Tuesday, September 16, 2003  

Nude Comedy Roundup or How I Got Naked in Some Man's Basement For Free Booze and Hummus

You would think that a road story that begins with "So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me" would get pretty juicy pretty fast. You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. I thought so...hell, that's why I agreed to do a free spot on the Naked Comedy Show. I got such good mileage out of the time I got a little naked on stage, I figured that if I got all the way naked, I'd have a bit of Hunter Thompsonian proportions.

I was wrong. Who knew?

So there I was, in some hippie's basement, naked except for my little white bootie socks and drinking cut rate whiskey from a plastic pint bottle while the MC introduced me. There were about 45 people crammed into the basement of a house in Newton, theoretically a staid, white-bread community where things like this simply do not go on. No one in Newton would be crazy enough to let naked people sit on their white carpet, would they? Oh, yes they would, brother. Oh yes they would. A local comic had promised these people a naked comedy show, and they were there to collect. Luckily, they'd let us decline coming to the naked potluck beforehand. Conventional comic wisdom is to never eat with your crowd before a show, and this was definitely not the night to break that rule.

And then BAM, I'm out the door and onto the stage, facing a sea of people ranging from fully nude to fully clothed, and righteously fine to astoundingly lumpy. Two men in Speedos are spooning to the left of me, a good looking woman in a sports bra is sacked out to the right, and three naked comics stand in the back of the room to watch me face down a demon. Let's put it right out there. If I liked how I look naked, I wouldn't even have to DO stand-up comedy. With the exception of ages 1-6 and a pretty sweet senior year in college, I've always had the kind of body that makes a guy develop a good pesonality pretty fucking fast. It's basic psychology that comedians become comedians because of something bad in their past. Mine was how I looked in Levi 501s in the ninth grade.

So I don't want to get all Rudy about it, but suffice it to say that it took some balls for me to do it. I didn't really have a choice. Given the opportunity, I'll yak your ear off for an hour about how standup comedy is the purest form of performance art. How there are no barriers and how only a comic can really connect with a crowd. So when the chance to strip away the last few barriers arose, I realized that I'd pontificated myself into a corner, and so dammit, here I was in a psychologically significant and truly fucking horrible situation.

And I don't know why or how, but it was the most engaged 25 minutes I've ever spent on stage. Period. I was jacked right into that crowd, and the laughs came as easy as breathing. We were in that perfect comedy rhythm, and I think I could have stopped talking entirely and still kept on getting them, because we were just riding that real comedy wave together. I don't know if it was being naked, or facing a fear, or having a room full of freethinkers, or if I just got lucky, but it was a great...GREAT...night of comedy. Hell, we even got to hot tub afterwards and finish the leftovers from the potluck.

I ate some hummus, soaked in the jacuzzi, and I even treated myself to a Kentucky Cheroot for the ride home. I had a happy skinbuzzy kind of feeling on, so I rolled down the window and just cranked up the music. The radio was playing David Bowie, and you don't exactly have to be a shaman to understand that that's one of the universe's fundamental ways of telling you you've just done the right thing.