Discover Top Posts Tagged with #comedy zone

“Dope A-F”- 2/20-2/23 - “Super Long Sets, and Getting Screamed at by a Drunk Asshole”

Oh man I have a lot of insanity to catch up on. We had some truly fire sets, and some that were truly a dumpster fire. It was a ton of stage time as I work to stretch my legs and build a 30+ minute set.

2/20

I got a closing spot at Ragtime. Which is a small joint in Arlington that is run by Rahmein Mostafavi. I’m stoked because the last time I was here it went extremely well. I headed over to Brandon Beswick’s house and we hung out for a bit. He was going to drive up and hopefully I would be able to get him a guest spot on the show.

We headed out around 5:45 and stopped at a Wawa for some gas and snacks. We then hit the road and ran into a super crazy rainstorm. He hydroplaned a couple times, but nothing too insane. As we get closer Rahmein messaged me asking how much time Brandon wanted to do. So I was super stoked to have been able to get my dude a guest spot.

We get to the show and head on in. It is about 7:40 and there is maybe 7 or 8 people there. Enough to where it is going to be fun, but not quite the turnout we had hoped or expected. I set up my videocamera and we all kind of bust balls and shoot the shit. Rahmein asked me about Host Battle/Winstmas Games, and we talked about the success of his couple’s therapy show.

As we keep talking about things like comic group chats, offensive comedy, our experiences at The Richmond Funny Bone (my home club, and he had just headlined there) the room starts to fill in. I mean actually fill in.

As the seats fill up I’m getting more and more nervous. The only comedians on the show are Rahmein, Brandon, and I. He tells me I can do whatever time I want and he asks Brandon to do about 15.

Once the room is completely packed I fade out the music and Rahmein heads to stage. He starts with some light crowd work, and then does something I have never seen before. He actually starts to ask audience members if they’ve ever wanted to do comedy. A couple say yes so he forces them to get on stage and try some stuff. The first dude’s name was Ben and I forgot the other guys. It was kind of cool. The whole audience was into the experience and it really bought the show a lot of goodwill.

After this Rahmein started into his act for about ten minutes and was doing really well. This was going to be a super dope crowd and I was so excited to see how Brandon and I were going to do.

After Rahmein Brandon goes up and gets into his act. He has a strong set. He has some jokes really hit super hard. He had a couple moments where he forgot where he was in his act but if you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have known. He closed really strong and had some huge pops. I was so glad he drove us up, and got to work this dope room.

After this Rahmein went back up and worked out an 8 minute story about erectile dysfunction. It was insane, and it just kept building and building. It absolutely destroyed. This was going to be tough to follow.

So my set starts off with talking about Rahmein’s dick from his joke. Then after that I went into some crowd work with the two guys who did comedy. Then moved over to talking to an audience member named Sebastian. Who was a crazy good looking gay dude in the front row.

We riffed for a while and I got his friend Justin involved as well. I had some good lines about how they were dressed, and how hot they were. This crowd work went on for a while. It was working super well and then I went into my act.

I did about 20 minutes of material and it was all working super well. After I did this I went to my notebook and tried some newer stuff that worked ok. I had some lulls, but I never lost them. It felt like a battle, but a super strong win for me. I closed pretty well and got off stage. I’d give this set a B.

Afterwards Brandon and I headed out and decided to eat dinner at Applebees. It was a nice secluded, and empty Applebees in Fredericksburg. I love empty chain restaurants. It is so quiet and comforting and the perfect place to talk. We discussed comedy and the nba before hopping back in the car and heading home. I started to wonder how well I truly did tonight and then I checked my Venmo and an audience member had tipped me $25. So to get paid a bit of cash, and then also get tipped made the night all the better.

2/21

The next night I had to head back up to the Nova area. I was booked by Allan Sidley to headline his room at Tyson’s Biergarten (The room is called Tyson’s Comedy Cellar) in Tyson’s Corner.

I was stoked because I was about to do 30+ minutes at least. I get to the show and the room is really cool. It took me forever to find the free parking garage, but once I did I realized how convenient it is to get to the venue.

The room is in the basement of Tyson’s Biergarten. It’s so dope. They’ve got a bar stage right, and a bunch of picnic beer hall tables for people to sit at. I set up my video camera and met the comics the show. The host was Ralph Cooper and he was a super fun and chill dude. I also got to meet Scott Hall who was a nice dude and pretty new to comedy. He had good energy and we had a good time getting to know each other. The other comic was a female named Ariel who was from NYC. Very quiet, but also nice.

