Bryan Kellen
Comedians are supposed to funny, right?
Vanessa Gochnour
Denver comedian Bryan Kellen combines absurdly physical acrobatics with genuinely witty jokes, and he has an uncanny ability to crack even the toughest of audiences. Not many comics can do what he does, which is why people are so sincerely impressed whenever he takes the stage.
And the crowd last Wednesday at Comedy Works was definitely in awe. They hysterically gyrated in their chairs, slapped the sides of their legs, and cried—literally cried—in amusement. This unequivocal talent was even more impressive when contrasted with the forces the comedian had against him that night.
It was a nightmare for any headlining comic: A cavalcade of unfunny warm-up acts. The host for the evening, Ron Ferguson, dropped enough one-liner bombs and painful innuendos to make a latter-day Mel Brooks movie (imagine a Robin Hood: Men In Tights sequel). No one laughed. Talon Saucerman, another local comedian, kidded that there were actual businesses that refused to utter Santa’s trademark “Ho, ho, ho,” during the holidays because it might offend customers. Apparently he didn’t know why “unwed mothers in Aurora were so sensitive about that.” (That was the “joke.”) And then he cautioned against making fun of the aforementioned mothers, “Because they will stab you.” (Get it? People in Aurora are violent.)
When Kellen took the stage, the audience was subdued, cold, and seemingly unable to find humor—of all places—in a comedy club. But within the first minute of his act, he had them rolling in the aisles.
In a five-minute bit about the aridity of the Colorado climate, Kellen wondered how his lips could still be chapped in a rainstorm. “Your lips literally disappear into your face,” he said as he tucked his own lips into his gums. And through a vivacious display of his teeth, he managed to utter, “It’s really dry here.”
It’s also cold. “It’s been so fucking cold,” he said. “The shit just hits you, and nothing works but your eyes and tongue.” And with his buggy eyes, slithering tongue, and stiff, slouched body, he demonstrated the effect of these frigid temperatures. To be fair, he also acknowledged the inconsistency of Colorado winter weather. “It can be 70 degrees in December, and you’ll get a tank top and shorts and say, ‘Take a picture,’” he joked as he ran around the stage. “Take a picture! Fuck you, California!”
Kellen doesn’t spare a single inch of the stage during his physically demanding set. He’s determined to distort every limb, warp every part of his face, and run in circles as he vigorously stimulates life’s universal moments with unrelenting drollery. What is it like to be a dorky white guy at a dance club? He’ll show you. What about the techno music blaring from the speakers? “It’s like trying to dance to a fire alarm,” he yelled as his limbs gyrated in opposite directions. And how about all those over-eager creepy dudes on the dance floor? In order to fully mimic their behavior, he bent backward, his head nearly touching the floor. With his crotch hovering inches above the faces of spectators in the first few rows and his legs bouncing back and forth, he mockingly quipped in a low voice, “You want to dance?” He doesn’t find much gracefulness in the female booty dancers either. During a particular instance that he found more inexplicable than revolting, a woman grinded away at his crotch. “This chick is going to fade my jeans!” he exclaimed.
When the comic wasn’t leaping around the stage, he was able to maintain the audience’s attention by reducing life’s most embarrassing moments into a self-deprecating shrug. Through his bodily distortions, rubbery facial expressions, self-deprecation, and his hilariously systematic synopsis of life’s everyman moments, Kellen does what comedians are supposed to do—cause people to hurt from laughter.
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