That's What I'm talking About

As I've mentioned before, I have a soft spot for the late night comedians who can handle it well.  Of course, my  all-time favorite is Don Barris, who can handle everyone from the obnoxious drunks to the dead quiet stone-faced crowds and somehow manages to make The Barris Kennedy Overdrive bit entertaining over and over again.  But there's a lot of other guys giving a good go of it.

Now, I should mention, there's really two types of late night crowds that I've encountered.  There's the mid-week and there's the weekend.  At 12:15 on a Wednesday night, there's usually about 4 guys left, and they're always foreigners, usually from some random place like Finland or Estonia.  They are sitting pretty close to the front, so you know they've been there since the start.  I suspect that their guidebooks told them to visit The World Famous Comedy Store and since they aren't American, they're just too polite to just get up and go back to their hotel before the official end.  And occasionally there are the obnoxious drunks (and occasionally I am those obnoxious drunks), but usually only one or two.  And this Tuesday, there were two super bitchy, super drunk Australian chicks by the time Sam Tripoli took the stage.  Now, I'll be honest, I've seen Tripoli perform at least twice before and have no memory of it.  I blame this on The Stripcrawl and too many bullets at The Sunset Trocadero, respectively, and not Tripoli being an unmemorable comic, because he is freaking hilarious and had complete control of the room from start to finish, including repeatedly putting the worse of the two Aussie chicks in her place - a very satisfying thing for the rest of us audience members to watch.

In contrast to that was the 12:30 set I saw from Mike Young on Friday Thursday (yeah, yeah, I'm there all the freakin time, I can't tell one day from another without fact-checking against my twitter feed) night.  That shit went right off the rails.   Because a weekend crowd is different - it has a LOT of drunks.  It's got folks that got drunk here, it's got folks that got drunk somewhere else, it's got folks that got so drunk they still think they are somewhere else.  And on Saturday night, it had one of the painted girls from The Playboy Mansion.  Nick Youssef had just gone up and had tried to do a little crowd work, but most everyone left had been there from the start and had already been worked over by Chris D'Elia about two hours earlier and apparently didn't want to let Nick go in on them again.  So Nick valiantly powered through with the one amenable crowd guy, did a bunch of his regular act and threw in some (I assume only half-)jokes about how shitty it is to have the late night spot.


So when Mike got up, he mostly just launched straight into his actual act, which was pretty funny.  And then one girl in the back got kind of mouthy and was doing that thing where she thought the act was a conversation with her personally (Yes, Kettle, this is the Pot calling) so Mike just asks exasperatedly, "Would you like to just come up here and use the microphone to say stuff?" and she squealed and hopped right up.  And then it just turned into a crazy, half-stripping, bills-raining party onstage.  But really, that was the best course of action at that point, so bravo Mike!