By John Mendels(s)ohn

I have gone on stage as an actor, an orator, a musician, and a solo comedian. Take it from me; one never feels more naked than as a comedian. So the one thing the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comics, as seen at the Klinic’s open-mic night every Wednesday, must be acknowledged to share is courage. Trying to maintain one’s confidence and timing over the roar of the oblivious patrons of the bar half of the club (what is it with bifurcated Madison clubs, of which Café Montmartre is another?) must certainly be among the most daunting tasks a Wisconsin performing artist will have to face in 2008.

If only they were as funny as they are brave.

Think of your favorite Monty Python sketch, or the miniature facsimile of Stonehenge being lowered among the incredulous members of Spinal Tap as a 10, as funny as it’s humanly possible to be. Then think of the best moments of the first seasons of Saturday Night Live as 9s; Clement Freud on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 an 8; Andy Kaufman lip-synching the Mighty Mouse theme song on the debut edition of SNL a 7; the best opening monologue Jay Leno has ever delivered a 6; Robin Williams on a good night a 5; an old-school shtick-monger like Rodney Dangerfield a 4; SNL for around the past 45 years a 3; the pun-based comic that comes with a piece of bubble gum a 2; and the irrepressible loudmouth kid back in high school who regarded himself as the class clown, (though everyone else regarded him the class asshole) a 1.

Few of the up-and-comers at the Klinic ever grazes 4, and none stay above it for long. One comic marvels at how tattoos, commonly chosen off a wall and paid for with credit cards, are seen as indicative of born-to-be-wild-ness. Tim Egan delivers a deftly constructed observation about how, in these PC times, the pot and kettle would have to call one another Teflon-American. You wouldn’t hear better than that at the Comedy Store on Sunset Blvd.

But curb your enthusiasm. Mostly their jokes go thud, thud, and thud. One comic points out that a lot of rock singers sound as though they’re being anally raped. Ta-da-DUM! Another observes that New York’s new governor, David Paterson, who’s legally blind, could have truthfully told his wife that he wasn’t seeing any other women.

Seeing. Legally blind. Get it?

Actually, this sort of thing might work on a certain level if it weren’t delivered with desperation, if it were just thrown away and allowed to sneak up on you. But the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comics is generally as desperate as it is vulgar, and boy, is it vulgar. Typically, one guy jokes about his inability to understand why riders of bicycles built for two always look so happy. “If I was on one of those,” he snorts, “it would be because something had happened to my fucking car.” See, it wouldn’t be funny if were just his car.

He said sarcastically.

This is what Lenny Bruce was martyred for, so these guys could come on stage and go Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, cock, dick, pussy, menstrual period, fuck, shit, fuck?

[A quick note on sarcasm: A few years ago, I was handing out flyers for a performance by my scripted sketch comedy troupe, the San Francisco Hysterical Society, at an event in Golden Gate Park sponsored by Absolut vodka. To try to make people more apt to accept a flyer, I started shouting, “Read all about it — Absolut vodka shown to cause intoxication in laboratory animals!” Declining a flyer, one guy in a backward baseball cap sneered, “Well, duh!”

You read it here first: the dimwitted shouldn’t attempt sarcasm, as it tends to result in embarrassment for all concerned!]

Local comedians are no less slavishly imitative of one another than their counterparts in Madison’s countless dozens of indistinguishable T-shirts-‘n’-guitars bands; nearly all come on stage dressed as though fresh from changing their own oil. Nearly all, as noted above, are potty-mouthed; nowhere else in life would anyone but a sociopath speak like this in front of strangers. At the Klinic, though, Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, cock, dick, pussy, menstrual period, fuck, shit, fuck seems as de rigueur as using the microphone. The recently dormant local standup Aaron Quinn, whose vulgarity-free, low-key, cerebral style is said to resemble Steven Wright’s and Mitch Hedburg’s, observes, “It's amazing how much power those words have. They're particularly useful for bailing out someone who is dying on stage. Audiences genuinely want people to succeed, so they look for places to laugh even if they don't find a show particularly funny. Swear words generate uncomfortable laughter.”

Well, maybe the first 45,000 times in an evening.

Less annoyingly, the next generation of Madison Standup Comics is also relentlessly self-referential, forever commenting on our reactions to them. Well, that’s the last time I’ll tell that one, I guess. (Promises, promises!) When they forget where they are in their routine, they are likely to muse into the microphone, “What the fuck else I got?” Charming!

If you’ve got to draw attention to the process, it seems to us — and we see no benefit at all from doing so — you should do it with the panache of Adam Kroshus. When one of his bits elicits the Klinic version of silence (those actually listening to him don’t respond at all, while the din from the bar is unattenuated), he thoughtfully points out, “That joke is actually very funny.” Which is, itself, the funniest thing he says on stage.

Speaking of vulgarity, you’re rarely more than 30 seconds away in Madison from a fellatio or penis-size joke. No one’s denying that sex is potentially hilarious, but so are fourteen million other areas of human interaction. Mining this particular area as relentlessly as they do, the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comics reminds one of nothing so much as the little boy in daycare who discovers that taking his peepee out always seems to get surrogate mommy’s attention.

