Love On The Air

Love On The Air                               3661

February 25, 2006-11:48 A.M.

What do you do with a bad emcee?  What makes a bad emcee?

In comedy, there's a whole lot of different ways to do the job correctly, and a whole lot more ways to screw it up.  The curse is that for every crop of new comics that springs up month after month, there's a plethora of bad comics that move up to emcee based only on their time in the business, and not for quality or ability.

I'm working with headliner "Chili" Challis at Connxtions Comedy Club in Lansing, Michigan.  It's a good club that's been in business over 20 years.  Our first show was a solid affair, with a crowd of about 150 or more.  The shame was that this boat of a club, established during the comedy boom of the 80's, easily holds 300 or more, and currently, half the room is curtained off as to lessen the visual punch of a room that is mostly empty most of the time.

Chili and I did radio Friday morning, on the "new" 97.5 with Dave and Lisa D.  If that's not a generic radio station, I don't know what is.  I offered to go with Chili, because these morning radio shows can be painful chores, with gagging and puking d.j.'s coughing up fake laughter and expecting you to spit out one-liners like a morning-prep jukebox.  Thankfully, it was anything but the case; whereas most shows give you a couple of minutes to plug the show and burn a few of your best lines, Dave and Lisa actually interviewed us like we were proven commodities, were appreciative of our time, and gave us plenty of air to plead our case for the throngs of central Michigan listeners to come out and enjoy our show.

I wound up getting back to the hotel and sleeping another couple of hours, wasted from getting up early, and also from a head cold which has gripped me and I can't shake.  I togged up and headed out looking for cold medication and lunch.  The cold medication, I found at Wal-Mart, which also gave me a chance to clear out all of the deposit empties from the back seat of my car.  I left the store with a pack of Alka-Seltzer Plus cold liqui-gels, which are not my drug of choice, but the store was sold out of the Sudafed Severe Cold Formula, which in my experience, is the fastest-acting product on the market.  I've taken three doses of the Alka-Seltzer since 3:00 yesterday afternoon, and I've only had small periods of relief from the runny nose, which is the most daunting of my symptoms because you don't want to be wiping your nose on stage (or have watery phlegm run down your lip), and the continuous blowing of my nose has left it red and raw, which isn't a good stage look at all.

For lunch, I happened on an Old Country Buffet and a Chinese Buffet right next to each other, and I opted for the Old Country, just because the sanitation at the average Chinese place is always a crap shoot, no pun intended.  I had a nice meal and then ambled my way back to to the hotel, where I got a couple of hours of sleep in before the 8:00 show.  A hot shower and clean stage clothes were just what the doctor ordered, and although I was a little dried out, causing the occassional speck of white foam to come flying out of my mouth while I was speaking on stage, it was much more desireable than the runny-nose thing.

Our regular emcee for the week isn't here, and hasn't been since Wednesday.  The replacement guy isn't an emcee.  He's got some good material, but no stage presence or ability to exploit the funny lines to their greatest potential.  It's unfortunate, because he's in the wrong position on the show; I actually think the show would be better if I opened, did all my time up front, brought him on as a guest, and then introduced Chili.  The guy would prosper, rather than draw the indifference he's been catching from the audiences so far this week.

When I came off stage, Dave, the club manager, pulled me aside and told me that the emcee was mad at me because I was getting laughs and he wasn't.  He took exception with some of my material as being uncreative, and thought he was getting a raw deal from the audience, but the plain fact of the matter is that you can't go up in the emcee role and just be angry, which he does, confront the audience, which he does, and do raw material without couching it to be acceptable by the masses, which he does.  One joke he did was a suggestion that men marry women who are orphans, because when the wife turns up missing, there's no angry parents looking for her.  That's a straight-up woman-bashing joke, and alienates half the audience right away, as well as any man in the audience with any sort of decency.  I like a sick joke, as long as it's done with a wink, and this emcee doesn't do any sort of winking.  In between shows, sitting at the "comic's table" in the back, I played dumb and made comments to our man along the lines of how tight the audience was, and how they really made us work, blah blah blah.  The last thing I wanted to do is rub his nose in it that he's not a very good comic, but ultimately, it's the club's fault for hiring the guy.  I know he's a last-minute replacement, but is he the best talent they could find?

Second show, we had about 60 people in the crowd, and our emcee fared little better with the more intimate group, and begged off from closing the show because he had to report to his day job at 7 A.M. the next morning.  I graciously offered to close the show for him and let him go after bringing the headliner on stage, because there was no value in making him stick around...I certainly didn't think his company would have been cheerful, and after making a back-stabbing remark to the club manager, I already had a a handle on his estimation of me.  I've noticed that this is starting to become an annoying trend, emcees begging off from closing the show.  In my opinion, it shows an impatience that is prevalent in the comedy business...no one wants to pay the dues, wait around, do the job as it's outlined.  Every open-micer thinks they should be a paid emcee, every emcee thinks he should be middling, every middle thinks they should be headlining, and every headliner thinks they should be playing better clubs or working for more money.  There's no honest analysis of ability and what the going rate for that ability is in today's marketplace.  I agree that everyone should aspire to better than they currently have, but why doesn't anyone think they need to work for it anymore?  It really pisses me off.

Today, I'm going to go through some receipts I brought along as part of the never-ending attempt to get my home office under control.  Pam and I have box after box of papers, receipts, flyers, magazines, catalouges, and every other piece of paper you could imagine, and it's choking off our modest living space.  Also, getting the receipts together gets us one step closer to filing our federal income tax, which I want to get done before the April 15th deadline, and with the modest amount of time I have at home, even though it's six weeks away, there's only about half that amount of time that I'm home and can actually attend to financial matters.  Consequently, I have to make as much use of my "down time" as possible, and if I'm going to be holed up in a hotel room (which conveniently has a nice desk in it to work at), then I should be able to make that work to my advantage.

I may try to make the six-hour drive home tonight after the second show, but I think with my cold-medicated state, I'd be better off doing the drive during daylight hours.  I'll make the decision later tonight, and hopefully I'll be feeling better, I'd love to get home early and have the bonus time with Pam and Harmony.  A big factor will also be how sick I am of this hotel room, and unfortunately, the AmeriHost is one of my favorite hotel chains to stay in...the amenities make it a nice place to stay, and it's hard to leave a place like that when you're used to being lodged in not-so-nice places.

If I don't check in tomorrow morning, I'll continue my blog Sunday night or Monday morning...I know you can't wait.  ;)

Ralph Tetta

Rochester, NY