It’s December 21, 2012 and I am hosting an event at the O’Hare Hilton. As a comedian, New Years Eve can be kind of a mixed bag. While you can usually guarantee a full audience, they can be drunk or distracted or just looking for someone to make out with at midnight. All of those things are not great for an artform which, for the most part, requires an audience to sit politely and listen.
Anyways, I meet my point of contact and she makes it clear what she expects from me: there will be two cover bands playing, one starting at 8:30 and another starting at 11:00. Before each band, I’m supposed to get onstage, make a couple of announcements and then do 15 minutes of jokes. I expected a challenge, but also knew that the more fun I was having, the more fun the audience would be having.
So, it’s 8:10 and I’m getting ready to get onstage when I go talk to the first band and explain what I’ve been asked to do. They all look at me, then at each other, and then one of them says, “No jokes. You can make announcements but then just bring us up and we’ve got it covered.” I look confused and the man repeats his statement again.
Umm…. ok.
I race to find my point of contact and explain to her what the band said, and her response was that I should do whatever the band wants. After all, the bands were promoted and one of the big reasons people came out, where I- a local comedian- was not. So, I went onstage, welcomed everyone, and made my announcements. I pointed out everyone was dressed so nicely, and said that it looked like an adult prom. Someone in the band clearly thought I might be using this as a springboard to start jokes and he coughed loudly and then when I turned to look, gave me the “wrap it up” sign. So, I introduced the band and walked offstage.
“Man,” I thought, “What a bunch of divas. Surely the second band will not be so demanding.” But before I could finish that thought, someone from the second band came up to me and told me that they expected me to do the exact same thing for them- just announcements and then say their name. So, that is exactly what I did.
When I got offstage after introducing the second band, I felt a little defeated. After all, I had been booked to do comedy and I was nothing more than a smiling face who said, maybe, ten sentences. However, waiting for me offstage was my point of contact. She was beaming with how well I did, and showered me with praise saying that I was exactly what I needed and she hoped I had a great time. She then handed me my check and told me to enjoy the evening.
The check was the most, at the time, I had ever gotten paid to perform stand-up comedy. I had been onstage for a grand total of four minutes and told zero jokes.
You would think that would be one of the weirdest shows I have ever performed in comedy, but it’s not even the weirdest New Years Eve show I’ve performed at. That would come five years later and is a much longer and weirder story.
Let’s get into it.
There is some necessary context that needs to be provided for this story so I am going to do something I never thought I would do in my writing. I’m going to talk about the Comedy Shrine.
In 2011, the Comedy Shrine, a comedy venue owned by improviser Dave Sinker, moved from Naperville to Aurora and had enough space where they were able to dedicate a theater solely to stand-up comedy. I spent the first two months helping book the room and then, when my friend and mentor Bert Borth took over, was a regular performer. In 2015, I started producing a show called Still Not Friday there with my friend Katie Keller. The show lasted about four months when, one night, Dave decided he was going to walk into the showroom and scream at Katie until she cried, blaming her for some issue which was not her fault. Katie and I took our show to Two Brothers Roundhouse, where it remains today.
Dave spent the next few months claiming he had no ill will with me and that I was always welcome at the Comedy Shrine whenever I wanted, though he did not love that our show was now in a venue that was in the same city as his club. That facade dropped about a year later when a booking of mine was cancelled the day of the show and I was told I would no longer be welcome at the venue. In a text Dave sent to another comedian, he called me “a cancer to suburban comedy”, something I took particular offense to as I had just lost my father to cancer a few weeks before I saw that text. So, to say that my response was “aggressively hostile” would be fair. Any time I saw a social media post promoting the Shrine, I would ask if I was still banned there simply for running a successful show miles away from their venue.
