Brian Slattery Photos
It was just after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, and host Dan Kalwhite lost no time warming up the healthy crowd for the latest A Guy Walks Into a Bar comedy open mic night at Cafe Nine, which featured returning performers from September’s installment as well as fresh new faces. He fished the crowd for anything interesting they have eaten for dinner.
One audience volunteered that she’d had pretzels for dinner — at a pizza place outside New Haven, before coming down to the club on State and Crown.
“They serve pretzels at a pizza place?” Kalwhite said. “The pizza must be terrible.”
Kalwhite also explained the rules of the open mic, which were simple. Each performer got 5 minutes, with Kalwhite giving them a warning signal at 4 minutes. Procuring the laughs from the audience was up to them. They accomplished it all, with some adventurous comedy that worked blue, pushed boundaries, and offered release.
First up was a comic who went by Freefisting.com; despite his somewhat edgy name (“don’t Google it,” he suggested), he offered more sardonic, absurdist humor, delivered as deadpan one-liners. “I’ve been uploading my socks to Match.com, but none of them match,” he said. “The news says UFOs are real and aliens are crossing the border.”
“Finally!” someone in the crowd yelled.
The non sequiturs continued. “I asked Alexa, ‘what does GOP stand for?’ and they said ‘they don’t stand for anything but themselves.’ AI is getting good,” he said. He finished with some timely gallows humor. “A guy walks into bar, because all the hospitals are full,” he said.
Kenny’s humor revolved around the difficulties of being Black, and living up to expectations. “I’m 29 and they’re still to this day asking if I’m staying out of trouble,” he said. “I can’t tell if it’s ageism or racism. What am I offended by right now?” He also mentioned that his parents had him young, when they were 15. “It’s like I entered the country illegally,” he said. Finally, he explained that he found himself lonely these days, “so I do lonely people things,” he said. For example, coming up with the solutions to huge societal problems all by himself in his room; he might “Google Map North Korea, like ‘maybe I can fix this,’” he said.
“Whenever I’m at a crosswalk, I feel like it’s a short history lesson about colonialism,” Ethan began. “There’s a red hand saying ‘stop’ and then a White guy just goes anyway.” His jokes settled on some of the improbable people who, it turned out, had pages on IMDB — people like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and convicted killer Jodi Arias. Not only that, but Hitler’s movies enjoyed an overall favorable rating. “Who is rating these? Probably people who look exactly like me,” he said.
Nick engaged the crowd with a series of questions, asking them to raise their hand if they, say, “have ever been fired by Marshall’s twice.” No matter what the audience did, he acted as though everyone in the audience had raised them; the disconnect from reality made the gag work. “They need to make dogs bigger. They’re too small,” he said. “Conversely, they need to make cars just a little bit smaller.” Tapping into some of the unrest felt broadly in the past few years, he said, “Why do people like adult coloring books? Just make pipe bombs.” The audience got it. He ended with an absurd, squelchy impression of himself eating a gigantic grapefruit.
The next comic, Josh, went for self-deprecation. “I don’t feel good,” he began. “It’s weird because I had Di Giorno’s and Pop Tarts, so I don’t know why I don’t feel good.” He headed into intentionally awkward conversation about sex. “Did you have a sex talk with your parents or did you learn in school?” he asked.
“School,” someone yelled from the audience.
“Bet you think you’re pretty good at it, then,” Josh said, to laughter. Then he switched it up to a joke altogether appropriate for the weather of the past couple days. “You ever turn your windshield wipers from high to low and think, ‘yeah, take a load off, fellas?’”
Mo, returning to the stage from the previous month, began with a wicked smile on his face that betrayed his angle; he was going to joke about things because the alternative was to go crazy. “Things are hard out here,” he said. “I saw a homeless guy with a sign that just said, ‘run me over.’” The audience was on his wavelength, and laughed. “I walked into a McDonalds and there were three White guys working there. I thought, ‘we really are in a recession.’” He explained that his family had emigrated from Somalia. “My parents wanted me to be a doctor,” he said. “They were too ambitious. Now I don’t even have health care.”
The next comic, Matt, made himself the butt of his jokes. ““I look like Jon Snow and Jonah Hill had a baby,” he said, to laughter. “Recently I lost 75 pounds.” He got a round of applause. “Even more recently, I gained 85.” People laughed again. “Recently I upgraded to an XXXL from an XXL. You know how hard it is to know that your shirt has more exes than you do?”
