Bad Moon Risin'
Saturday, April 2, 2005-12:57 P.M. CST
Reporting from Merrillville, Indiana, deep in the heart of Chicagoland and the home of the Wisecrackers Comedy Club, situated in the beautiful Raddison Star Plaza Hotel, I can say that April Fool's Day was a red-letter day for comedians. Maybe it was a full moon, or a dead moon, I don't know
After conversations with a few of my comedy buddies, it seems as though we all went through several rings of Hell last night in our comedy lives. I won't bother intimating others' stories, I will regale you only with my own.
First show, 8:00 PM, was a complete debacle, the likes of which I have never seen before. The recipe for disaster started with a table of four, seated directly in front of the stage, who were celebrating a birthday by one of the young ladies (O.K., she wasn't that young) by drinking like there was no tomorrow. They kibitzed, harangued, interrupted, heckled, offered assides, and generally stopped me from doing my job all through my 30-minute set. I usually don't mind the hecklers, as I take pleasure in destroying them (as most comics do), but I was being interrupted during the set-ups to my jokes....just blatantly disrespectful behavior, not unlike going to the movies, sitting way up high in the raked auditorium, and putting your hand in front of the projector. George Carlin calls it "theft of services," and for the 100 give-or-take a few people in the club, services were being thefted at a remarkable rate.
Cut to Chris "Boom Boom" Johnson, my partner in crime this week, and a very funny headliner. He lasted less than a minute with heckle girl before he really started laying into her. He then proceded to collect money from the audience to refund her table their admissions...$40 would have covered it, he got $47 and gave them the $40 and left $7 for the poor waitress (who in all honesty, was probably guilty of over-serving the table....get that, establishment owners and liquor license holders....there's a concept called OVER SERVING) and then security escorted them out to a chorus of cheers by the rest of the audience. After the show, we were regaled with drinks, hugs and love, and sold quite a bit of our souvenir merchandise. It was the single most bizarre show I had ever been involved with. Truthfully, and a quick perusal of my earlier journal entries will bear this out, I have never really had a fun time at this club, and I'm beginning to understand why. The club management really doesn't manage the club, they manage the admissions and the drinks. The rest of the show is a fuck-fest of do-whatever-you-want and damn the consequences. And as a frustrate performer, who exactly do I complain to? The booker? The Food and Beverage Director of the hotel? The club manager? Any one of these routes will certainly do nothing except insure that I never play the club again. Which begs the question, actually....do I really want to play the club again? I guess I'm the eternal optimist, who believes that over time, things will improve. And yet, in four years that I've been performing at this club, they really haven't improved. The crowd is red-necky and uncontrolled, and the club staff really don't agressively try to reign them in at all.
Exhibit B, just to prove that I'm not making a mountain out of a molehill here, was the second show last night. A large, bald-headed gentleman who I picked on a little bit (he had it coming....he was ordering drinks like he was at a Cubs playoff game) had to use the bathroom, so he left the showroom. Instead of going down one floor to where the men's room was, he went upstairs and pissed in the stairwell. The urine then proceded to leak down the stairs to where the crowd would exit (luckily there was another exit that they were directed to) AND THE GUY WASN'T ASKED TO LEAVE! THEY KNEW IT WAS HIM, AND THEY LET HIM STAY AND ENJOY THE REST OF THE SHOW!
Now, I may just be a simple teller of jokes, but I know how many fingers make ten, and those ten fingers should have grabbed this guy by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants, and slid him out of the club like shit through a goose. Instead, they gave him a V.I.P. card and served him some more drinks. Outrageous. I understand why comics who have been in the game for 20 years or more always tell me that they want to open their own club....they're sick and tired of seeing clubs run poorly (or not at all!) and want to do it "the right way." It's actually very simple; provide adequate sound and lights, play music in the showroom before and after the show to provide some sort of ambiance, treat your guests well and don't allow them to get belligerent or to interrupt the show, first with a gentle reminder, then a firmer gesture,and finally with ejection. It is disrespectful to the guests who know how to come out and have a good time (AND SPEND MONEY!!!!) to allow any one person or small group of persons to ruin it for everyone else.
Also, treating the comics a bit nicely doesn't hurt either....we're not Lippizaner Stallions that have to brushed for three hours and fed rose petals, but offer us a sandwich or a cocktail on the house, for God's sake. We're not an interruption of your job, we're your partner for the week! We do the show, you serve the food and drinks, the customers have a nice evening of entertainment, and everyone profits. Is that so hard?
And then White Castle fucked up my drive-through order. The only thing worse than shitty food is shitty wrong food.
O.K., I've vented, and now I am purged. Dammit!
Ralph Tetta
Rochester, NY
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