the comic's comic

Boston Comedy Festival 2009 results, prelims 1 & 2

Just because I'm not there doesn't mean the Boston Comedy Festival's annual contest is going to wait for me. The first two preliminary rounds were held on Sunday night at the Hard Rock Cafe, with four comics from each group of 12 advancing to semifinals later in the week. Notably, all of the comedians making it through last night either live in Boston or used to live there. And here they are:

Prelim 1: Dan Crohn, Giulia Rozzi, Tyler Boeh, Zach Sherwin (aka MC Mr. Napkins)

Prelim 2: Joe Wong, Mike Whitman, Lamont Price, Sean Sullivan

Two more prelims happen tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday, all at the Hard Rock.

Steve White wins 2008 SF Comedy Competition

Steve White won the 2008 San Francisco Comedy Competition, which ended Saturday night. White returned to stand-up after several years of acting. Here are the overall results and a note from producer Jon Fox, wholly reblogged from the fine friends at SFstandup.com.

1. Steve White
2. Derick Lengwenus
3. Tyler Boeh
4. Brent Weinbach
5. Leif Skyving

2008 SF Comedy Competition: Finalists

And here, ladies and gentlemen, are your five finalists competing this week for the title of the 2008 San Francisco Comedy Competition, including a veteran comedian/actor, the 2007 winner of the Andy Kaufman Award, a beatboxer from Boston by way of Portland, and two guys who prove that living in the Mountain West makes you have to be funny. In alphabetical order: Tyler Boeh (Boston, via Portland, Ore.), Derick Lengwenus (Wyoming), Leif Skyving (Idaho), Brent Weinbach (San Francisco), and Steve White (Las Vegas). Finals begin Tuesday in Mill Valley. Winner named Saturday in Brooks. Good luck, fellas!

Clockwise from bottom: Boeh, Lengwenus, White, Skyving, Weinbach.
Photo thanks to SFstandup.com and Stanovision Productions

Blogging the 2008 Boston Comedy Festival (prelims 5-6)

Someone asked me if going first in a contest meant certain elimination. That entirely depends upon a few factors, such as: How proficient your host is in warming up the audience and getting them to laugh, what time your show starts (the later, the better, it'd seem), and how quickly you can get an audience to laugh. In the first two nights of prelims during the Boston Comedy Festival contest, the comic who drew the first slot advanced from each of the later shows, but not from the earlier shows. On night three? Foreshadowing. Or not.

Prelim 5 winners: Myq Kaplan, Key Lewis, Tyler Hawkins, Tyler Boeh.

Kaplan knocked his set out from the start, riffing callbacks on pretty much everyone who went before him, starting by announcing: "I'm also 1/2 white...and the other 1/2 white as well." Then landing a joke that combined "baloney pony" and "rapex" before going into his own, already-strong routine, closing by putting his wordplay to extended play on the word, "boobies." Hooray-bies! No doubt as to whether he'd advance.

Lewis, by the way, was one of several biracial comics of the black/white variety to perform this week (and the one Kaplan was calling back to), which, you might think, could be of benefit to Obama's candidacy if somehow all of these comedians could help him. Anyhow. Got off-topic for a sec. He joked about how blacks run everything in Alabama, and how people mistake him for Mexican. I don't think Mexican jokes work as well in Boston, just because the Latino influences here aren't from there. But it didn't hurt his score.

Hawkins wasn't shy about announcing he was the only Canadian competing. The start of his set took a similar reversal of gender roles pattern that Eric Hunter used to score victory the previous night (an almost completely different set of judges, though, and no, I was not among them), joking about how women act in the dance clubs. Halfway through, he shifted to cat territory, and how he's not good with felines, with a lengthy act-out that had you thinking, where's the Meow Mix? Earlier this summer, Hawkins, from Edmonton, won the "Homegrown Comic Competition" at Montreal's Just For Laughs.

Boeh avoided making a joke of his name (Ty Boeh) because, well, he had just come back to Boston from winning the first week of prelims in the San Francisco Comedy Competition, and he has other jokes in his arsenal. Such as a guy pimpwalking on a treadmill. Or a local slogan for Harpoon beer. But the real feature of his routine on this night would be beatboxing and noisemaking, with big sound effects on having sex with women of the black and tracheotomy variety. I discussed this with another comedian last night, and it's one of those things that can divide comics in a contest when you see a competitor who closes with beatboxing or singing or playing an instrument. They almost always get a huge crowd response. Is that a bad thing? Depends upon whether you feel the point is telling jokes, or getting laughs. Whatever works, right? This is a debate we can have sometime down the road.

The rest of this group suffered some bad breaks. Liz Miele never had a chance going first, as the host had bombed. Maggie MacDonald, going second, had Miele warming them up, but her strong set based on her veterinary job apparently still not enough. Could it have been too sexual? Who knows. I wasn't judging this night. Joe Vespaziani, going third, had a brilliant set, so what happened there? I'd thought he was a cinch to advance, with jokes about turning 40, watching porn with the closed-captioning, body pillows, untying a vasectomy and more. He got robbed. And I'm not just saying that because I competed with him 10 years ago in the 1998 Seattle Comedy Competition. Ira Proctor managed to pop the microphone, which got him off on the wrong foot, which in turn, only plays into his onstage humorous rage. And Ms. Pat came a long way from Indianapolis to tell us about where her daughter puts her Oreo cookie crumbs (!).

OK. Moving on...

2008 SF Comedy Competition: Week One winners

And now, the five comedians advancing from the first week of preliminary competition in and around San Francisco this year are...
1) Tyler Boeh, 2) Brent Weinbach, 3) Murv Seymour, 4) Jose Sarduy, 5) Dax Jordan

Week Two of the San Francisco Comedy Competition begins Wednesday.