A Night Out with the Laughing Devil

On Saturday, I decided that I needed to get out and about after a bit too much time in libraries. During the day I went on a tour of 19th century Irish New York (think of Michael Scorcese's Gangs of New York - though don't believe it). It was very good though the weather was as Irish as the theme - it was pouring with rain.

In the evening I decided to go to the local comedy club, suspiciously named the Laughing Devil. Basically a big corridor with the comedians standing in the middle, with their back to the wall and people on either side. Only about 40 seats, but seven comedians who each have 10-15 minutes to impress or die. This is not the smooth packaged comedy of TV or even most comedy festivals. Some of the comedians have made TV (a couple of them on ‘The Last Comic Standing’) but at The Laughing Devil on Long Island City on a Saturday night, they are trying things out, working the audience, looking for something different, hoping it will work out. Someone like me – white, old with grey hair – is always a target and in Auckland, it would be unusual for me not to get picked off. No difference here – apart from anything else I’m the only person by themselves – but they find it hard to know quite what to do with me. ‘You look like a retired art teacher’ (I tell them I’m a not-retired history teacher – it’s a lot easier than saying you’re a Deputy Vice Chancellor at AUT in New Zealand). They’re interested in where I’m from and one decides that Britain + New Zealand equals Australia. Are you married, where’s your wife, do you have children. But unlike British comedians they don’t have the malice to make much of that (the Brits are quite keen of ridiculing ‘poor old duffers’). 

But these comics also have better targets. The audience is their main prompt and the audience knows it. It starts off at the beginning when the compere introduces himself as Alexis and someone shouts, ‘that’s a girl’s name’. The audience settles in for the fun. As the evening goes on, the comedians unearth a goldmine of opportunities. The English couple where the guy is looking to show what an idiot he is – 'all Englishmen use Brut after shave he says' (inaccurately) – ‘that’s disgusting’ says the comic suggesting that Brut is made of various bodily substances and the man is lucky to have a woman of any sort. The woman meanwhile falls asleep – ‘she’s been drinking since lunchtime the husband says’. ‘I can’t blame her’ says the comedian. The couple who have been together for nine years which the woman looks pleased about and the man not; the mixed race couple who are hilariously happy to share their experiences of coping with cross-racial matrimony; the two Mexican diplomats from the United Nations (honest) who claimed to be rich and who looked like a good opportunity for the 36 year old, broke, suicidal woman comic who is searching, she said, for a ‘sugar daddy’ (‘you start life alone and you end it alone’ she says, adding: ‘me, I’m also spending the middle part alone’); the couple to whom one comedian says ‘you’re obviously a mixed generation marriage – what’s the age difference, 30 years’? ‘We’re both 26’ they say. ‘You must be working hard’ the comic tells the man).  But the show takes off when a late-arriving, cell phone using (the ultimate sin in a comic show) black couple take on the headline act, a black guy. He comes from the more energetic end of comic activity and seems to be looking for something to get him going, possibly a fight – ‘this is the only job where you can’t get sacked, whatever you do’, he says – and he finds what he wants when the woman and he get into something about aids. As it develops, she shouts 'you’re a racist fucker'. He’s said that there has been no aids in the US since Magic Johnson (presumably a joke) and has started on about aids in Africa. ‘There’s no aids in Africa, you’re just a racist’ she continues. This somehow spins off into her racism about Chinese and the audience waits to see where this going to go. In the end nowhere, as he realises that it’s stopped being funny, so he heads back to safer territory. 

The styles were very different – the downbeat newcomer who bemoaned how his degree in Greek and Latin had not prepared himself for any life other than as a stand up, and then quickly realised it hadn’t prepared him for that either, and shot off the stage. The existentially angsted thirty year olds, addicted to the scene but living an on edge life (or so they would have us believe) of crappy apartments, booze and meth, sexual frustration and failure; the young guy whose combustibility and excitement were either induced by chemicals or genius, or both; and then the man from Ohio who works in a department store and talked about his mother and who probably was surprised to find himself at the Laughing Devil in Long Island City.

This is not your smooth, sharp packaging, form of stand-up, carefully planned and scripted, with the odd diversion, and due out in video. The audiences and the comics will be circulating round the clubs, so each appearance must have something new. It’s probably where most comics start. So I’m not sure it was the funniest comedy show I ever went to, but it was probably the most interesting.