In 2017, Dave and his son, Patrick, decided they were tired of my nonsense and extended an olive branch to me. Not only was I welcomed back to the Comedy Shrine, but I was being offered a chance to host their New Years Eve show. Now, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the idea of working on New Years Eve, but I appreciated the gesture and my fiancé (now wife) was visiting her sister in Phoenix, so I agreed. And because I was appreciative of the gesture of good will being made, I had made a hyper-conscious decision that I was going to be on my best behavior. I was not going to get drunk (which I had a deep history of doing in that venue). I was not going to get hostile with the audience. I was not going to try and re-litigate past slights with Dave and Patrick. I was going to be a good host, something I knew I could do.
I’m not going to change names for this story, but I’m not going to use last names. I’ll just say that for that night, we were doing two shows (a 8:00 and a 10:00) and I would be hosting the feature act Marc and headliner Bill. Bill was a national headliner who had gotten famous from a television role he had done in the 1980’s, but was an established comedian who had done The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson a number of times. Marc was a character actor who had also rose to fame as the comic relief on a sitcom in the 1980’s and I had seen in the comedy circuit for a while. I can happily say that Bill was a delight to work with. Marc, on the other hand… well, that dude was weird.
I arrived at the Shrine about a half hour before the first show was to start. Patrick welcomed me and we went over the announcements he wanted me to make. I was told that Bill was in the green room, an area where comedians can hang out before they perform. When I asked about Marc, I was told he was waiting in the liquor supply closet for the show to start. I guess when he arrived at the club, he saw people coming in and because he had a belief that people should not see the comics for the first time until they are onstage, he went in the first room available for him.
Like I said, that dude was weird.
Anyways, I went in the storage room and met Marc. I asked if he had anything he wanted me to say for his introduction, and he gave me that information. Then he said that he would be introducing Bill after his set. Now, if you’ve been to a comedy show, you know that this is not how things are usually done. Usually, the host comes up after the feature comedian, makes a few announcements, maybe a quick joke, and resets the room to get ready for the headliner. However, I was trying to be on my best behavior and did not want to cause any waves that would upset anyone and cause more problems for Dave or Patrick. If Marc wanted to welcome the headliner, so be it. I was going to be a good host.
The 8:00 show went well. The crowd liked me a lot and I got the room prepared for a fun night. I, honestly, cannot say anything about Marc’s set (features do about 25 minutes) because I had a guy in the green room who had worked with Johnny Carson. I wanted stories and Bill was more than happy to tell me them. I’m sure he appreciated telling stories to me, such a devoted fan of the artform, and I had to remember to keep my normally boisterous laugh a little quieter because the green room was right next to the stage. Marc finishes and bring up Bill, who does a wonderful job (headliners do about 45 minutes, and this is important to remember) and we close out the night.
First show out of the way and it went well. All we had to do was repeat the formula and there would be no problems, right?
Well…..
Sometime between the first and second show, I realized something and I was, clearly, the first person to realize it.
A comedy show usually runs around 90 minutes. Our 8:00 show got done a little before 9:30. But, clearly, they wanted the second show to run until midnight, so we could do a countdown and toast and smooches and all of those things. That would mean we would need to take this show and add an extra half hour to it. When I brought that up to Marc and Bill, clearly they had not considered this either. Bill made it clear that he had not done over an hour in quite a long time, so to ask him to add the full extra half-hour to his set wasn’t something he was entirely comfortable with. So, I had decided I would step in and help. I explained to them both that I had headlined this club many times before, that I have the material to do it and experience with the room. I could easily just go up after Marc, do another 10-15 minutes of jokes, and that if Marc and Bill each went a little longer, that would get us to midnight with no problem. Bill seemed to appreciate the effort I was making.
Marc had his own ideas.
Stressing again that he would be the one to bring Bill onstage (something he was insistent on, much to Bill’s confusion), he said that the plan would be that I would do fifteen minutes (as opposed to the ten I had done at 8:00), he would do at least 45 minutes and Bill would take us to midnight. Had this been a normal show, I would have stepped in and said, “Hey, I think I should really be the one bringing up the headliner. That way, I can gauge how much time needs to be done so Bill has the best chance to succeed.” But I was not trying to do anything that would have me come off as confrontational, so I agreed to Marc’s plan.
