I spent a horrible Friday evening at the local comedy club, The Comedy Zone. I went with a large group of people from my wife's workplace. The headliner was a tall bald guy named Michael Mack. He does short-form jokes and one-liners, but the focus of his act is little parody songs that he sings while accompanying himself on the guitar. He's this guy.
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He wasn't horrible, and talking with him a couple of minutes after the show, he seemed like a nice guy, which goes a long way down here. But these comedy clubs are really like the minor leagues; I've been 3 times and have yet to see anybody that I thought was really funny. And these poor guys are working themselves to death, it's about 90 degrees in there, they are trying to get the energy up in the room, and they're playing mostly to groups of people that really aren't all that smart to start with, and get dumber as the drinks go down.
There was one "patron" who kept screaming "tell us about the p____" (a word often used to describe a kitty-cat, which, in this context, references the female genitalia.) Whenever the crowd noise died down, there was Mr Yokel, screaming "TELL US ABOUT THE P____", or his creative alternative, "TELL US ABOUT THE P____, BROTHER". When he got a joke to his liking, he would wait until the laughter died down, and then shout out "OHHHHHHHHHHHHH YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH". Sadly, each of his outbursts brought on as many whoops and laughs as the comedians telling the jokes.
So, I feel like I am trapped in hell. Every once in a while, Mack gets off a cute zinger that gets a little laugh out of me, but the comedy guys, in that environment, almost can't help but pander to it, and so most of the evening was like having an enthusiastic guy reading the punchlines from Hustler's joke section. This was all set in former family restaurant that's been adorned with day-glo paintings of the "leading lights" of comedy: Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr, Jay Leno.....at one point I asked my wife why there was a picture of the Ku Klux Klan on the back wall, but she kindly pointed out it was the Coneheads.
With the attention span of their audience, these poor schmucks wouldn't be allowed 60 seconds to set up a joke, and of course it gets me thinking about Scharpling and Wurster. They practice a very peculiar approach to long-form slow-burn comedy that they could never get away with in any format I can think of other than possibly a subscription podcast. That's not to suggest that they can't go on to bigger and better things of a different type; both are obviously successful in their primary fields, with enough creativity to spill over into this side project. We're lucky to have it.
But there's this new form of comedy that's closer in many ways to a surrealist avant-garde artform. S&W excel at it, as does Galifianakis. There's a different sensibility at play than there is in what most people think of when they hear the word comedy. Most of the people who frequent this board (and, I would assume, AST, though I haven't spent hardly any time there) share that sensibility, or at least are entertained by it, when your average person would give it a "What the HELL?" response and flip the channel back to re-runs of Becker.
At the end of the night, they actually passed out a survey asking, among other things, what comedians would you most like to see at The Comedy Zone. I wrote in Scharpling and Wurster. What the hell, if the show ends, maybe they will take it out on the road. I've got a feeling it would be rough sledding for them in Knoxville, but I would pay to see them try it.
Anyway, if there's a point to this, it's this. Throughout the last hour of the show last week, Tom kept muttering "At what cost..." This is pure supposition, I don't know the man at all outside of the character he plays on The Best Show, and I don't even know that character as well as most of you. But I have to wonder if the unfinished question is directed back at him as much as at us. If the show is over, will he and Wurster find a new venue for the stories that revolve around Newbridge? And if not, how easy is it to walk away from something you've developed from nothing and nurtured to the point that it almost has a life of its own?
If you listen to either of the radio interviews given in the last couple of years, it sure seems like Tom loves his show. If he derives a sense of satisfaction from it, where does he find that satisfaction if the show has to end?
Of course, I could be (and usually am) completely wrong. I'm trying to convince myself to count myself lucky for the archives, and the fact that I haven't heard 90% of them yet.
