No Bells, No Whistles

I'd been to comedy shows a couple times--once in college and again at a small club a couple years ago. Watching these men--it's only been men--get up on stage and try to make me and the rest of the audience laugh, I think about how hard it must be, night after night, for them to put themselves up there among distracted, drunk, or heckling crowds. How painful it must be. They don't have tricks to fall back on. There's no band, no bells and whistles, just the stories they tell.

But tonight I saw a true professional--Lewis Black. I didn't worry about his home life or whether or not he self-medicated. He spent some time on politics, how he can't believe that anyone is a Democrat or Republican these days, considering how horrible both parties are. He also said he wouldn't make any jokes about Obama because he's not funny--he's just so smart that he becomes lost in his head and thinks about the rest of us in the abstract (he used his serious voice here). Black spent more time mocking the republican candidates--pretty easy targets, but it still cracked me up.

(Actually, one of the funniest jokes came from the warm-up comedian, John Bowman: he hopes Mitt Romney picks Tom Cruise as his running mate so we can get America's two wackiest religions on one ticket.)