Olive Tree Cafe & Bar / Comedy Cellar. Greenwich Village. The Olive Tree Cafe is upstairs for those wanting a bite before or after the show. The Comedy Cellar is located...um...in the cellar.
The Cellar, The Creek, and the Evolution of My Live Comedy Consumption | Julie Seabaugh
Substance over style is no longer up for debate. Comedic expertise funds 100 percent of my annual income. I even know how to behave in public. January marked my 10-year anniversary of professional journalisming, and in that decade, the way I define, experience and process stand-up has changed dramatically.
Example: Back in 2003 and 2004, hanging out at shows meant hitting the Comedy Cellar once a week or so, usually weeknights, when you could easily score those free online reservations that now only seem to pop up on the website for Sunday and late Wednesday shows. I’d sit right up front and sob into my two-drink minimum over how fucking funny Rich Vos, Mike Birbiglia and Lisa Lampanelli were. Then thunder up the stairs two at a time, throw open the door, process the weary faces populating the back table simultaneously processing whoever’d just come in, and spend the rest of the night at the Olive Tree bar, bugging the everliving shit out of Robert Kelly, Dan Naturman and Dave Attell. Nachos were typically involved. Each and every time I’d holler joyously about how the chips and cheese not only came on their own platter big enough to serve a Thanksgiving turducken, but all the salsa, guac, sour cream, lettuce and jalapenos came on a whole other plate altogether. There was also alcohol. So, so much alcohol.
I’d only started following stand-up a few months before I started visiting the Cellar regularly. Once I discovered Jerry Seinfeld’s 2002 documentary Comedian--and understood how he’d in part filmed there to extol the sacrosanct/volatile vibe, thank owner/father figure Manny Dworman and pay homage to the West Village’s indelible role in shaping music/literary culture--fuggedaboutit. Somewhere between 2 and 4 a.m. I’d be sobbing again, this time over the lovingly chalked-up slate tables, the Charlie Chaplin projecting silently overhead, the serene portraits sketched in pencil, framed on wood panel, glowing dimly beneath stained-glass lamps. This was ground zero for the absolute best comedy in the world, man! This was beautiful! This was the heart and home of the truest, most honest expression of humanity anyone could possibly...yes, I would love another Blue Moon, thank you very much!
Nine times out of ten I’d drink straight through until last call. When everyone got herded outside, they made a 90-degree right turn and set up shop again a few doors down at the old, pre-2008/2009 renovation Minetta Tavern. Taps ran past the legal cutoff; cigarettes clouded the air despite the Smoking Ban having gone into effect the spring of 2003. Mornings I recalled how I got home remained few and far between.
I also frequented Comic Strip Live, the Laugh Lounge and the Laugh Factory in Times Square (as well as the back hallways of the latter--leading to the fire-hazard, death-trap, showbiz-depository office of Joe Franklin), though they scarcely compared. Comics say the only place they ever feel like themselves is onstage; I’ve never felt more in tune with the world than while making a youthful nuisance of myself somewhere on the premises of 117 MacDougal. Everything was close quarters and brimming with potential, and so enthralling it made my stomach clench for hours on end. (Though in hindsight, those pangs could have been my liver.) To this day I still feel a visceral interior hum when popping out of the basketball court subway exit on West 3rd, Froggering between cars to avoid the stand-arounders blocking The Blue Note, passing the Fat Black Pussycat and The Village Underground, and rounding the corner at Ben’s Pizzeria.
Now in 2013, The Laugh Lounge is gone, the Laugh Factory turned into the godawful Times Square Arts Center, and Comic Strip Live hasn’t changed one iota, which in the entertainment business isn’t that reassuring a selling point. My new rotation takes me Long Island City's The Creek and The Cave, a brick-walled burrito joint that just happens to have a black box theater adjacent to its northeast wall, and where owner Rebecca Trent celebrated an anniversary of her own this past weekend. Most shows are free and there is no drink minimum. I stand in back, arms folded, particularly notable bits from Pat Dixon and Nick Turner and Barry Rothbart eliciting a mumbled “Nice.” Then thunder down the stairs to the bar area, make a 90-degree right turn, process the moustachioed faces simultaneously processing whoever just came in, and spend the rest of the night bugging the everliving shit out of delusional open-micers by not jumpstarting their careers pro bono. There is no alcohol, as I laid off the drinking last year. By 11:30 or midnight, it’s time to head home for a nice chamomile tea and vibrant dreams uncompromised by nausea, dry mouth or splitting headache.
There is an up-and-coming neighborhood offering both easy subway access to three boroughs and reasonable, performer-viable rents. There are handsome hipstermen and pretty hipsterwomyn who drink straight through until last call. There is a clubhouse for the second-generation scions of alternative-comedy elders who eschewed the notion of home clubs. There are Kickstarters and podcasts and festival auditions. There is momentum.
While I still pop into the Cellar from time to time, I rarely make it beyond the 10 p.m. show. Nachos are out, as I swore off dairy. I nurse club soda. I can’t remember the last time Vos, Birbiglia or Lampanelli appeared on the schedule. Yet when Creek regulars Mark Normand or Dan Soder or Joe List make the Cellar lineup, you can read all over them how humbled and thrilled they are to be here. Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle or Robin Williams or Ray Romano will drop in. Slate tables will be covered in chalk doodles; Charlie Chaplin will project silently overhead. Young audience members will get drunk and fail to remember how they got home. Jokes riffed in a claustrophobic basement may one day go on to spark a revolution.
I only recently put it together than the Cellar and I were born the same year. (Some sources alternately mark its founding in 1982, but Cafe Feenjon began programming comedy in 1980. Plus 1980 works better for my purposes.) That makes us twins, or means it’s understandable to feel a connection, or confirms how planetary alignments fated me to, of all the joke joints in all the towns in all the world, walk into that landmine.
I get a laugh every time I say it. But I’m totally serious: When I die I don’t want a coffin, mortuary or burial plot. And certainly no religion. Cremate my body, maybe say some words and pour out a few nachos in the showroom. Then flush me down the left side toilet in the Comedy Cellar women’s room. That’s where I spent my giddiest moments--marveling at the mind-blowing amazingness I’d just seen/heard and eager to absorb whatever amazing mind-blowingness I’d see/hear next. I’ll disappear from this world like so many other spent punchlines in a place I felt truly alive, my dusty remains rushing to join the brain cells, bodily fluids and endorphins I happily sent swirling down that drain so many years before.
Collaborative drawing with Daniel Fishel @Olive Tree Cafe! Good food, live music, and awesome friend. What can you ask more? Probably bigger table to draw?
