Paul
Nardizzi, a
“See, I don’t have that problem because I have this thing that I wrap around my milk,” he says. “It’s called the refrigerator. Yeah, then I added a second layer of insulation known as my house.” Nardizzi pauses, looking out at the audience with a straight face.
“It cost me
$200,000 to set up that little ecosystem,” he says. The crowd goes wild.
This was
just one of the many jokes Nardizzi nailed at the Boston Comedy Festival this
past April. The Ultimate Comedy Contest
crowned him its winner and awarded him the $7,000 grand prize. It may not be enough money to protect
Nardizzi’s milk, but it is enough to feed his wife and children.
“The reason
I’m doing this is for the money,” he said before the final event. “I really don’t need the recognition
anymore.” He has a point. Nardizzi has been on Late Night with Conan
O’Brien three times and has also appeared on A&E’s Evening at the
Improv. He has his own website –
www.paulnardizzi.com – that lists all of these achievements and more.
And
Nardizzi is no stranger to comedy festivals.
He won HBO's U.S. Comedy and Arts Festival in 1997, and was a finalist
in the 1995 San Francisco International Comedy Competition. Although he still performs at clubs
regularly, Nardizzi has been branching out, doing sets at corporate functions
and golf tournaments.
“Now my
phone rings,” Nardizzi says. “People
call me now.” He seems to be surprised
at saying this, because it was not always this way. Starting out, it wasn’t like this at
all. It was probably closer to what
you’ll see if you go to open mike night at one of the several
Comedy is no laughing matter to
Bill King this evening at the Comedy Connection. It is a Monday night, Amateur Showcase at the
club, and King is on stage, bombing his set.
He is, as some comedians call it, “eating dick.”
King is the
first amateur comedian on stage, and he does not have it easy. Being the lead amateur is hard enough, but he
also has to follow Kevin Knox, the professional host for the evening. Knox laid in with one joke about how the
elderly in
They cool
off quickly.
You see,
people expect to laugh when they go to Amateur Showcase at the Boston Comedy
Connection on Monday night. They shelled
out their $10, and they want to be entertained.
But the comedians are not laughing.
This could be their chance to be seen and heard, their step to actually
being paid for doing stand-up. For the
performers at Amateur Showcase, comedy is serious business.
There
are about 12 audience members at Amateur Showcase tonight who paid to get in,
all clustered near the stage, front and center.
Another dozen or so, the performers and their guests, are nestled in the
back corner of the room like some sort of estranged faction. The venue seats about 400. This near-empty room is swallowing people
up.
Last week
national act Kevin Meaney had an audience overflowing into the aisles and
busting their gut. Meaney did a “duet”
with Frank Sinatra, and acted every single part of “We Are the World.” He talked about
Not
tonight. At Amateur Showcase, good jokes
get subdued chuckles from the audience and exaggerated howls from the
back. Bad jokes echo into the deafening
silence and sit there festering while the performer searches for redemption
through clusters of um’s and uh’s. You
would think it would be less intimidating to tell jokes in front of a few
people than a large crowd. But it is
harder to debut your comedy career in front of no one. There are fewer people available to laugh at
your jokes.
King, 33,
has never been to
A while
back, King and his brother were scheduled to try out for a comedy troupe. Two days before the tryout, King’s brother
suffered a stroke and couldn’t do it.
King did not try out but still went to watch the event.
“They asked
me to come on stage and do something for the audience, and so I went up and did
about three minutes off the top of my head,” King says. “I did fairly well, and
after the tryout I went home and wrote about an hour’s worth of material until
four in the morning.”
And so an
aspiring comedian’s dreams were born.
King has been doing occasional stand-up at clubs in western and central
“I’ve
always wanted to be in show business, whether it was in front or behind the
scenes,” King says, then telling the typical story of the comedian always
wanting to entertain people. “When I was
four I used to go on the roof of my garage and sing to the neighborhood kids,”
he says.
But tonight
King is not doing so well. He opens with
a joke about his beer belly, and how he resembles the starving African children
on television commercials. He poses in
side profile and pushes his stomach out, rubbing his hand over it. Not a bad joke compared to the others he spouts,
but he stammers through it, and it doesn’t go off so well. Some audience members laugh nervously, others
maybe smile a little, but no one is convulsing in laughter.
Yet
audience members are polite at Amateur Showcase. There are not as many hecklers here as you
might see on other nights. The audience
seems to understand the plight these performers are going through. Besides, it is just not fun to watch someone
eating dick.