Shawn’s comedy ranged from sex talk to describing about an altercation he had with a seven-year-old while working once as a camp counselor. But he started with an observation about popular online videos of men being kicked in the testicles. “He’s got to be a groper,” Shawn said. “Nobody gets kicked in the balls for insider trading.” After working blue for a minute, he switched topics — to inequality. He explained that he currently has a job delivering and installing expensive household appliances, which meant that “I get paid minimum wage to see how great my life would be if I didn’t.”
“I love being Italian,” said Colin at the beginning of his set. “Have you seen all the representation we’ve been getting?” He mentioned everything from the Sopranos movie to the impending release of a big-screen Mario Brothers movie. “This would be the greatest year ever” for Italians in the media, he said, “if not for Andrew Cuomo.”
He went on to talk about how he’d been bullied a lot in school, on account of being small and taking special education classes for a speech impediment. His mom explained to him that he and his two younger brothers all ended up in special education. “Maybe she should have stopped at one,” he said. “Either that or Greenwich, Connecticut thinks middle class is a learning disability.” (The next comic, Alfonse — returning from last month — mentioned that he also had a speech impediment as a child. “They said I should go to therapy, but therapy is where you go when you want to talk about your problems,” he said, letting the irony sink in.)
Newcomer Elaine had a message for the audience. “Please put on your masks,” she said. “Not because of Covid. I just don’t want to see your faces.” She explained that she had been born with flat feet severe enough that she’d received titanium implants as a child. “It was all worth it because now I’m part robot,” she said. She went on to say that “I used to be a software engineer. I wrote code for a living. It made me feel like I was dying.” She said that people told her “you should start running and you’ll live longer.”
“But then I’d have to spend more time running,” she added.
Kalwhite was clearly impressed as she left the stage. “Are you brand new, Elaine?” he asked.
“I mean, I’m getting old,” she responded.
Ben’s comedy hinged almost entirely on delivery; a series of announcements about the current state of his life sounded desperate and sad on paper, but had the audience laughing loudly because of his emphatic tone. The next comedian, Mustafa (another returnee), spared a thought for the way billionaires seemed to get weird, unable to properly enjoy their wealth. “I once read Steve Jobs wore the same clothes every day. What a loser! As soon as I got my stimulus check I got three new outfits.”
Pete mused on being a gay man at a time when perceptions of gay men rapidly shifted from his adolescence to today. He began by saying that he wished gay men would lean more into the abilities far-right religious protestors like the members of Westboro Baptist Church ascribe to them when they blame homosexuality for causing natural disasters. “I wish!” he said. “What an awesome superpower that would be.”
“I get told a lot that I don’t look gay or sound gay,” he continued. “But I think all that went out the window with Mike Tyson.” Explaining how Tyson could be such a ferocious boxer but then speaks with a gentle voice, he then added that somewhere out there “was a tiny gay man running around with Mike Tyson’s voice.”
Amid comedy about her family, Tricia also brought the audience around to a culinary theory she had. “I think we all know what the weak link in the sandwich is,” she said. “It’s the pickle.” There were gasps from the crowd. She pressed on. Pickles, she explained, were always the first things to fall out of the sandwich, which was especially embarrassing given that cucumbers tended to stay in sandwiches, like “responsible cousins.”
“Do better,” Tricia said to pickles.
The next comic, Joy, explained how she once, unsuccessfully, tried to talk her way out of a minor traffic violation by explaining to the officer that her previous traffic violations had been even worse. The last scheduled comic, Ish (another returnee), talked about the interesting place of being of slightly indeterminate ethnicity in U.S. society. “If you’re going to be racist to me, you have to figure out what kind of brown I am first,” he said. “Am I trying to bomb you, or just move to your neighborhood because you have a good school system?”
The comedians that night were inspiring enough that when Kalwhite asked if anyone in the audience wanted to get up and try it, he had a volunteer. “I don’t know how you guys do this,” Brenna said of the previous comics. “Cafe Nine is a great place. I just moved here.”
The audience cheered.
“I grew up here,” she added.
“Wait a minute!” someone in the audience yelled.
She riffed on what the previous comedians had talked about, then found her own groove, ending by mentioning the nanny she’d had as a child, a smoking, loud-talking woman who “stole $300 from my dad and drove a car through the front of a store — and that was the woman who raised me,” she said, as if to say, and this is how I ended up this way. The audience cheered. They liked her just as she was.
The next Guy Walks Into a Bar comedy open mic night is on Nov. 10 at Cafe Nine, 250 State St. Check the club’s listings on its website for more information.
