The finer points of open-mic comedy

When The Comedy Club On State launched its Wednesday-night Big Deuce open mic on April Fools’ Day of this year, it surprisingly turned out not to be a minefield of awkwardly bombing weirdoes. Okay, watching people bomb is part of the appeal of these things, but in between a few duds was an assortment of local comics working the lead out and earning some honest laughs with their material. Like The Dan Potacke Show, it’s an event largely run by local comics, who are keeping it organized and gradually honing it into a pretty reliable staple of local entertainment. Decider took notes on a couple of the shows and spoke with comic Chris Waelti, who also has the enviable duty of shining a flashlight at comics to signal that their five-minute time slots are up (or that they’re bombing).

Openness vs. quality control
“There is the unfortunate reality of the genre—an open mic combined with a relatively friendly audience will bring out some truly awful comedians,” comic Alan Talaga says. “When I say awful, I’m not talking about the people who are just starting out… I’m talking the guys who want to use this as an opportunity to bitch about their ex-wives for five minutes.” But since the open mic is mostly run by a group of comics anyway, they can basically install themselves into the lineup, which brings some consistency to the mix and cuts down considerably on the potential crappiness that scares people away from open mics. The best regular Decider’s seen so far would have to be JoAnne Poniatowski, who has just the right deadpan to bring out the sicko brilliance of her material; for example, she explains she likes eating old people in the form of stew, “because then you don’t have to eat around the bruises.”

Then again, it’s important not to get too clique-y: “A lot of new people, that’s kind of our audience in a way,” Waelti says. “They’re gonna bring all their co-workers and stuff like that, and a lot of their friends. It’s the moral support, and they drink a lot.” On a busy night, some folks might have to volunteer not to go on, just so the show can stay at a reasonable length. “People that you have total faith in, you want to put them after guys that you have no faith in so you can bring it back up,” Waelti says. “Then guys that you’ve never seen before, you put them around people that you have mediocre faith in and know that they will do kinda well. It’s good to pay attention to those guys, too, so you can see what they’re working on.”

Bad improv and bike jerks
The regulars here use their privileged stage time to encourage performers to get beyond the stand-up format. At the open-mic’s inaugural night, Waelti and Talaga stormed the stage as “The Laffabouts,” a ridiculous parody of bad improv-comedy groups. More recently, a guy wearing a yellow cycling vest, introduced as “2Fast_4U” (his made-up Craigslist screen name, but really comic Sean Moore), wheeled his bike up to the stage, locked it to a stool, and boorishly riffed through a few minutes of deliberately tacky material on the merits of cycling and living on Madison’s near-East Side: “I don’t drive anymore, but I did have a car, and it was a fixed-gear car…” Waelti also discourages people from doing too much of the same material over and over again on different nights. Decider caught Poniatowski and Paul Hart twice at different open mics, and both managed not to repeat themselves too much from set to set. Mark Kump does some of his comedy in song form, which Waelti finds is a reliable way to break stuff up. “Songs are cool, too, because music overpowers comedy,” Waelti says. “The song doesn’t even have to be that funny, just ’cause there’s music.”

Know the place
The Comedy Club’s open mic is a tad removed from the ones many of the same comics have participated in at bars on South Park Street—like the still-running one on Tuesday nights at Azzalino’s and the defunct one at the now mercifully closed Klinic. Waelti wants his fellow comedians to bring their tightest stuff to the Club nights, but on the other hand, “You don’t really have to worry about offending anyone at Azzalino’s, because it is all comics. It’s more of a workshop than this would be.”

For better or worse, the Club also draws fewer out-of-control drunks into the crowd and fewer flat-out crazies to the mic. One walk-in at the Klinic “was basically this crackhead off the street,” says Waelti. “And his big joke was, ‘I would fuck a snake if you held his head for me.’” Of course, sometimes a rowdier atmosphere helps performers toughen up: “The nice thing about [drunks] is it teaches comics how to deal with hecklers. And it’s the worst possible hecklers. I got a glass thrown at me onstage one night at Azzalino’s. It was my fault.”

Just keep doing it
Waelti’s advice for first-timers is simple: “I would say you gotta get up there, and then after that, you have to just keep doing it. If it doesn’t go well, first off, you’re gonna have to get used to that. Bombing is a part of comedy. You don’t just get up there and kill every time. That’s the thing that I usually try to tell anyone—just keep doing it. That’s all you really can do.”