One of the clearest differences
between a professional like Knox and the amateurs is delivery. Some of the amateurs have funny content, but
they don’t know how to convey it to the audience for laughs. King is no exception.
His jokes
are bombing, and he gets nervous. He
stutters. He plays with his hair.
Vulgarity that does not seem to have been written into his set spews out his
mouth, and a lot of spittle surrounds it.
It is almost as if he is getting angry at himself up there, his eyebrows
furrowed inward, his tone of voice turning mean. He resorts to obscene bathroom humor,
including one where he compares a starfish to a part of his wife’s anatomy, and
another where he describes in detail the term “hot lunch.” Both have connotations of a sexual fetish
website on the Internet. The audience is
cringing. The polite laughs have left
the building. It is one thing to be
disgustingly funny like Knox can be, but it is another thing to just be
disgusting.
King
finishes his routine, and Knox jumps up there after him. “Give him a round of applause,” Knox
says. “It’s tough to be the first one up
there.” Consolatory claps ebb through
the club.
“I’m like the
mop guy,” Knox says before the show. “If
a guy doesn’t do so well, I get up there and try to cushion the fall. I try to get the audience going again so the
next guy has a chance.”
The next
person up is Paul Vogan, who first makes fun of his small stature, which gets
the crowd laughing a bit. Then he takes
a turn in the wrong direction, and keeps going for the rest of his five
minutes. He mentions a place called My
Ass,
“The
President once drove through My Ass,” he says.
“Many people die every day in My Ass.”
The crowd shuffles in discomfort.
Get off the subject, the silence is telling him, or get off the stage.
Vogan is an
actor, and has never even been on stage in a club before. He has just told
funny stories to his friends, he says, and he decided to give this a try. But the audience members are not as forgiving
as his friends, and he seems to be having a hard time reading them at all.
This is
opposed to Knox, who has a good sense of whether the audience is entertained,
slightly bored, or ready to get up and leave.
At one particularly dead point during the show, Knox looks back at the
sign behind him that says “Comedy Connection.”
He scans his finger across the first word and says it loudly and
sarcastically – “Co-me-dy.” It stirs the
crowd again. He knows his way around
this place.
Ten minutes before the show starts,
Knox is offstage, sitting on the back of one of the chairs, his feet on the
seat. He is not exactly dressed up, with
a worn out sweatshirt and warm-up pants.
His long, curly blond hair makes him look like he would fit perfectly in
a 1980s rock band named Venom or something.
“Some kids
suck,” he says. Knox is not much different
off stage than he is on it. He is blunt,
to the point, and does not seem to be a big fan of subtle humor. During his set, he makes farting noises with
his tongue and flashes his middle finger.
He talks about driving drunk and the laxative qualities of prescription
drugs. “There are some kids I’ve seen
that have been doing the same routine for like five years,” he says. “They need to get out.”
Knox tells
the story of Ray Romano, now the star of the CBS sitcom Everybody Loves
Raymond. Romano was nominated for an Emmy in 1999 for Outstanding Lead
Actor in a Comedy Series, a far cry from his start in
Knox did
the stand-up circuit with Romano and became friends with him. He talks about how close Romano was to
quitting before he got his break. “He
was ready to forget it all,” Knox says.
“He thought he wasn’t going anywhere.
Now look at him.”
“Sometimes
you see a kid that’s on his way to greatness,” Knox says. “But for every one that makes it, there are a
million that don’t.” Tonight it looks as
if Vogan and King might be two parts of that million.
But you
never know. The first time is always
hard, and rarely does anyone flat out succeed.
The first time most people try writing fiction, they don’t pen The
Catcher in the Rye. Like most art,
good stand-up comedy takes practice, and lots of it. You need funny ideas, funny writing, and
–probably the hardest of all three—funny delivery. Most comedians cannot hide behind a guitar or
props, making the experience even more harrowing. It is them and the microphone. You cannot get much more intimate than that
unless you start taking your clothes off.
In
And it is
never too late to start. Larry Lee
Lewis, who hosts open mike night at the Chops Lounge in
“I see some
guys with guitars,” he says, “but there aren’t too many anymore with
keyboards.” Lewis considers himself a
throwback to the comedians of yesteryear.
He plays a little tune on his keyboard and then comes out with something
like, “My father was so cheap, I went to him one time and I said, ‘Dad, can I
borrow $50?’ He said ‘$40? What do you need $30 for? I can’t afford to give you
$20.’” Then he punctuates with his own piercing laugh – “Ha, HAA, HAAAAA!” You cannot help but laugh along.