At 10:00, in front of a packed Comedy Shrine audience, we started the show.
My fifteen minutes to open the show went well. The audience was fun and ready to have a good time. As I went to bring up Marc, I remember thinking, “I don’t know what I was worried about. I’m sure everything will be fine.”
During the opening of Marc’s set, Bill and I just kind of rolled our eyes at the whole situation. But, as Bill pointed out, sometimes this is just how comedy shows run. He excused himself to use the bathroom while Marc was onstage, and I took the time to listen to Marc’s set. The audience was enjoying Marc’s energy and jokes and when he announced he would be bringing up the headliner after his final joke, everyone in the room was thrilled with the job he had done… except for me.
Now, there are two reasons for this. The first is that he had only done about fifteen minutes, ten minutes less than he had done for the earlier show and way less than he needed to do if this show was going to get to midnight. The second reason I was more than a little uneasy was that Bill was still in the bathroom. Now, had this been a normal show where I was going up after Marc and resetting the room, this wouldn’t have been a problem. I could have simply stalled until I had gotten some signal that we were ready to move on. But, not only was Marc going to be the one bringing up Bill, he had no idea Bill was not ready to perform.
I needed to act fast. Before he could start his final joke, I yelled from behind the curtain, “Hey, Marc! Instead of going into your last joke, why don’t you do some other jokes?”
I will admit this was not a great idea.
The audience chuckled and I could hear that Marc was clearly taken aback. At this point, Bill had come back into the green room and was a myriad of emotions. Confused. Concerned. Pissed. He realized the same thing I did. Because I would not be coming back onstage, Marc was basically setting the pace of the show and, at the rate he was going, Bill was going to have to do a lot more time that he had expected. This was confirmed when Marc started to introduce Bill a few minutes later. At this point, it was about 10:35, meaning Marc had done about 20 minutes and Bill was going to have to do A LOT of time.
The start of Bill’s set went fine. He clearly had a headlining set honed by decades of craft and experience. It was polished and professional and very well-received. But comedians aren’t often asked to do nearly twice the time they are expected to do. After about an hour of doing really well, it’s clear that Bill is in an experience he had not expected. He begins talking with the audience, something he had not done during the 8:00 show. He was still getting laughs, but it was clear to me that he was pulling out every stop he could. Marc must have sensed this also because he turned to me and asked what the time was. It was about 11:45. Then Marc did something I didn’t expect. He told me to follow his lead and walked onstage.
Now I did not originally walk onstage, but you could hear the confusion. You could hear it in Bill, who had clearly not expected this. You could hear it in the audience, who easily picked up that this was not something that normally happened. Marc was trying to be party host, trying to get the audience to participate and cheer. When I walked onstage (about five minutes later), my goal was to do whatever I could to get to midnight. Marc looked like he was already exhausted. Bill looked pissed that he was even in this situation.
I do not remember anything said or done in that last ten minutes. If there was video of me attempting to juggle, I wouldn’t doubt that happened. By the time we got to the countdown, there were three dudes onstage who were covered in flop sweat and an audience so excited the show was about to end. Not exactly the best way to bring in the new year, but what were you going to do? The countdown happened, 2018 had begun in the central time zone, and Marc looked at me and said, “You can go backstage now. I’ll close out the show.”
And that’s exactly what I did.
Patrick was backstage. You could see that he was confused and before he could ask what happened, I explained the situation and told him that I was just following Marc’s lead. He shook my hand, gave me my check, and wished me a Happy New Year. It would be the last time the Comedy Shrine paid me for a show.
Bill and Marc came backstage, the former looking highly annoyed at what a person of his experience and mastery of craft just had to experience. Marc, meanwhile, had a ear-to-ear grin.
“I thought that was a lot of fun!”
Fancy Boys Club 