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Picture of Jon Fox with his checkbook open tomorrow.
Thanks to everyone!
]]>The only viable reason I have for telling “The Truth” is to keep me out of the back of a squad car. Everything else that comes out of my mouth is a translation of facts and occurrences designed to land the things I want from minute to minute; booze, girlfriends, car rides and Milky Way candy bars. Every good story needs some extra juice to distract you from whatever my hidden agenda is (in this case, to get you to read and subscribe to my Boozecoma Humor Blog http://boozecoma.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/how-to-read-an-online-job-posting and as the winner of The Seattle International Comedy Competition http://seattlecomedycompetition.com/winners.php as well as 2 time host and emcee of the contest, I have several tales that I tell about my experiences that have augmented from actual occurrence to showstopper story. Here are some of the stories followed by what is most likely recorded on the police report.
Interview With A Vampire:
Story-
H. Clay Jones was the Seattle Comedy Competition’s minister of cool in addition to being an important part of the operational machine running the contest. Mr. Jones is also a card-carrying vampire http://vampireadvice.com .
]]> H. and I were out one night after the contest’s early rounds and were able to con 2 girls into taking us back to their apartment using the vampire angle in addition to the normal M.O. of Irish Car Bombs http://irishcarbomb.com and Senior level bullshit. Once there we were treated to a heinous buzz killing parade of Duran Duran albums and Chi Chi’s margarita mix. Somehow we had to cut the cord on the slumber party and get on to “Fuck Street.” I pointed at the clock and said we need to get down to business before H. Clay turned to stone at sunrise and became too heavy to move. I am not sure if it was the threat of heavy lifting or the fear of not getting their deposit back, but I have never seen panties hit the floor that fast. We were able to contain our laughter until we sped away from this caper less than an hour later.Truth-
H. Clay Jones is indeed a vampire. After drinking in various bars around Seattle, H. Clay and I got some late night breakfast. Checking the time, I remarked “The sun’s coming up. Do we need to go before you turn to stone?”
Movin’ On
Story-
After breezing through the first round of the Seattle International Comedy Competition, the second round proved to be more of a challenge. The 1st night of round 2 I was lost on stage and barely made the minimum time by 1 second (going under would be the same as going over your time-thus deducting points). I was able to battle my way back to contention but on the 6th and final night of the semi-finals the top 4 spots were all but locked up and your truly was in a rugby scrum with 2 other comics for the final spot the finals. My closest competitor was DJ Hazard
I huddled in the back corner of the Comedy Underground
Truth-
I honestly don’t remember much about that night other than the huddling in the back, as I had stayed out all night drinking in what I thought would be my last night in town. DJ picked up the work 2 days later.
Sweet Connie Doing Her Act
Story-
During the semi-finals we played a show in a Bellingham WA. mall. There was a girl at the show determined to fuck one of the comics that night and she made the rounds trying her luck on each comic. If this was a normal road show and you did not have to face everybody the next day, somebody would have jumped on this train wreck. This was not the case, so everyone was acting non-chalant waiting for chance to break from the pack and add this state to the “special” map that comics keep of road conquests. The passive-aggressive party carried out into the parking lot giving the comic hosting the semi-finals the opportunity to make his move. Before I left the scene I told the host to let me smell his finger the next day and he did me one better by “Jack Horner-ing” this cooze’s
Truth-
That went down pretty much as I explained it. The host’s name was left out to keep him from spending the night sleeping in his car…
Gimme Gimmie Gimmie
Story-
You have no idea how much weight being the Seattle Comedy Competition winner carries. When I arrived in Seattle to host a segment of the competition 2 years ago, I mentioned what I was doing in town to the car rental agent who as it turns out was a comic. He upgraded my bullshit mid-sized rental to a FUCKING MUSTANG! He must have alerted the authorities of my arrival because I blew right past a cop on I-5 doing 110, and he never gave me a second look. I also scored a free bootleg Clash DVD from a Tacoma record store plus never dug into my pocket once for a drink.
Truth-
They were out of the car I rented, the clerk at the record store never looked up from his gaming magazine but I did drive 110 mph past a cop. The cop was going the opposite direction on the other side of the highway and was most likely a security guard.