In the
spectrum of stand-up comedy, Lewis stands about halfway between King and
Knox. He is on the verge of becoming a
full-blown professional. He started,
like so many others, at an open mike night.
“All my
friends said that I was funny, but it’s really tough to get up on stage and
actually do it,” he says. “Now I’m
hooked.” Lewis tries to perform three,
four, even five times a week. He is
usually the opening or middle act in a sea of stand-ups that have about the
same experience as him. He says that the
Comedy Connection may soon bill him as an opener on the weekend for one of the
national acts, something he has never done.
You can sense the excitement in his voice.
The open
mike night that Lewis hosts is one of the more wild ones, and according to him,
the “only true open mike.” At the Comedy
Connection, you have to arrange for a five-minute slot. Same deal at the Comedy Studio. But at the Chops Lounge, you can walk in and
do any bit you want. The microphone is
at one end of the lounge, and the bar is at the other. There are about 30 feet between the two,
tops. The microphone does not always
work so well, but the place is so small it does not matter. The lighting shines evenly, less like a
spotlight, and so the comic does not feel the weight of the entire room. The comics are more relaxed, and there is
more of a team atmosphere here. People
staying at the hotel come down and have dinner in the lounge. Some have no intentions of hearing stand-up
comedy.
Next to the
microphone is the piano where Lewis begins the night. He soon starts introducing people, dozens of
them. The show launches at nine on a
Wednesday night and winds down about three hours later.
The
majority of the audience, meaning 99.9 percent, is the other performers, and
almost all of them know each other.
Newcomers use this to see if they can get a few laughs. Regulars hone their skills. You do not have to pay to get in because you
have no idea what you will be getting.
These are testing grounds.
“We put
oddballs on,” says Lewis. “We’ve had
80-year-olds get up and do Jack Benny impressions.”
There is
some humor mixed throughout the night, and things you might not see
elsewhere. Two guys perform a parody of
“Tears in Heaven” by Eric Clapton where they sing about getting in touch with
their feminine side – “if you saw me in P-Town…”
As the
night wears on, the acts miss more. One
man who seems to be either high or drunk will not stop. He has been on stage for ten minutes and is
missing every cue Lewis is giving him to stop.
Lewis walks from the back to a table in front of him, and sits
down. Lewis stands up again. Lewis puts his hand on his face. The guy isn’t telling jokes anymore, he’s
just chatting with people in the audience. He finally asks for one minute more and
finishes his routine. The other
comedians still here are grimacing.
But overall
this is a good atmosphere. Even if the
jokes are bad, the laughs still come, though forced. The Chops Lounge is a place for amateur comics
to hang out with one another. They chat
with each other, share a drink. One
comic is talking to the bartender before the show about the recent
Holyfield-Ruiz fight, a big one in Beantown because John Ruiz was an underdog
and a local boy from nearby
“See,
Holyfield was backing down, he kept backing down,” said the comic. “If you want to win, you’ve got to get right
up there, right in his face.”
Another
overhears him and leans over. “Just like
stand-up comedy,” he says.
There is a companionship here that
performers like Kevin Knox don’t always see.
Because the Comedy Connection is known as the premiere comedy club in
That is not
to say Knox does not support the event.
He repeatedly compliments the amateurs for their bravery to perform on
stage. And he is not the only one who tries to encourage the amateurs. Joe Santagate, the booking agent for the
Comedy Connection, offers King advice after the show.
“You just
need to expand a little,” Santagate says to King. “Once you do that, give me another
call.” Santagate started as a doorman at
the club, and has been booking acts for six years. He says that he receives about 20 calls per
day from amateurs who want to have their five-minute shot on stage.
When they
perform, Santagate considers the size and reaction of the audience, as well as
his own feelings about the routine. He
is generally forgiving. Santagate says
that it is always good to find new talent, and he sometimes sees an impressive
amateur. When this happens, he refers
them to the Comedy Connection’s sister club in
None of the
amateurs tonight will be paid money for their performances. Hope is their only compensation.
“Comedy is
tough,” says Santagate. “Everyone is
looking for their dream shot.”
This is one
of the problems that Knox sees with
Knox
describes the comedian that television producers are looking for: hip, young,
and good looking, but not necessarily funny.
“The show can write the material for him,” he says. “He won’t even have to come up with any
jokes. He just has to look cool.”
Maybe the
“love” that Knox says is gone is just on the surface, or maybe Knox had a few
bad experiences that dominate his outlook.
