Stage of Fanatic Salon. Photo by Mason Edwards.
Comedy shows have a range. The big time names who have put together the hour long shows you watch on tv all started here, at open mic comedy sets.
Having coordinated outfits with two of my friends, we sat in the front row of the Fanatic Salon in hopes to get made fun of. Each comic paid $5 for 5 minutes, working material onto the supportive crowd of mostly fellow comics. This was different from the polished sets you see on Netflix or the low effort crowd work clips on tik tok. Akin to something like a sports practice, where comics had the opportunity to polish delivery and gauge a joke’s laugh factor.
Comedy is a language of self deprecation and intuitive sarcasm. There is a joke in everything, it just needs to be found. The best comics spoke this in fluency, riffing off what the last comic said as a segue into their material or taking jabs at each other as they took the stage. The best jokes, the ones that make you belly laugh, aren’t always the most clever. Comics who are confident or outlandish lure you into this giggly bubble of anticipation. Trying out a new persona or finding a clever twist. Making you forget this is all a performance, orchestrated and rehearsed to make you laugh.
George Brown, a freshman film and TV studies major at LMU, goes to open mics because, “it’s good for working on new jokes- you can’t know what works until you try it” he said. “A lot of them are pretty brutal but it’s part of the process and the only way to get good at comedy.” Brown met us fellow lions before the show started, it was clear he was scribbling new material before his turn to go on. The difficulty of drawing the line with a cocaine addict roommate, who’d rather sniff it up.
One clever joke of the night went something like, when is ‘cancel culture’ going to make us stop saying “colored pencils”. A ridiculous Jo Jo Siwa impression had me laughing louder and longer the rest.
It’s a very supportive environment, one woman decided she just wanted to tell a story to everyone at the end, no one laughed but it was very heart warming. A couple of comics, which, at first left bad taste, completed their set and left immediately afterwards, sometimes leaving in the middle of the next person’s set. Hidden behind the laughter is a lot of hard work gone into making these jokes land, for some it means multiple venues a night practicing the same jokes. Brown is the same, he will go to open mics as often as he can, most nights of the week, usually multiple mics a night. “Part of doing standup is getting on stage as much as possible so you can get comfortable and keep working that muscle,” he said. So, leaving right after preforming didn’t seem so bad, considering they were probably off to another set.
Some didn’t make the crowd laugh for five minutes, trying out joke after joke that didn’t land. That’s the way it goes, “Pretty much any comic you can think of started at shitty open mics,” Brown reminds us.
Leaving the salon, a few comics thanked us for bringing the energy, saying it was nice to have audience members at this venue who weren’t comics themselves.