John McClellan
Coming in for a landing in Seattle
Nice to meet you on the World Wide InterWeb… my name is Steve Stajich and I was honored to win the Seattle Comedy Competition in 1988.
While I believe that you never quite give-up stand-up (more on that in a moment), I did stop performing comedy on stage about ten years ago. So I can’t speak with much authority on the stand-up comedy business right now. I will say that in living in Los Angeles you observe that there are templates in stand-up and comics find their template and pursue it: Edgy guy, likeable guy, actor guy looking to get roles from club sets, guy pretending to have a mental problem but not really, and so forth. Female comics now seem to have greater latitude in presenting a persona than they did during the so-called “boom” years, but you’d have to talk to them about whether it’s still more difficult to be a female comic.
]]> It seems that all the appealing features of being a stand-up have remained the same. I don’t mean the life on the ‘road’ dimensions, with dial settings varying from “Frank Sinatra” to “I think that shit just caused my heart to stop beating.” Although there’s a rich education to be had from those aspects of comic life. But what drew me to stand-up was that a person could aspire to write funny ideas that became a show or “set” and then present that little production with almost nothing between you and the audience’s reaction. If you do stand-up and have a gift for it, it can take you all around the world and land you in some wonderful places. One of those, for me, was the 1988 Seattle competition.Every generation will likely testify that theirs was the best time to do whatever it was they did. Pre-“boom” comics reflect nostalgically on doing sets during the days of Lenny Bruce, or working tiny clubs where they opened for Bob Dylan or Joan Rivers with her original face. But that said, I think it was definitely easier and faster to become a stand up during the post-cable TV ‘boom’ of the late 80’s and 90’s than it is right now and in those ways anyhow… better.
Maybe stand-up is more regimented now (see “templates”) but today a comic with something truly fresh and original might go further because everybody, including the public, is less enamored of the craft itself. Today you can’t buy a pile of sweaters and immediately start middling at the nearly 470,000 Funny Bones that were built following the Funny Bone Act of 1985, which stipulated that every shopping mall in America must have a room filled with plastic chairs pointed at a microphone. Some towns would work around the comedy regulations and use the rooms for AA meetings and cattle auctions.
I spoof, I kid… but in reality those rooms provided much needed work-out space. Of course there are far fewer rooms now, following the “Repeal of the Funny Bone Act-Act” of 2005. Stage time, especially with a civilian audience and not a room filled with other comics waiting to perform, seems harder to come by now.
Moments ago I mentioned having a “gift.” I mean this only from a technical standpoint, as one would concede that it takes a special skill set to be a dentist or Rush Limbaugh. During the “boom” I think there were a lot of people out on the road who were looking to find themselves rather than work on any particular honing of craft. It was easier to follow a comic on stage that was earnestly looking to improve and grow than one who was trying to overcome a failed marriage. It’s something any person can observe on “Open Stage” night about the allure of being the center of attention in a room with a working microphone in your hand.
The contest process, especially as the Seattle competition was structured at that time, became an effective way to get comics in touch with their gift or their search for it. Thus did Seattle become a key moment for me because, much as I didn’t expect to share anything really personal here… man, I wanted to win that thing. While I didn’t realize it at the time, I needed a process that confirmed I had a gift and that I had the right to be out deploying it despite the concerns of loved ones and the IRS. That’s not a blanket endorsement of all contests for comedy. For example, the TV show “Last Comic Standing” cultivates a certain kind of presentation which leads to some very generic comics being involved. And I’m not sure I’d want to compete in the Funniest Person in Waco Contest, or any town you’d care to insert there.
Ultimately, I think a good stand-up wants to ‘win’ every set they do. Unfortunately, the means is often adjusted to fit the end and that can lead to a lot of profanity and sexual banality and perhaps one gets “results” but… what did you use for ammo? Still, comics must want to excel at every single show. In that way a contest, even one stretching over weeks… is really one long show looming large. And because of the scope of it, you can really get in touch with exactly what you want to present on stage and how you want to do it. My hesitations about the process stated, I would say comics should get involved in a contest but use it all as a forge to hammer out what you ultimately want to do on stage. Don’t let the contest tell you what to be or what to present, with the possible exception of trimming your hilarious colonoscopy bit.
