24th Jan 2007
Elizabeth Spiers: Standup Comedy Sensation
This week is “Go See Friends Do Standup Comedy Week.” There is doubtless a joke somewhere in the concept of going to see friends do standup routines. I like live comedy, but it’s a hard sell to get other friends to go see it with you. Up there with karaoke. There are those who do and those who don’t. When I invited a friend to see the Upright Citizens Brigade recently, she was dubious, saying, “The only comedy I’ve seen recently is friends who begged me to come see their act, and then they weren’t very good. What are you supposed to say?” Exactly.
Two weeks ago a group of colleagues and I went to see the amateur improv stylings of our workmate “Downtown” Jacob Brown. We had so much fun with our pre-show warm-up drinks at a nearby bar that when we arrived 15 minutes late for his show, the unprecedented happened: an amateur improv comedy show was sold out! I guess the laugh was on us. (Oh, come on, I’m sure that wasn’t the only laugh.) So we’re recommitted for this Thursday. Sober. We’re practicing our heckles. (”Booooo! Your spreadsheets are funnier than that joke!”)
Tonight, however, was the standup debut of dear friend Elizabeth Spiers, of one-time Gawker fame, and more recently of her own commercial blog empire including Dealbreaker, AboveTheLaw and, as of an hour or so ago, Fashionista. To my relief, as I told her after the show, “Thank God, you didn’t suck!” Seriously, not to damn with faint praise, she was quite funny and had the audience with her the whole routine (which was more than at least one other comic could say). Of course, it is no surprise to me that she is funny. In person, very deadpan but always on, and in her writing she may as well have invented snarky. But standup was a new form. No quite sure how she got roped into it, but she nailed it, mostly working with material of her incongruous Southern Baptist childhood.
The venue was a new club with an old-skool cabaret ambiance literally around the corner from my office, Comix. Strangely the menu had many more Comix than the stage had comics: a third of the menu items were dubbed Comix (because it’s funnier with an “x”) this or that food item, such as “Comix fries” (a virtual laugh riot of fried potato strips), while all but one of the five acts in the evening’s line-up were in fact humor writers but not standup comics. The one exception was Jessi Klein, who was quite hilarious (especially her routine as Andrew Dice Clay’s little sister). David Rakoff was characteristically dry as cremation ash in ripping on Rent; Jonathan Ames killed with a story of his small teenage penis, plus Monica Lewinsky ogling a sausage at Veselka ; spunky/scary host Catie Lazarus kept things humming with stories of failed relationship and clips of on-the-street Dr. Lazurus videos (yikes); and the other comic, not so much.
After party with NY bloggerati, including Alex Balk, Lindsay Robertson, Mark Graham, Kambri Crews, and others at Pop Burger.
The evening almost ended with a dance-off between me and some attention-starved hottie at the bar who kept busting a conspicuous grove thing to every weak-ass hip hop song that came on, but thankfully the DJ couldn’t be bothered to play my requested funktastic dance anthem, Flashlight. Just as well. One threat of comic disaster among friends per night is plenty.
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