A dude came up to me named Morgan. He told me that he has seen me at 50 first jokes at DC Drafthouse . He said he loved my bit and followed me on IG because of it. He brought a friend out to check it out and that felt so freaking cool. We talked for a long time, and got to know each other better. It was one of the first times where I felt like I had someone search out my comedy. It was pretty dope. Then I had another audience member who had seen me at The DC Improv and then brought me a 36 pack of dry erase markers for my classroom (reference to a joke I do). This was honestly shaping up to be an amazing night.

The only problem is the attendance. Honestly there is about 12 or 13 people here and outside of the three that came to see me the audience does not seem interested in comedy at all.

The comics go up one by one and nobody has a really hot set. Like the audience seems to hate comedy. The host does ok, Scott does ok, and Ariel has the best set of the three. Even she struggled a bit, but she def is someone who knows her material.

After this I go up. I start with crowd work and this show feels brutal. I am wringing as many laughs as I can out of this group. I riff on the venue a bit (the venue has a weird system where you buy a token and then trade that for beer). I get a big pop when I talk about how the bar on Sunday has a reading group for children. I then do a riff on how the kids have to turn in a token to get a book. This is the biggest laugh I get of the night. For the first 30 I am doing my best material/crowd work. The fire alarm goes off twice which was ridiculous af and scary. After the 30 minutes of getting to know people and working I decide to use the last 20 minutes of my set to try new stuff and just get weird. I felt comfortable the whole time, but it was definitely a lot of work. I’d give my set a C. This is as average as it gets. Some things bombed completely, most got chuckles, and some things killed. I did my time and did a full 50 so that felt really good to be able to be on stage that long.

After the show I say my goodbyes and get my parking validated. I then hop in my car and head back absolutely exhausted.

2/22

It is finally Friday so I am so glad to be done with work. I get a message from Allan Sidley about how he heard how tough the room was but he got a lot of high praise about me. It made me feel infinitely better about my set. He said the Thursday’s can be rough, but they’re really growing that room and he can’t wait to have me back. It means a lot to hear. All you can ask after a show is the booker wants to have you again.

This night I was booked by David McCallie to feature at his new room at The College Inn in Charlottesville. He is super nervous about the whole situation and is being a diva about it. I get it though. It is his first show, and he wants it to go well. I’d rather someone care too much than not at all.

I am on the show with McCallie, Abdulla, Paige Campbell, and Chris Alan. This is a pretty fun and dope lineup and I’m hoping this will be a new dope room in town. I get there pretty early. Like 5ish and then I just sit waiting for some others to get there while I watch Netflix in my car.

I change in the back and while I am doing that Paige and Alex show up. I start unpacking the stuff from my car, and then Abdulla gets there. They all help me carry the stuff to College Inn and we settle in for what will hopefully be a super fun night of comedy.

A bunch of other comics/friends show up to hang. We are a little worried because the vibe isn’t that people are here to see comedy. There are a few groups of people, but it looks like they’re going to be surprised by comedy. This is when I realize you can’t ever make comics happy. If no one had been there I’d have been freaking out, and now that there are people here I am just assuming they hate comedy.

Turns out as the night goes on they are definitely there for comedy. It get absolutely packed as we get closer to showtime. The servers and staff don’t know what to do with this many people. They had to start turning people away, and making them leave because they were over their max occupancy according to the fire code. Which is one of the coolest things I’ve ever been able to say about a show before.

Before the show stars McCallie offers Alex Castagne and guest spot and he takes it. So now I've got a ton of my besties on the lineup and it’s the first time I can remember where all of us are performing back to back to back to back. It is so packed I can’t set up my big camera so I have to put my GoPro on the speaker right next to the stage.

McCallie goes up first and every seat is filled and 20 people are standing at the door. We are on a raised seating area that we have closed off for the comics to sit at. We are in the middle of the restaurant almost doing comedy in the round.

McCallie does mediocre. He is new to comedy and he doesn’t get up much, but he proved he was able to produce one hell of a show. He seemed really proud even though he was being a control freak. He got a few laughs and then brought Abdulla up.

Abdulla had a fine set. The show was starting to build. People were into it, and they wanted more. Then Alex went up and this is when it really started to get hot. Alex did about 7 minutes and he had some really strong pops. They dug him a lot. Paige carried that momentum when he did about 15 after. He was hitting them with a lot of his new stuff, but also giving them some of the hits. At this point I am so excited about my set. I can not wait to get up.

McCallie brings me up and from the very beginning of my set I had them. I absolutely destroyed for 23 minutes. They were into my rhythm, and cadence. They were following along, and I was darting my eyes back and forth all around me trying to keep everyone engaged. During this time McCallie had allowed two of his buddies to sit on the stage. This is fine because they’re both loving my set/the whole show.

