Milt Abel is a stand-up comedian traveling the world, and places closer. Matched betting

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Bombing in Bagdad

By Milt Abel | June 15, 2010

| June 15, 2010

Bombing in Bagdad

Not that kind of bombing. The kind of bombing that stand-up comics hate to experience but can survive, I should know, I’ve come through on the other side of bombing a hundred times and I’m always as close to the epicenter as you can get.

This past Friday night, June 11th, I signed up for a short set on a comedy showcase at the Bagdad Theater and Pub, one of the McMenamins chain of pubs, breweries, and hotels. The chain, with locations throughout greater Portland, has taken abandoned poor houses, churches, schools, and other previously used buildings and converted them into funky place to eat, drink, watch a movie, or sleep, sometimes without every leaving your chair. My favorite McMenamins is the one in Edgefield because it has a variety of places to eat and drink on the grounds; one evening my wife and I strolled through a vegetable and produce garden, past the small, chip-shot golf course, and ended up in a tiny, brick toolshed of a bar that had a fire churning in its hearth and allowed for cigars to be consumed along with the ports and wines its cloistered barkeep offered.

I hadn’t been on stage for a couple weeks and felt the need to get up there and loosen up a bit; stand-up comedy is a lot like breathing, if you don’t do it every once in a while, you lose the ability to do it all. So I called and requested a ‘spot’ and had to wait a day for confirmation from the showcase’s producer that I was indeed a pro, that I had enough experience to not cause people to run screaming from the room after just a minute or two on stage -you’ve got to keep the ‘house’ for the stand-ups coming onstage after you. Then it’s up to them to keep customers in their seats and laughing for the next guy, this is the nature of non-industry showcases. (Industry showcases have entertainment movers and shakers in the audience, and everyone goes onstage to be seen by them) “Open mikes” mean the field of talent is wide open and you probably will have people running and screaming; some from the stage, some from the audience.

I was wary of doing a set there because by the Facebook ads I could see all the other comedians on the bill were of a completely different generation. I’ve been doing stand-up for 28 years, that’s a generation. All the others on the bill were new and the attending audience had seen ‘new’ comics for the few years this showcase had been running so the mild panic that had pitched a tent in the back of my mind was, ‘they are going to think I’m out if it and over the hill.’ My material and performance will be as off the target as walking up there in white socks and dark, too short pants thinking that will get them laughing before I open my mouth; Jerry Lewis worked that schtick a generation ahead of me.

The bomb that went off Friday night at the Bagdad Theater was not anyone totally imploding onstage, it was the violent exposing of how sensibilities had changed between my early days of stand-up comedy in San Francisco in the 1980’s and what fledging comics were throwing up in 2010. A generation ago there were three major influences of comics’ style; the absurdism of Steve Martin, the observational slice of live from Bill Cosby and Seinfeld, or the iconoclastic Pryor and Carlin. Ninety five percent of all comedians, and their material, could have been traced to these influences. I was, and still am, a Cosby-Seinfeld slice of live, observational style of stand-up. Clean like them too.

The comics who went on Friday at the Bagdad were influenced by someone I’m not aware of. They all got laughs, but I sat dropped-jawed at the anger and impatience that lay behind their sets. The material was far bluer and meaner than anything I’d recently seen. That’s fine, I don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy about whatever makes a successful career for another performer. But what caused the damage was the lack of consideration; considering what espousing anti-social behavior implies, or considering where an entertainer can go when their single, most consistent audience response lies in shocking the audience, not with a revelation, but impropriety.

I should talk. I had a rough, sloppy set. I tried out a couple new jokes and got on stage. So it wasn’t a complete loss. One of the new jokes was the idea of a church lowering its role model of God to something a little more accessible; instead of the Church of God, the Church of Steve… here’s an audio clip of me that night awkwardly throwing out the joke.
church of steve
There was another new joke I told myself I was going to try but failed to remember to do. A cute little thing my twelve year-old daughter and myself co-wrote, that relates to bombing and Bagdad,
Their coming out with a children’s version of the movie The Hurt Locker. It’s going to be called The Boo-Boo Box.

I think the crowd that night would have found it as funny as white socks with short pants.

Topics: comedy, humor, travel | No Comments »

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