Brian Posehn at Capitol City Comedy Club
Decades from now, when gay marriage is legalized in even the most backwards states in the union (and not just urbane, cosmopolitan regions like Iowa), and the entire era in which dudes who were into dudes had to fear for their lives is regarded with deep, abiding national shame, the odds are pretty good that you'll still hear the word "faggot" used as a punchline in comedy clubs.
That's one of the lessons drawn from Friday's Brian Posehn show at Capitol City Comedy Club. All three acts on the bill—headliner Posehn, local opener Doug Mellard, and featured act Jacob Sirof—fell back on this cheapest of the cheap (followed closely by "Do y'all like smoking weed?", which Mellard and Sirof both used) to make their point, all to varying degrees of effectiveness. Mellard used it for a quick, easy laugh during a rough spot; Sirof went there to take down a heckler; and Posehn opened with a joke built around his iTunes Genius feature making fun of him for downloading a Wham! song. Such dude-brah pandering couldn’t help but be disappointing—especially coming from Posehn, who otherwise demonstrated a mastery of his craft onstage, deftly weaving personal anecdotes and those “nerd” jokes everyone came to see into a narrative thread that was thoughtful and insightful, as well as really fucking funny.
Posehn's a good storyteller, and his material shines brightest when he lets it breathe. His set was built around a handful of anecdotes—his bachelor party; meeting Kate Beckinsale on the set of Late Night With Conan O'Brien; and the perils of having a familiar face—that frequently had him saying, "I swear to God this really happened." Unlike most comics who walk similar paths, Posehn's jokes are punctuated with empathy for the various strippers, bus drivers, and hotel clerks that really makes them resonate. You may come to hear him talk about how he named his cock and balls "Short Round" after Indy's sidekick in Temple Of Doom, or one-liners like, "We're gonna make a mouth baby,” but what separated Posehn from his openers was the fact that his jokes felt like they were inhabited by real people. When you can identify with a stripper trying to hang onto a pole in the middle of a van going 40 miles an hour in the Vegas desert, that's when you really laugh.
It may be a little weird to call a guy who spends most of his set talking about pot and masturbation "deep,” but it's what kept Posehn's nerdy stoner act from feeling like shtick. True, Posehn did go for the cheap laugh that even supposedly progressive Austin crowds cough up like Pavlovian dogs whenever someone says "faggot" in a funny voice, but fortunately he stopped mining those sorts of easy gags early on, once he was sure the audience was with him. And if a comedian can avoid going “there” in a bit that speculates on what it might be like to be fucked by Dennis Rodman against a dumpster behind an L.A. nightclub, then he's probably good enough to have never needed it in the first place. Here's hoping Posehn learns to trust his audience a bit more from the beginning, and that the crowd proves worthy of it.