I got some of the biggest pops I’ve ever gotten on some of my jokes. I finally captured great video of my bits about witches and China. I then did an 11 minute version of my arming teachers bit, before closing with a couple other things. I legit had one bit not murder, but it still did ok. I’d give my set an A. I loved this set and I could have done an hour.

I get off stage and feel amazing. Then Chris goes up. He shoots himself in the foot early (which is a signature Chris Alan move). He just buries himself up top to see if he can dig himself out. Which he does. He slowly starts to murder. After maybe a tentative 5 minutes up top he had them hooked. He is absolutely murdering for 40 minutes with a mix of material and crowd work. Everything is working and it is a masterful set.

Towards the end of his set he opens up the room for questions from white audience members for Black History Month. He gets a ton of laughs on this. the audience is involved, he is shitting on white people, and at the same time bringing everybody together.

At the end of his set McCallie’s friend who loved the show started to yell and heckle He had issue with one statement Chris made and instead of talking about it reasonably he started to yell. It was incredibly awkward. He was super drunk and honestly it put a poor ending on what was one of the best nights of comedy Charlottesville has ever seen.

After his set Chris leaves and the guy is still yelling. I go over to grab my camera and my bags and the guy is just shit talking everybody else who was on the show. He goes to tell me that I did great and tries to dap me up. Now this guy is hammered, he has already been yelling about racial stuff for 10 minutes, and he is obviously aggressive. I should have just shook his hand, and thanked him.

I couldn’t do that. I just couldn’t. I would have felt like a huge p***y if I just let him say all this awful stuff about all of my friends. So I didn’t. I told him that I didn’t want to shake his hand, and that it wasn’t cool that he yelled at comic during their set. It didn’t look good and they should have talked about it off stage.

The dude then turns this into a racial thing. Saying I”m telling a black man what he can and can’t do, that I'm a racist, part of the problem, etc. He isn’t just saying this. He is screaming it into my face for about 15 minutes. I just calmly talk to him and tell him I’m speaking to him as a comedian. It’s not a good idea to yell at someone while they are performing. I get why he is upset, but discussions should be in private. He keeps yelling and getting in my face. he never put his hands on me but he did try to bump his chest into mine. I think he was trying to get me to bite and make it a physical altercation, but that would never happen.

I go through a lot of this at work. I”m used to people trying to intimidate me, and I can read body language. I knew this guy was upset, he’d been drinking, and I could never understand what he was going through. So I just tried to listen, and tell him he misunderstood me. All of my friends and his friends were now around us. They don’t know how this is going to go, and I’m just trying to avoid this dude getting thrown out. His friends (some who I know) are saying I’m not worth it and to just go and I am agreeing with them. I nor anyone is worth getting thrown out of a bar and risk not being able to come back. His friends are freaking out, my friend are all around us, McCallie put his hands on me and told me not to escalate it (honestly this made me madder than anything. I understand what he was doing, but I know what I’m doing. I was in the right, and wasn’t escalating shit.)

It just is too many people around to successfully deescalate the situation. I feel bad because in his mind I am a racist, and a pos. I probably in his mind prove his point that white people ain’t shit. He kept yelling I wasn’t a part of a group and I’ve done nothing to help anyone in my life (which is far from the truth, but it was not my job at that time to dispel his wack ass assumptions of my life). I just let him yell until the bouncer finally threw him out. The whole time he was yelling that everyone in the bar was a racist and trash.

After all this I felt pretty rough. It just put me in a weird headspace. I was planning on going home, but my friends talked me out of it. Instead we were going to go to McCallie’s for a small get together and play Smash Bros. As we are walking to my car to put my stuff away a lady who used to teach Special Education said she loved my material and that it was the best part of the night. This meant a lot to me and definitely put me in better spirits.

I head to McCallie’s and Chris calls. He is upset too so I go meet him and bring him back to the house. This is when the night starts to turn around. We talk everything through and just start hangin. John Marg, Paige, Alex, Jake Snyder, McCallie, Alex’s brother, Chris, Padgett, Abdulla, Sean Wells, David Luzader (he left before we played smash because he’s a baby), and some others are just having a blast.

We talk comedy, We talk how good the show was. People start drinking and hanging out, and as the night goes on I hook up my switch and get about an hour and a half of Smash games in. I grab my stuff and then walk to my car to head home. Definitely in a better mind state than I was a few short hours ago. I head home and pass out.

This was one of the best and most memorable nights of comedy I’ve had in forever. It also showed how much I’ve matured since I started comedy and teaching. I have way more patience now, and I am a better person. This was a dope reminder of that, and that I have to keep working on myself and my comedy so I can achieve something really special one day.

