Monday, August 15, 2005  

Dog Days

I've been up against it this summer. Humid, hot days that grind a man down, and sweaty nights that sit on your chest like a heart attack. There have been no updates because there have been no shows. The book was light to begin with, but even those few dropped out and fell away as one spineless club owner after another blinked, gave into the hot crazies, and decided they just couldn't take the chance. It's the same every year. The conventional wisdom is that crowds are light in the summer because people are out doing happy summertime things, but the conventional wisdom is wrong. The truth, and you know this in your bones, is that nothing's funny in July. The sun bakes the joy right out of you, and the only thing worse than watching some jolly asshole in a comedy club is being some jolly asshole in a comedy club.

So we Professional Comics hunker down in our comedy bunkers and drink from our emergency stash as we ride out yet another New England summer. Picture your favorite comic in a dirt-walled storm cellar, barely visible under the light of a naked 40-watt bulb, a slippery can of Schlitz clutched in his quivering hand as he crosses another day off a cheesecake calendar, and you'll have a pretty good idea how he spent last month.

Out of the desperation born of 90-degree heat and delirious tremens, I even took a gig in upstate New York. Enemy territory. It was a decent enough club smack in the middle of a desperate little town filled with thrift stores and dive bars. Main Street is lined with second-hand shops. There are easily a dozen of them in a two-block stretch, and the only reasonable conclusion is that this burg's entire economy is based on buying your neighbor's stuff when he panics and sells what he can, knowing the whole time that when you're down the well, the karmic hammer will swing the other way and he'll be buying some of yours. It's a transitory relationship with material goods that's almost Buddhist in nature. These upstate yokels have commoditized poverty. I'm sure the Dalai Lama considers them visionaries, but the Dalai Lama doesn't have to try to make them laugh.

Small towns in New York State take on a different flavor after dark, and if the daylight hours are spent lazily shopping for used sundries, the night time is the right time for drunken brawling and brazen wife-swapping. These people might appear to be run-of-the mill working schlubs in Yankee hats, but when the sun goes down, they metamorph like alcoholic werewolves, quenching their bloodlust with booze and bisexuality. They cram quarters into greasy jukeboxes and load up 70's rock that works on them like Pan's flute. Your humble narrator witnessed a man and two random biker chicks simultaneously make it to third base with his girlfriend on the bar of the comedy club. A veteran of such debauched displays, I kept a cool head and calmly used the distraction to tear up my bar tab for the week and swipe a six pack from the cooler. It's a risk-free caper - no man's going to tear his head out of a bleach blonde's lap to protect the domestic beer. Then I left and went to bed. Let the younger men try to get into a letter to Penthouse; I was on a budget and took what cost-saving moves presented themselves. My rough calculation is that my quick thinking saved me and my family about seventy-five bucks.

This weekend, I'll be at the Comedy Lounge at the Radisson in Hyannis, Massachusetts. I anticipate good shows. While they don't shy away from the alcohol there, this is New England, not New York, and we know how to conduct ourselves. There will be no voyeuristic displays on the bar. There will be, however, a fairly kickass comedy show or two, followed by reasonable consumption of mass-market beer. Summer's almost over; it's time to get our wits about ourselves and get back into the clubs.