Since I have nothing to gain by kissing up 21 years later, let me thank the Fox’s for running a great event that mattered very much to me. Let me again thank Rod Long for the night he talked me back into the contest when I thought I couldn’t hack it. Everyone in the Seattle event in 1988 had been so nice and so open and so mutually supportive that I actually felt bad that we couldn’t somehow spread the final result around a little more. Winning meant taking something away from these other talented people. Even the newspaper reporter that wrote about it for the next day’s edition was a really nice guy who was generous to me in his articles. It seems contradictory that a contest can be a warm memory, but Seattle was.
Buoyed by my victory, I took out a big ad in the Fox’s comedy newspaper and it was sweet when that big ego stroke hit the streets. I headlined more clubs after winning, although I have a good friend who firmly believes that being the middle act is the best job in club comedy. Your results may vary, but I think he’s right.
After Seattle, comic (and later “Seinfeld” writer) Carol Leifer contacted me about coming to New York to write content for a show she was hosting on VH-1. Dude, I was now a TV writer living in Manhattan! Allow Grandpa to effuse that it was totally cool. As I said, you can land in some wonderful places. Writing eventually led to Los Angeles and cable led to network… and I’m happy to say that, for the most part, I could keep the jobs coming back-to-back. A year on the staff of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” caused me to think that there might be a third act for me that was somehow more literary. That led to my current phase of writing for theater and contributing an op-ed column to the Santa Monica Mirror every week since 2002.
As I said earlier, I don’t think you ever really quit being a stand-up. Like me, you can stop doing ‘sets’ in clubs. But the urge will manifest itself at any time: You do a tight five at the Thanksgiving dinner table, then the pie comes out and closes.
What can go away at some point, assuming that everything on board your psychological boat is properly fastened down… is the need to do stand-up. For me, stand-up was a wonderful way to get paid to write comedy. When I found ways to accomplish that without three sets on Saturday night, I moved in that direction. For others, performing live may be the ultimate buzz and I can easily understand that addiction.
I loved stand-up and enjoy seeing someone new on late night TV who is sharp and interesting. But my theater experiences have caused me to look for some new form of stand-up presentation that avoids the usual business of mugging and making funny gestures and having the audience accept your physical presence. Right now I’m exploring some way of doing stand-up where I’m never seen by the audience, without putting a paper bag on my head. I’m interested in what happens if you just present the material without having to run it through the filter of how much the audience likes your face or your personality. Of course not wanting to face the audience probably speaks volumes about my “personality”… don’t you think, Dr. Phil?
But none of that--if it works--will alter the fact that even after a nuclear or ozone-related flattening of the earth’s surface, there will still be somebody trying to do time in front of a group of raggedy and starving people who likely got into the fire circle with “twofer” passes handed out by the fire circle manager. Hopefully, the Fire Circle Comedy Competition will leave everyone involved with great memories of the kind I have from Seattle in 1988.
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If you win the Seattle International Comedy Competition, you can use it for the rest of your life as your intro at comedy shows. I recommend writing it out for the MC like this: "He also won the PRESTIGIOUS Seattle International Comedy Competition..." Crowds will respect you more if they really emphasize the "prestigious" part.
I put it on my resume, too. I'm not sure if it helped me get all the commercials I do (check out http://www.facebook.com/l/7bef5; www.RonOsborne.com
As a matter of fact, I wouldn't doubt if the title directly contributed to my being cast in this swell new cartoon:
And I am sure winning it had nothing to do with my Grampa's recent illness.
bill radke--champion 1992
Two favorite SCC memories:
1) Watching Patton Oswalt abandon his act and goof throught the entire set and still be funnier than any of us, and I'm thinking some day this guy will be a famous French rat.
2) Coming from behind on the last night to make the cometition finals and driving in circles around a Bellingham mall parking lot, whooping it up.
Still miss it.
By Heidi Hoffman, Herald photographer
And then there were five.
More than 30 comedians stood up and went down during the past month of preliminaries for the 30th Annual Seattle International Comedy Competition in venues all over the region, including the Historic Everett Theatre on Nov. 7.