2/23

I was finally going to be making my return to Fredericksburg. I haven’t really done a set here in a super long time. I used to be a regular at Liberty Laughs. Which was the Comedy Zone comedy club in the area. It was above a bowling alley and I had some of the best sets/times there and some of the worst sets of all time.

The comedy zone recently opened up a new club at this placed called Central Station. They do two shows once a month now as they try to build the audience back up. I had been booked to feature for both shows opening for Adam Dodd (musical comedian who is originally FXBG) and the host was Sean Bennett (new local comic).

I get to the venue and the sign out front says to enter on the side and that the shows are at 7:30 and 10:00. Both of these are a lie. You had to enter in the front and the shows were at 7 and 9. This is not a good sign. I go in and the place is absolutely huge. Like this place looks like it could comfortably seat like several hundred people. We had a pretty good sized crowd for the first show though. They sold about 80 tickets and the way they had the seating it felt and looked super full. There’s just so much empty space.

Some of the audience was upset about how long it was taking to get their food and drinks. This was because a lot of the wait staff had called out this night. Also the host didn’t know that he was supposed to be taking money at the door and helping seat people. So the gm Shelby was stressed out about it and rushing around. Eventually everyone got seated and their drinks and the show was starting.

Sean goes up and he does ok for about 10 minutes. It was obviously one of this first times hosting and with this crowd he had a pretty fun opening set. He then goes to bring me up and forgets my name. Not only does he not know my name he asks me if I’m a singer. I tell him know and he was like, “but you have a notebook” and I responded, “yea because some of us write jokes.” I don’t know this felt really disrespectful and dumb. Like just ask me my name or idk check the poster that you’re on.

So now the stage is awkward and weird. It just took the energy out of the room so I went up and just did crowd work for my entire set. It killed. I cracked the audience and got to know everybody. I brought a gentleman on stage named Hammer. I kept going back to him and got some good pops. I closed with a joke and got a good response, but for the most part it was like 95% crowd work. I’d give this set a B-. It went really well, and felt good.

Next Adam went up and had a crazy good set. He was a pretty good draw for locals since he was from there. He kept people energized and everybody had a blast. Sean came up and apologized and we laughed it off. It honestly wasn’t that big of a deal, and I was able to overcome it and have a hot se. Just iin the moment it just felt super shitty. Also Scott Wharton (a local comic) had come out and hung as well.

After Adam’s set I had a guy come buy my album, and got to talk to the other comics for a bit. They were fun to talk to and hang and Adam was very complimentary.

The second show looks like it is going to be super light. At 9 pm (start time) there is literally no one there. The gm Shelby comes over and says we can do whatever we want for this show.

Adam asks me if I want to do a shorter show/set and I tell him I’m down. So I'm prepping to only do about 10 minutes. Also Scott Wharton was going to get a guest spot so it would all even out.

Once the show starts there is about 14 people there and not only are they wasted, they don’t see like they even want to see standup. This is going to be a brutal show. The show doesn’t even start with the host. Scott just goes up and goes into his act. It is not going well at all. These people are not giving him anything. There are two drunk ladies in the front and he starts to get a little mean and aggressive with them which isn’t a good look.

After him Sean goes up and struggles as well. He makes a race joke about being against mixed race dating. This bothered a few of the women in the front and he goes in on them a bit. He keeps insinuating that they can both apologize to each other (a reference to his joke about white women giving head like they’re apologizing for slavery). The audience hates him. The audience is super talkative and interrupting his set and I’m just ready to do my time.

He brings me up (remembers my name this time.) I then proceed to work my ass off for 18 minutes. I just do crowd work and a few jokes. Half of the jokes work. The crowd work I opened with was basically me trying to separate myself from the previous comics. I apologized and got to know the two women in the front. I tried to get a dude to come on stage with me and he refused, but that was ok. I got chuckles on most things, and some crowd work got ok pops. I worked my ass off and felt good about how I handled it. I did my time and I’d give this set an F but I earned this F. I didn’t bail on my time. I stayed in the pocket and didn’t let them beat me. I had the best set of the first there by far and that was validating.

After this I grabbed my bag and said goodbye to Adam. He was complimentary, but I was ready to go home. I headed out and went to Arby’s to get a bit to eat. I stuffed myself with a roast beef and cheddar and Oreo bites. I deserved it. On my way home Scott messaged me that I left my notebook. I thank him for holding onto it and I am going to grab it from him Friday. A perfect ending for an insane weekend of comedy.

So that’s it laydees! That’s how my weekend went. I’ll be back tomorrow with Monday-today’s shows. I love you all soo very much and make sure to follow me on IG @winstonhcomedy. xoxoxo much love baybeeas!

#comedy #standup #comedy zone #comedy club #improv #crowd work #bomb #fight #race #smash bros