He laments, but later in the show he jokes with the other comics, and
seems to be having some genuine fun. The
comics that Knox talks with are more experienced, and the manager intersperses
them among the amateurs during open mike night.
He does this to keep the crowd on its toes and laughing. Then they tend to laugh at the amateurs, even
when they aren’t funny.
The true
lack of camaraderie seems to be among the amateurs themselves, and not the
comedians of Knox’s caliber. They come
by themselves, sometimes with a friend or girlfriend, and tend to stay isolated
from one another. Instead of being a
team, they may see this event as a competition.
Knox sees it another way.
“I just
like making people laugh,” he says.
Laughter might get you free drinks
at the club, and even a free meal. But
it will not pay the bills. Many of these
stand-ups live paycheck to paycheck, and struggle day-to-day just like anyone
else. The profession’s glamour survives
the 10- or 15-minute set. After that, it
disappears.
Most
are regional comics. They stay in the
“I’m
not willing to go to
“The
longer you do it here, the more your name gets out,” Nardizzi says. “The more you get known, the more gigs you
get.”
Nardizzi
may say that he makes a decent living, but he did enter in the Boston Comedy
Festival, which is normally for more amateur comedians. Others of his caliber questioned Nardizzi,
who says that money was the determining factor.
An extra $7,000 is something that these comedians need whether they’re
professionals or not.
They
are reluctant to say how much they’re making for being funny, but some of them
have second jobs. Dave Russo, the winner
of last year’s Boston Comedy Festival, is still a substitute teacher. He teaches during the day, and travels around
the region at night, doing shows.
Nardizzi’s path to stand-up comedy was odd enough. After graduating from college in 1990, he got
a job as a banker.
“There
was an open mike for just bankers,” Nardizzi said. “And so I tried it out and it went
well.” But these amateur comedians are
not dropping what they have and diving into stand-up comedy. The money isn’t there at the beginning, and
when it comes later on, after years of experience, it still isn’t that much.
Which
is why these comics are protective of their material. Another reason why Nardizzi entered the
Comedy Festival was he wanted to see if any of the comics from out of town were
stealing his material. When asked if
people really do that, Nardizzi stares and nods. His straight face shows that there are no
jokes about this subject.
“Most
of the time it’s the people that are close to you that are stealing your shit,”
Nardizzi said. “They don’t even realize
they’re doing it half the time. Or they
think that we’re buddies and so I won’t care.”
But
Nardizzi does care. He said that when
you start hanging out with other comics a lot, you start acting the same,
sounding the same, and generating similar material. He said that it is hard to keep separate the
material you have heard from the material that you have created yourself.
Jokes
get recycled. This is the way comedy
works. Most comedians got hooked on the
profession from watching someone else.
Nardizzi memorized Dennis Miller’s first HBO special, for instance. The subconscious stores these jokes, and the
conscious might use them later without realizing what it’s doing. This goes on and on, and no comic is immune.
Nardizzi
rants about a new product with peanut butter and jelly in the same jar: “Is that for people who own one knife? Why
don’t I cram bread and milk in there, let these morons tongue their lunch out
of the jar?” Brian Regan, the 1996 Male
Comedian of the Year and a national touring comic, does a bit that is oddly
familiar: “If you’re that lazy, why not put some croutons in there, get the
whole sandwich with a spoon?”
Regan talks
about the Step, a piece of exercise equipment: “People are sending away for
them in the mail. Bing-bong! It’s here! They
run down the stairs and get it. This is going to be great!” Comic Denis Leary talks about the
Stairmaster: “Have we turned into gerbils, ladies and gentleman? People are
paying money to go into a health club and walk up invisible steps for an hour
and a half. What’s next, the
Chairmaster? I sit down, I get up, I sit down, I get up.”
Leary talks
about cocaine: “I’d like to do some cocaine.
I’d like to do a drug that makes my penis small, makes my nose bleed,
makes my heart explode, and sucks all my money out of the bank, is that
possible please?” Robin Williams: “What a wonderful drug. Anything that makes
you paranoid and impotent, give me some of that. There’s a wonderful thing called freebasing.
It’s not free, it costs you your house, it should be called homebasing.”
Finally,
Williams talks about alcohol: “I had to stop drinking alcohol because I kept
waking up nude in front of my car with my keys in my ass.” A few years earlier, comedy genius Richard
Pryor: “I had to stop drinking because I got tired of waking up in my car doing
90.”
