Blowhard, Esq. writes:

When was the last time you attended a comedy open mic? Recently I went to one and it was a strange and interesting experience.

The show is called Big Trouble, held every Tuesday at a small dive bar in Little Tokyo. I got there pretty late, sometime after 11. About a dozen people were present, of which only three to four were actually paying attention to who was performing at any given time. The isolated laughter gave the place a sort of Lynchian air — all that was missing was a red curtain and midget. Although I can’t be sure, I’m fairly certain almost everyone there was a comedian who was going to perform. Well, everyone except me, although the host did introduce himself and ask if I wanted to be on the list.

I saw about five comics do five minutes each. Their sets ranged from OK to, er, not very good. Most of the material was clichéd (“Hey, how stupid are Twitter and Instagram?”) or the jokes had a decent set-up but no satisfying or surprising pay-off. But when you’re in a room where the majority of people aren’t paying attention, it’s almost impossible to develop any sort of momentum, so failure seems inevitable no matter the quality of your material.

While the jokes themselves might not have been very interesting, watching how each comic dealt with bombing was. The jokes were clearly rehearsed, yet whenever one fell flat (which was often), the comics had to react in the moment to recover, and they usually did so with a look or ad-libbed line tinged with a mixture of bemusement, anger, and exasperation. This happened in a flash, mind you, but it seemed like for a few seconds their real comedic personalities came through and I would think, “OK, now I see why people think this dude is funny.” I’ve mentioned this before, but it reminded me of Robert McKee’s observation that a person’s character is revealed when their expectation of reality is thwarted.

Besides, when you’re doing an open mic in the middle of the night in a crappy part of downtown L.A. while the homeless shuffle on the sidewalk right behind you, I don’t think having a killer set is really the point. A guitarist once told me that the best practice for a band is playing live shows in front of people, as many as possible, as opposed to merely rehearsing in a studio. For those comics, the point is to get up there, do it, and rack up experience. Grinding. No one said the first draft has to look pretty.

More:

• Holy Fuck, also held every Tuesday and just around the corner from Big Trouble, is a larger, better produced show that’s featured some major names. Did I mention both of these are free?
• If you decide to take in the shows, make sure you stop by bäco mercat for dinner. I highly recommend the bäzole, a cross between Mexican pozole and Vietnamese pho.
• Friend o’ the blog and comedian Steve Hernandez hosts a weekly podcast where he interviews up-and-coming Los Angeles comics.
• The best book I’ve read on the mechanics of humor is Dan O’Shannon’s What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event. Whereas most books on this subject are deadly (see Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, which I gave up after 10 pages), O’Shannon’s book, while geeky, is a fascinating analysis of funny that contains plenty of laughs. Comedy writer Ken Levine interviewed O’Shannon about the book here.