Recap Open mic at the Squire Lounge

Open-mic comedy nights are notorious for being showcases of agonizing non-comedy. But that’s what happens when you invite overeager, well-intentioned amateurs to tell jokes to an audience that usually consists solely of other comics (and maybe a few unlucky bar-hoppers who didn’t realize it was open-mic night).

That’s where the Squire Lounge's open-mic comedy night is different—sort of. There are plenty of genuinely witty local comedians who channel a supernatural power that allows them to make a packed room of drunkenly gossiping hipsters roar with laughter.

But those are the good comics. There are also the not-so good ones, those who attempt to ape the touchier material of the talented and fall tragically short. At a place like the Squire where no topic is taboo, comedians have to be very careful; not everyone can get away with joking about, say, race relations in America—especially not the newer guys, who have very little understanding of where those lines of decency lie. Offensiveness, of course, can be funny, as long it’s finessed properly (and assuming the audience happens to be open-minded). Under these ideal circumstances, some seasoned comedians drop race jokes like a hot iron—and the people laugh.

But sometimes the people don’t laugh. Like when Abbey Jordan—a genuinely hilarious, up-and-going-somewhere comic from Denver—expounded on relationships last Tuesday, Nov. 25, at the Squire’s open mic. She tiptoed over the line when she likened the desire to change certain things about her lover to “buying a house in the shifty neighborhood and hoping all the black people will leave.” Fellow local Ben Roy—a veteran of standup comedy—similarly stumbled over the line Tuesday when he addressed a couple of hecklers of Hispanic descent: “The taco cart isn’t going to push itself,” he told them.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Roy also coined a term that is sure to go down in the Squire’s history books: “Zseech!” The word, as local comedy luminary Adam Cayton-Holland reiterated Tuesday, should be uttered by members of the audience whenever a comic takes a flying leap over the line of decency. That is to say, when jokes about race, rape, incest, drugs, abortions, sex, pimps, hoes, handjobs, blowjobs, fisting, cock rings, and anal excretions just get to be too much for spectators to handle.

Of course, if you go to the Squire on a Tuesday night, you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into: hearing, for example, white and black people talk about race in a manner that would make a Klansman blush. When comedian Dick Black took the mic last week and said, “I had to pretend to be white to get on this show,” the open-mic’s long-running host Greg Baumhauer responded, “How did you pretend to be white? Did you pay your bills on time? Did you spend more time with your kid?”

Zseech.

But even if race humor isn’t your thing, there are still plenty of topics that came up Tuesday night that would make just about anyone squirm. Like, for instance, jokes about sewing your tongue to your penis so you can taste your lover while you copulate with her. Or accuing the female patrons of ruining the Squire’s plumbing by flushing their stillborns down the toilet. On any given Tuesday, no matter what you hold near and dear to your heart, someone at the Squire will tear it to shreds. Whether it’s funny or not is another story.