reply.
Birbiglia transitions from his own blogging experience to Obama to cable news. Then he pauses. "You're feeling me on the humor portion of my program," he observes. Not so much his monologues. "We don't want to hear a human being speaking," he figures they're thinking. "We want to hear rapid-fire jokes, and we want to hear them now." Jokes ensue.
We're closing in on 26 hours of nonstop comedy, which leaves us exactly one full day to reach the finish line. What will turn out to be the ultimate highlight of this show?
Gary Gulman opened with a quick quip about wanting "to set the record for beards of bees" before setting down his recording device on the stool onstage. "But first, I'm going to record this, so you can see where you can do better...because you might mail it in," Gulman said, referring in fact to the audience. "And when you come back at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow you can know how to be better."
Kudos to the big guy, also, for successfully using the word "irascible" in a punchline. About The Mary Tyler Moore Show, even.
I now have watched 24 hours of continuous stand-up comedy without napping, dozing or otherwise passing out from exhaustion.
Our host, William Stephenson, has just told the audience that this not only will be a record-setting show, but also "the best f#%&ing comedy show in the history of the universe." Methinks our host needs sleep even more than I do. Or we better have an incredible 26 hours in our futures.
There's a nine-year-old boy in the audience, and that throws our host off until he realizes the boy is the son of Paul Mecurio, who has returned for his second set of the day. Mecurio is back to work the crowd, and a young Indian man beats him to the punch by identifying himself as "convenience store Indian, not casino Indian." Mecurio wants to give the guy a piece of his mind about Dell Support and asks his son to look away while he flips him the bird. It's all OK, though. The guy gets his picture taken with Mecurio and continues to rib himself. "It's interesting to me that you have no sense of self-worth!" Mecurio exclaims. Looks like it's going to be quite a night.
I entered the club 24 hours ago, we've seen 22 hours of stand-up comedy, and a new audience is beginning to trickle in before they begin charging (host William Stephenson, who has taken only a couple of quick naps, just said cover charges would kick in at 7 p.m.), and only the pillow boy remains a holdover from the last time the sky was dark. I've taken to standing to maintain some level of alertness. Expecting/hoping the "regular" showcases tonight with full houses and their energy will carry me through tomorrow.
An up-and-down afternoon heads into everyone else's Happy Hour with the departure of the young women from Baltimore via Israel (they'd been here since 2 a.m.), leaving the young guy with the pillow and headband as the other really longterm fan (here since 12:30 a.m.) still hanging tough in the audience. There's also a father-daughter combo sitting just offstage that have slowly warmed (or is it succumbed) to relentless crowd working by the comedians today. He's retired law enforcement. His daughter is 20. And that's your update as we finish up the 21st hour in this 50-hour comedy show.
It's just before 4 p.m. and a cameraman from FOX 5 News has shown up during Joe DeRosa's set. DeRosa tries to engage the cameraman in conversation, but he's reluctant to do so.
"Why, they're not going to use the audio from this?" DeRosa says.
"Why not?" the cameraman replies.
"Cunt!"
The audience of about 35 erupts into applause. DeRosa says he'll offer to tell any joke the cameraman wants so he can capture some live footage. "How about McGreevey?" the FOX 5 guy asks. DeRosa tells a joke about how his grandfather had colorful ways of describing that the former New Jersey governor had come out of the closet without using the word "gay." He also follows up with a joke he's told often about being adopted and not looking for his biological parents. Tune in tonight to see what makes it on the newscast.
Quotable from the 2 p.m. hour: "This doesn't feel like a comedy show. It feels like something cataclysmic happened in the world...and this is the only place where we're free from the zombies." -- Christian Finnegan
This is no ordinary show, and certainly not an ordinary audience, and yet I've seen several comedians approach the stage without keeping that in mind. Comics who deliver their regular 20-minute low-energy set when the crowd isn't having it, and needing the opposite. Comics who rely on crowd work with audience members who have been talked to and at again and again. Comics who yell at the audience. Comics who complain about the hour in the day, when you don't hear any audience members complaining. Comics who repeat their material to the same audiences within hours. Comics who are too crude for the hour. Unnecessary racist or misogynist material. Now, I'm not saying that any of the performers need to have watched the entire show, but they should keep in mind the circumstances of this marathon showcase. Plenty of young people and tourists taking advantage of the free show (only a cover charge between 8:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m.) and some staying several hours already. So I offer this simple advice: Know your audience. Because some of you are making me weary. And if you're making me weary, just think of the impression you're leaving on these men and women.
It's just after noon on Wednesday, and already, Dan Ahdoot has said three things onstage that capture the mood in the room.
1) "I've never performed with orange juice and half a danish in front of me."
2) To a guy dozing off in the crowd, who earlier claimed he'd been here since 11 p.m. Tuesday: "That's how I know a joke is working, if he's waking up."
3) "What a surprise? All of the people without jobs here at noon are potheads!"
Just as I finished typing that last update, Pete Dominick switches gears completely and decides to talk about how some people watch comedy shows and think maybe they should do it. So Dominick offers tips and guidance. First, he says that most comedians wish ill on each other's careers, and when they ask how another comic is doing, they really want to know what's going on with your career (not how you're doing personally) so they can hope it fails or try to audition for the gig you're working toward. Dominick talks about how age and looks play differently in the industry (he claims 27 is seen as too old to start comedy and if you're bald, like him, good luck with that, too, getting industry folk to look you in the eyes). And yet, when he got his gig hosting a show on Sirius Satellite Radio, he said he got tons of dates performing stand-up -- despite being no better or worse as a performer than before he got the radio gig. "But that's how this business works," Dominick tells the audience. "It's f#%&ing insanity."