The sole woman among the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comicsour first night at the Klinic embodies what we call the chucklewhore mentality — I’ll do anything, regardless of how self-degrading, to make you snicker. All about how fat and promiscuous she is, her act reminds, unpleasantly, of a scene in the sixth season of The Sopranos in which the murdered mobster Vito’s troubled goth son defecates in the shower after PE to stop other boys ridiculing him. She describes herself as a chunky monkey. Ta-da-DUM! She envisions herself in a remake of the famous film adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, now re-titled Fat on a Hot Tin Roof. Ta-da-DUM! But her act isn’t only self-degradation; she also manages to tell us that her former boyfriend had…can you guess?…a small penis. Side-splitting!

For the record, a student type identified only as Joanne does much better the subsequent week, eliciting at least one estimable laugh speculating about the special reproductive abilities of coasties, as UW undergraduates apparently call classmates not of this neck of the woods.

It’s instructive to consider the locals’ stuff vis-à-vis performances by Big Names in Comedy. It might be that the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comics rarely grazes 4 on our scale of funniness, but having just watched YouTube videos by Roseanne Barr, Patton Oswald, and coming-soon-to-the-High-Noon-Saloon Doug Stanhope, we wouldn’t say they do much better. There’s something about the sound of many people laughing delightedly at them, though, that at first makes their stuff seem funnier than it actually is. If we saw the Next Generation of Madison Standup Comics at the Comedy Club on State Street, and the audience were guffawing, we might well be more amused.

Which isn’t to suggest that we didn’t find most of the opening acts at the Comedy Club’s recent Thursday evening performance featuring Randy Chestnut unfunny at best, obnoxious at worst.

MC Jeremy Elias does a nice bit about Asian porn movie sounds, but we have to sit through jokes about blowjobs and masturbation first, and then a very stale-seeming riff on the various shortcomings of Jews. Josh London, who seems to have lots of friends in the audience, lets fly a jaw-droppingly tasteless bit about his sister diagnosing his…don’t read the rest of this unless you want to laff yourself unconscious!... “sweaty balls syndrome.”

The appealingly lower-key Adam Waldron demonstrates some good timing, and has a funny line about berating someone whose job it is to hold up an advertising placard for having “a job dirt can do.” But then, before, and after, losing his place and musing, “What the fuck else do I want to do?” he tells Star Wars jokes. In 2008. And wants us to laugh at the idea of his cutting off his own penis.

Right about now, the idea of a conceptual standup like the Doug Gordon-created Angus MacAbre, Scotland’s funniest zombie comedian, purveyor of undeadpan humor, begins to sound pretty appealing, but we get more of the same, in the form of Janesville’s own Nick Lynch, who evokes only scattered obliging titters as he disparages Wisconsin’s tax on tobacco. Then it gets even worse, with a lame and tasteless bit about child molestation that we are no doubt meant to perceive as “edgy” but which we find inexpressibly “obnoxious.”
The minute hand of the clock seems motionless during the performance of Steve Purcell, a fat Wisconsinite who seems to believe that being a fat Wisconsinite is inherently amusing. He tells far too many pot and blowjob jokes, but has a good line about the value of his car doubling when he fills it with gasoline, and the audience seems to enjoy his bit about one-hole balls being favored by gay bowlers, even though it doesn’t withstand a millisecond’s scrutiny.

In his very long headlining set, local boy made good Randy Chestnut, an actual touring comedian, hits every notch on our scale between around 2 and 7. Wonderfully, he notes the existence of what he calls Dairy Tourette’s, sufferers from which blab implacably about cheese at the mere mention of Wisconsin. He speaks of having studied his family’s genealogy, and learned that he’s one-quarter gay on his mother’s side.

Savvy Veteran that he is, he has it both ways with a joke that, handled less masterfully, might have gotten him drummed out of the Corps of Comics. He assures us he doesn’t deal in the sort of humor he immediately proceeds to deal in, relating the story of the gay fellow who fucked an alligator and wound up with GatorAIDs. He deploys his physicality deftly, breaking (as he blurts out the awful punch line) into the sort of spazzy dance the sort of riff-raff who would actually tell such a joke might do. His gift for physicality comes again to the fore as he envisions earthquakes being the planet’s way of telling us, “Get the fuck off me!” For once, the fuck feels ungratuitous.

He speaks of the Leviticus definition of a threesome — a man and two women — and cites the one great thing he’s done with his own life that Jesus didn’t: turn 34. But after an excruciating George W. Bush impression that might be too highbrow for his audience, he promises more dick jokes, and they’re no less obnoxious than anyone else’s. The one about his hoping that an ex-girlfriend who conversed with his dick would get into an argument with it, and that it would come to blows, isn’t worthy of the Klinic’s dishwasher, and his bit about how you can tell much more easily when a man, getting fellated, ejaculates than when a woman is being cunnilingled is redeemed only by his remarkable microphone technique.
He then lets fly a virtuoso, intricately written, joke about how many Democrats it takes to screw in a light bulb, but the audience doesn’t have the attention span for it, and it’s back to playing (metaphorically!) with his own feces.