During the standup boom of the late 1980s and early ’90s, my parents constantly dragged my older brother and me to comedy clubs around the country. I was awfully young at the time, but many clubs would admit underage patrons if they were accompanied by an adult. We were in love with Eddie Murphy, Steven Wright and the cable special “Women of the Night” and perhaps my parents saw all this as viable entertainment for two boys who were years away from turning 18. I still remember a comic at Dangerfield’s in New York doing an impression of “Cheers” mailman character Cliff Clavin and feeling like I was in the presence of a celebrity when we bumped into that comic days later.
Memories like that one bubbled to the surface this week when Louis CK wrote e-mails and online posts to fans to both apologize for a recent cancellation at Madison Square Garden due to the snowstorm and to announce the release of his latest album “Live at the Comedy Store.”
In one, he wrote a love letter of sorts to comedy clubs. He described them as the places where comedy is born and where comedy, standup comedy, truly lives “where comedy is born and where comedy, standup comedy, truly lives.”
This week on the Chicago standup circuit I bore witness to a night of comedy that was nearly perfect and another that was downright awful thanks to hecklers and it reminded of how much like the Wild West a night at the comedy club can still be.
At “Black Box Comedy” at the WIP Theater in Edison Park Friday night there is heckling the likes of which I rarely see. A Saturday night at 10 p.m. is arguably too early for drunkenness of this sort, but is nevertheless present in the form of a rowdy birthday party front row. They are snapping selfies, interrupting the comics, bossing them around and putting the rest of the room on eggshells while fueling other blowhards in the crowd including one person who keeps shouting, “I paid to see Bill Cosby” and another who loudly drops a gay slur. I wonder, who is the person that ever thinks heckling is a good idea? Their noisy tirades are insults to the comics, an egregious offense to customers who want to be there and paid good money to do so and a headache to the producers, who are apologetic afterward.
To be certain, the WIP is a great space for standup. The room is outfitted with flickering candles and bistro tables and is as comfortable as a Zanies or the Laugh Factory. Likewise, Edison Park is a great neighborhood.
But the real insult to injury is that in dismissing the comedians, the hecklers missed out on some really great jokes. There was Mathias Muschal who spun a funny yarn about being sent to a Mexican grocery store by his girlfriend to find vegan chorizo. “I see pork, chicken, beef and [finally] soy chorizo,” says Muschal. “But that’s just Spanish for I am chorizo.” There is feature comic Justin Golak who has this one about winter: “We’re in the part of the year now where if you don’t do a major hallucinogen, you’re not going to see a bright color until May.” Lastly, there is headliner Jeff Steinbrunner who has a very funny joke about working out. You know those wristwatches that track your mileage while doing cardio? Steinbrunner says he pleasured himself 7.5 miles last week.
It’s a shame these great jokes are lost on all but about 10 of us in the room.
But on Thursday at “Stand Up, Stand Up” at the Crocodile in Wicker Park there is a live album recording for Mikey Manker’s new album “Idiot” and it’s a window inside the magic that can happen inside a comedy club when the comic is at the top of his game and the room is fully engaged.
Manker, dressed in blue jeans and a fitted, black V-neck T-shirt, looks almost too clean-cut to be telling misanthropic tales of drunkenness and debauchery, of flunking out of the 8th grade and of hating on children. But Manker is putting on a real show tonight. He’s tonally perfect, loose and limber and the audience is eating right out of his hands. Even his one-liners kill: “I’ll never do heroin because I only have like one belt,” he says.
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To be certain, live album recordings often involve the gathering of friendly faces and Manker has a congenial room. But to any comic who is ever heckled I hope they can find solace not only in CK’s evaluation of comedy clubs as a necessary place to practice craft even though as he says, “It’s late at night [and] no one is being responsible,” but also of their value to someone like me whose first impression of a comedy club more than two-and-a-half decades ago was that of a place where magic happened onstage. “We go to a comedy club and pay a bit of money to laugh harder than we ever do anywhere else,” says CK. Isn’t that the truth?