Who
stole from whom? Who knows? It might not have even been intentional. It is hard to monitor who is stealing your
material when the thief doesn’t know he’s doing it. Then again, a lot of comedians have a similar
sense of humor. Who is to say they
didn’t create their own jokes, separate from one another? Similar jokes come with the territory of
being a stand-up. Most comedians realize
this, and try to keep it to a minimum.
What they want the most is to make the crowd laugh.
And laugh they do. The audience at the Comedy Connection is as
diverse as the performers on stage, with a mix of tourists, aspiring amateurs,
and friends of performers.
E.J. Murphy
sits in the audience. He drives a tour bus. A native Vermonter, he now lives in
“I’ve never
tried going up there,” he says. “But
I’ve thought about it. That’s why I like
to check it out.” It’s not a surprise
that many who go to these shows have at one time entertained the idea of trying
it themselves. They just don’t have the
guts.
One comic
discusses his overweight girlfriend as Murphy watches.
“I don’t
want to come out and say she’s fat, so I try to be more subtle,” he says. “So I’ll be like, ‘Hey, do you want to go
take a walk on the beach? And then do
500 sit-ups?’”
Murphy
laughs, but he is also studying. He is
discovering what kills and what bombs, what gets the laughs and what gets the
uneasy hush.
“I’ve
written down some stuff,” he says, “but that’s as far as I’ve gone. I try it out on my own, maybe in front of
some friends, but that’s it.” Murphy
says that he got the idea from his job, where he drives tourists around and
tells them the history of
“But it’s a
lot different than getting on stage,” he says.
“When I’m driving the tour bus, I don’t have to face the audience when I
tell my jokes.” A security wall pops up
when you’re not face-to-face with your critic.
But to look at them and see the contortions of disgust, the occasional
dead face of quiet, can be vexing. Then
you have to keep going.
There are a
few strongholds in almost every audience.
There are the hysterical laughers, the ones who make every joke the
funniest thing they have heard. These
are the ones who are crying, leaning their chair back and forth in spasms. Their laugh starts loud and strong, fades to
a high-pitched wheeze, and finishes with a cough or a deep breath.
Then there
is the challenger. This person dedicates
himself to not laughing even though he paid $10 to do exactly that. It is almost as if he is trying to impress
the people he came with by showing them his power to keep a straight face.
And when
they leave, the audience is a lot like the one outside a movie theater. Instead of recalling parts of the movie,
they’ll retell jokes, recreate the funny situations, and laugh all over
again. They’ll try to make up jokes of
their own, or tell ones that they had stored inside somewhere. After a good show, there is a certain unity
among the audience. Everyone’s smiling
outside the club. Everyone’s stomach
hurts from laughing hard.
Amateur
comedy is like sex in that if it’s good, all your troubles are put on
hold. That bad day at the job
disappears. The headache you had this
morning is only a distant memory.
But if sex is bad, it’s still pretty good. Comedy cannot say the same. If comedy is bad, it is often tense and embarrassing, for the giver and receiver alike. It leaves both parties uneasy and shifty. The events unfold and everyone involved wishes they had stayed home and rented a movie, maybe even a comedy. You know that you’ll at least get a few laughs for $3.50. With stand-up comedy, you have no idea.
This is the
situation that every amateur wants to avoid.
They may have dreams of grandeur before they get on stage, but once the
microphone is in front of them and the lights shine down, they’re not thinking
about their own Thursday-night sitcom.
Like Kevin Knox the professional, they just want to make people laugh.
But for now the night is over and
dreams are put on hold. After the last
guy, Knox gets back on stage, thanks everybody, and says goodnight. The exit music gets thrown on and people get
ready to leave. Five minutes later, Bill
King is still sitting in the back, finishing his Budweiser.
“Good job,”
I say to him. He nods at me and says
thanks, but does not smile. Instead, he
throws the bottle back and finishes what is left of his beer. He stands up and puts his coat on and looks
around the club. There may be two or
three others still here, but mostly it’s just King and I. This place, which last weekend was so full,
and even earlier tonight was at least brewing a little, is now dark, almost
hollow.
“This place
sure cleared out fast, didn’t it?” King says.
He says it like he didn’t want the night to end, like he wants what Paul
Nardizzi got when he won the Boston Comedy Festival.
When
Nardizzi was announced as the winner, he took the stage and hugged his fellow
comedians. Everyone called for a speech
at the microphone. The entire place
stopped, their attention centered on him.
“I’d like to thank God,” Nardizzi said, “for putting a lot of weird shit in my head.” It is one of those strange gifts that few people besides a comedian would be grateful for.