The PIT and the Comedy Club

The PIT  (People's Improv Theater) looks like a nightclub when you first walk in.  Spacious, all decked-out in black and red, it boasts a serious-looking bar, lots of mingling room, and an industrial-strength theater in the back.  Its Undergound  (i.e. basement)  space is a bit funkier, and that's where I ended up when I stopped by for "Pen and Pencil," a sketch writing clinic for fledgling comedy writers.

I only wanted to watch and get an idea of what I might be in for when my classes begin next week. The clinic, however, was  in a tiny room with a couple of old couches and a few swivel chairs.  Not an easy place to fade into the woodwork, especially since I was the first one to arrive, aside from the clinician, or "jam meister" as he preferred to be called.

Eventually a couple of genuine participants straggled in, and the room, which had seemed like a third-degree interrogation cell began to feel more like the basement rec rooms of my youth. Both my jam mates had just finished a superhero sketch, apparently a rite de passage of all NYC comedy writing classes. We read the skinny, bearded guy's script aloud. The author played the hero, Captain Compliments, and I got the role of the arch-villain, Professor Sarcasm, ultimately destroyed by the Captain's back-handed compliments.  The jam meister suggested it might work best as a cartoon.  Meanwhile I was freaking out at the possibility that sometime in the next few weeks I might be required to write something just this structured and farcical....

No worries!! The next sketch, submitted by the young, brooding guy who'd been texting up to this point, was an amorphous blob of crazed pornographic genius hot offf the unconscious.  The war for the affections of bisexual women between the super-macho, yet sensitive, hero, JusDaTip, and a race of uberlesbians, who could only be defeated by having period sex with the bi-babes.  He mentioned that his script had offended everyone in his comedy writing class. "Never mind that," the jam meister told him.  "You can't let other people's reactions stop you." WTF!?!  Having just abandoned a corporate cubicle for my comeback, I was awed that in my new world political correctness no longer held sway.

Later that evening I made it over to the Gotham Comedy Club.  A comic, who looked like Woody Allen after a few years of weight training, told a rambling joke about wanting  a  "big-butted  woman" to sit on his face, making his cause of death ASSphyxiation.  A porno shaggy dog story!

Note to Self: All the lines have been erased -- in the new world of comedy, the Aristocrats rule!

Comic Timing

The only problem with being ahead of your time is that when your time finally comes, you're usually out of time. Maybe you've given up or moved on to other things or maybe your inspiration's dried up or your ego's suffered so much forced transcendence that it no longer leaps to grasp the slightest shred of aggrandizement.

Worse yet, when your time does arrive, you're engulfed in the multitude. The ideas and expressions that defined you, gave you unique access to the meaning of the moment and with it the right to be heard, are now in everybody's mind. The things you identified and perceived through an act of creative intuition have progressed to the point where everyone can perceive and understand them.  And you become just another purveyor of the commonplace.

In the old days when I was writing satire, comedy and politics weren't supposed to mix. At least not in anything but tepid one-liners, which took the world at face value, inserted a couple of laughs, and left the sheets unruffled. Using humor to strip the news and the media creating it down to their absurd undergarments was off-limits  -- too heavy or too frivolous depending on which side of the divide you fell on.  It's taken fifteen years of Stewart/Colbert to bring people to the point of accepting without question that the demolition of a politically programmed reality is the highest form of comedy.

Back in those days, there was no solidarity in satire.  Sure, there were a few comedy clubs and irony-tinged theater groups (respectively beset by showbiz and avant-gardism).  But nothing like today's New York, with standup venues and improv theaters on nearly every block, and an entertainment industry insatiable for new stars, scripts and realities to fill the infinite space of cable, internet, and cellular programming.  It seems like we are in a comedy renaissance in this city, having achieved that synergy of underground creativity and mainstream success on which such moments thrive. Or perhaps, and better yet for my purposes, we have already passed the peak of this renaissance:

For I have decided to make my comeback, and this time I will strive to be Behind the Times instead of Before them.