Dominick also decides to heap praise on fellow stand-up comedian Ted Alexandro, whom many in the audience had just seen earlier this morning. "He is an aberration," Dominick said of Alexandro. "He is such a nice and humble and honest person."
Where is all of this coming from?
"I could be up here crushing with my act, but I do that so often," he quips. "So I thought, why don't I give you some behind the scenes." So there you go.
As hour 14 heads into hour 15, and I think my eyelids cannot stay open, Pete Dominick arrives and says he's going to do a "social experiment" and work through today's New York Post and see what jokes he can write from it. Obama's on the cover. But turn the page, and just as important, Charlie Sheen's new wedding. "I almost don't want to do my act, because this is such a weird thing," Dominick says. He continues flipping newspaper pages, and I cannot help but think of Fred Armisen's send-up of "topical" comedians by doing this very thing on Saturday Night Live.
Update: Dominick does make an astute observation about how the crowd doesn't change seats throughout this lengthy night, even though stand-up works better often when the audience is seated closely together and near the stage. "You guys are an outfield," he says. He also notices that there's a Reuters reporter judging him from the back of the room.
For the record on this record-setting comedy attempt, Jon Fisch became the first comedian to take the stage for a second time. He'd been on from 2:42 a.m. to 3:04 a.m., breathing life into the crowd. When he returns at 8:56 a.m., several of the audience members remember him, even though he exclaims: "Same dude, new hoodie!" Some ask him how many Red Bulls he's had for all of this energy. "I don't know," Fisch says. "That's another record I'm working on...sugar free!" Upon further reflection, he says he's had four Red Bulls and a cup of coffee. So far.
12 Hours! New audience members! An applause break! Duly noted, Ted Alexandro. Duly noted. A quartet of new audience members recently arrived, and say they're visiting from San Diego and saw this was happening as a "thing to do" on the "Internet." Alexandro applauds us all for being here as record holders. "I remember reading that (Guinness World Records) book as a kid. It was two fat guys on motorcycles and a midget Chinese guy," he quips. "Why aren't they here?" Just the boost of energy this show needed. "I'm not a night comic. I'm a morning comic," Alexandro says after more applause. "It only took me 14 years to figure this out."
Breakfast update: They passed around sandwiches that appeared to contain egg, cheese and some sort of meat, although in this light, in this current state, it's not in me to determine exactly what sort of meat. Audience attention focuses away from Lee Camp, who is attempting to deliver political jokes to a radio show that was a no-show. Camp sees what's up. "At this time of the day, anything's distracting," Camp observes. Not distracting: His eclectic mix of zingers. Most get big laughs. A couple get big groans. On the latter, Camp replies that he actually preferred those reactions.
After an unfair amount of bluster, the daylight is sneaking into the club and it's time for the "free breakfast" for patrons still hanging around the Comic Strip. Barry Weintraub took the stage at 7 a.m. and asked audience members if they were enjoying the grub...a muffin and a glass of OJ. "They spare no expense, don't they?" Weintraub quipped. He wanted to talk politics, from the night before and going back to Reagan. Even if most of the kids in the audience wouldn't remember the late president. "I really think politics goes over better at 8:30," he said. "The 8:30 a.m. crowd really is into politics." Weintraub just got a text message and read it onstage. His friend is outraged that Hillary Clinton hasn't conceded the presidential campaign yet. "How many people are getting irate political texts at 7:15 in the morning, and they know I'm excited to get them?" Weintraub laughs along with the audience.
In other news: I am opening another can of Red Bull. 2:09, 4:15, and now 7:15...What food pairs well with Red Bull? At this hour, I'm thinking almost anything.
The voice of Rachel Feinstein's mother still would be haunting me, if not for Paul Mecurio, who in his first 10 minutes onstage has proceeded to yell at most of the remaining audience members and even at me. He thought I was the Guinness World Records rep. When he found out what I was doing, he barked: "Why aren't you at your computer when I'm onstage?!" Hold on. Looking up the appropriate cliche. Wait. Here it is. Be careful what you wish for. Yes. That's the one. "F#%& you!" he points at me. "Blog about me!" Done, and done.
Mercurio flips out his Flip video camera and turns it on the audience for several minutes. It's not stand-up. It's more like a 21st century Lenny Bruce vanity project. For whatever that is worth.
If I close my eyes, I hear the voice of Harland Williams. If I open them, I see Kevin Downey Jr. Don't close your eyes. Don't close your eyes. Not that Downey has the same material as Williams, but definitely the voice. But closing eyes means defeat, and defeat is not an option. Even when I've already distinctly heard a comedian (not Downey) actually retell the story of Lorena Bobbitt. On purpose. An hour or so later, our host tells Brian McFadden he must stay onstage for another 15 seconds or so before departing. Which gives me the impression that each comic must deliver at least a 20-minute set to qualify for the record?! I could ask someone if this is the case, but at this hour, I'm only thinking about breakfast, and hoping beyond hope that food will boost my spirits. It's the sitting that wearies the body. Lying down helps, but not really. Not when we still have 41 hours to go...
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