We don't usually comment here on the judging, but tonight the audience and judges were definitely not marching in lockstep, most noticeably when crowd favorite Jose Sarduy was announced in 5th place. Of course, the audience doesn't know that scores often come down to hundredths of a point, since they are only privy to the ordinals and not the cardinals.
When all was said and done, Rodger Lizaola, a San Francisco Comedy Competition finalist earlier this year, grabbed his first first-place finish of either event's final round.
1. Rodger Lizaola 2. Travis Simmons 3. Sean Kent 4. Paul Hooper 5. Jose Sarduy
That means the big Final-Final at the Moore will bring big drama. BIG. Be there.
Rodger "the missing Mario brother" Lizaola
]]>The audiences are red-hot. And this sold-out house was no exception
The brilliant David Crowe ("Crooked Finger," Showtime) hosted, warming things up almost instantaneously in the opening segment, after the intermission, and everywhere in between. And the Finalists kept it up, rocking it, baby, all night long.
As if that wasn't enough we were treated to a closing set by Emmy-winning comic Rick Overton, currently appearing as Pam's dad on "The Office."
And the results were completely different from the previous two night of finals, which means that these last two shows are critically important.
Continuing what has been emerging as a pattern, Paul Hooper went from 5th on Wednesday to 1st tonight; 2nd was Jose Sarduy, duplicating his second-place finish from Wednesday, but who also finished 5th on Tuesday. Travis Simmons, breaking the streak of opening comic finishing last, came in 3rd, to go with his 1st place and 4th place finishes; Sean Kent was 4th, after finishing 2 and 1 the first two night; Rodger Lizaola, always the most consistent, was 5th tonight, following 4th and 3rd place.
That's why we call it a contest.
"Behold the glory that stands before you."
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Nov 17 2009, 12:03 PM · UPDATED
Vashon Theatre will be the site of a fierce and funny contest next week, when the annual Seattle International StandUp Comedy Competition returns to the Island for one of the final rounds in a month-long search for its top comic of 2009.
http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/vashon/vib/entertainment/70297147.html
]]>Back to good news. Show was great; theater owners Eileen and Gordon Wollcott and daughter Raechel were in remarkable spirits considering, and the audience, like always on Vashon Island, roared with laughter from beginning to end.
And among the judges - Islanders (and new parents) Alex "Lois Griffin" Borstein and hubby Jackson "Gilmour Girls" Douglass. Yay!
The scoring was almost Biblical - the first shall be fourth and the last shall be second, or something like that.
1. Sean Kent 2. Jose Sarduy 3. Rodger Lizaola 4. Travis Simmons 5. Paul Hooper
About 3 years ago they built a stage set for us, looks like a brick building exterior complete with street lamps. You kinda expected Tom Waits to appear.
The blue bloods seemed surprisingly partial to somewhat bluer material. Who knew?
Anyway, the judges saw it like this: 1. Travis Simmons 2. Sean Kent 3. Paul Hooper 4. Rodger Lizaola and 5. Jose Sarduy
Sean Kent won the "WAC Choice" award. Take that as you will.
]]>And any of the others had a shot. They had to jump up; and in fact, any two who were trailing could have made it in, assuming Rodger Lizaola had an off-night and dropped down.
But that's not how it played out. Rodger took second for the night, leaving one spot open. Derick Lengwenus had a great set, bringing out possibly the world's greatest Kevin Spacey impression, which was good enough for 5th place; Steve Monroe, in 5th overall going into the night, was only awarded 7th.
That left the door open for Hooper, whose performance was not wildly different from any of his previous shows - other than the fact the judges were in full agreement with the audience.
For the night! L-R: Duane Goad (host), Rodger Lizaola (2nd), Paul Hooper (1st), Travis Simmons (3rd), Jose Sarduy (4th), and Derick Lengwenus (5th)
The finalists:L-R: Duane Goad (host), Travis Simmons (2nd), Jose Sarduy (1st), Sean Kent (3rd), Rodger Lizaola (4th) and Paul Hooper (5th).
Photos: Peter Greyy