Dear people of the internet,
I’m excited for this month’s edition of the show I co-host, Night Cheese. I made a website for it. Check it out…join the mailing list…or don’t. I don’t care. I just like that the website kind of looks like cheese and I wanted to show that off. I clearly have an eye for design.
Love,
Stu
I’ve been thinking a lot about how my stand up has changed since I did comedy back in college on the West coast, and so I wrote this thing about one of my old jokes that I ended up adapting after coming to New York City. Before I say anything else, I want to point out that my experience in comedy is limited. I did relatively minimal comedy before coming to New York and I’ve been here for just over half a year. So, in terms of the East/West differences I’m writing about, they only come from my limited personal experiences, which I suppose could have been different for anyone.
Time Out New York magazine came out with this list of all “the best open mic nights in New York City,” and, as many open mic comedians such as myself have noted, the list is not accurate. At all. Maybe it’s a marketing thing, but it’s mostly just a list of the biggest clubs in the city. Which, very obviously to comedians, are often some of the worst open mics in the city. The very first one listed, the Comedy Cellar, doesn’t even have open mics!
If you’re looking for good open mics check out badslava.com or freemicsnyc.com. There are tons of great open mics where a bunch of better comics come to try out their stuff…and it’s usually the basement of some bar in Brooklyn, not all the best clubs in Manhattan. Maybe I’ll make a list of my favorite mics one day!
A couple of comics who host great mics made this video calling out Time Out NY for what they’ve done. Funny stuff.
This is a fantastic piece in a series of articles that are being written about NYC and L.A. comedy this week in Vulture.
I know nothing about the comedy scene in L.A. (okay not nothing), but my sister does live there and I’ve visited several other times, too. And from what Gethard says about the two locations…well, I can’t help but agree with him. New York is awesome! I don’t like L.A. right now. Does that mean I’ll stay in NY forever like him? I donno. But I can certainly hop on board with the NY lovin’.
One thing I definitely don’t get about L.A. is that even though you abbreviate NYC like this: NYC, you abbreviate L.A. like this: L.A.. That doesn’t make any sense! Look how clunky those two periods look next to one another! I’m not even sure I did that right…either way, it’s confusing! Come on, L.A.! Efficiency! Take those gosh darn periods out of there. No one will confuse you with Louisiana. I don’t know why you’re insecure about that; you’re much more popular than LA.
Anyways, Chris Gethard is awesome. The way I remember how to spell his last name is that it spells “get hard.” There can’t be a cooler person than that! You can see more of him on The Chris Gethard Show on Fusion.
I found this little ditty about going to your first music open mic in NYC. I just looked up the meaning of ditty, and it’s “a short little song.” Sorry for my inaccuracy; it’s an article, not a song. I could have just deleted what I wrote and then I wouldn’t have been wrong, but you know what? I like it this way. I feel more transparent. You can see how the cheese is being made.
Shit. It’s sausage isn’t it? I meant sausage. You know what? There’s no reason why I can’t make cheese AND sausage. They go very well together.
Well, this has some tips about going to open mics in NYC and it’s interesting. The ideas about “bombing” and meeting people are very similar to comedy. It also reminds me about how one of my friends always goes to these music open mics in the city and does comedy at them. He says they’re a very different, more engaged crowd and they can be pretty fun. I went to one once and I pulled to go 24th. Everyone got 10 minutes of stage time. Seeing as how I didn’t want to stick around a small bar exclusively filled with musicians for 230 minutes, I decided to leave. But, it makes me want to check out a better music mic, try it out, and see how good they are for comedy. Maybe I’ll write about that.
p.s. I love the picture I found for this post
It was my last night in New York City. I had spent the whole summer going to stand up comedy open mics. I was leaving the next day for my hometown in the Chicago suburbs before heading all the way back for my last year of school in California just a few days after that. It was late at night, probably 1:00 in the morning and no one was out. I had just finished my final mic which started at 10:00 PM Saturday night at the Irish American Bar & Pub. My set was okay: I had a couple good jokes, but I went up late and everyone was tired. Typical. I always went up in the last group at that bar. At least, that’s the way it seemed. My friends and I had been sitting around the bar for three hours until all the comics had gone up and performed their sets. And we had gone to two other mics earlier that evening. As it turns out, that mic ended up leaving the Irish American to be hosted at another bar. And so it was not only my last mic in New York for the summer, but the last mic at the Irish American for anyone.
stumelton.com 