Review: The Alternative Show

Andy Kindler and friends offer humanity
and bread slippers
Andy Kindler, meta-comedian, makes the perfect host. Watching him interject between comics with jokes about jokes, he emits just enough self-effacing humility that you feel (temporarily) that everyone else on the bill is more important, giving the sense that he’s the Billy Crystal of Just For Laughs. A little background check proves it’s true. As well as hosting the Alternative Show, he also delivers the festival’s annual State of the Industry Address, for which he’s legendary. But while he rightfully concedes audience attention to the featured comics, he’s much of the reason people came in the first place. Perfect.

Kindler’s opening bit was genius, if turning a punk bar with no hinges on the toilet stall doors and support beams covered in skulls into 60 people roly-poly barrel laughing within seconds — by doing a middle-aged Jewish guy microphone stand dance — can be considered genius. I think so. He kept the laughs going for ten solid minutes until everyone was seated, settled, and utterly focused on the seven expressive faces that succeeded him. As the night wore on he grew less funny, but never un-funny.

Most of my comedy-watching experience is through television’s Comedy Network: going back to Dad’s place in the suburbs, turning on the cable, wondering why it’s not funny. Oh my Christ is it funnier in person!

I hate to force a philosophical angle, but the humanity of this setting is also striking. Seeing a largely awkward character in Pete Holmes, skulking at the side of the stage, transforming into a persona instantly under the lights, and launching into a monologue about masturbating on top of a made bed, smelling of Febreeze, having failed to score, and then lamenting as he finished, hands full, that “This was supposed to be for someone else!” is quite endearing.

The first three acts — Patton Oswalt, Holmes, and Kurt Braunohler — mixed in with Kindler’s spontaneous segues made the night roll. Oswalt delivers it’s-funny-because-it’s-true jokes. While your belly is still chugging with laughs, you’re already reflecting on how, once out of your twenties, he’s right: you do sorta forgive Nickelback, realizing there are so many worse things one could do to get rich and laid than write crap songs. Sorta. Braunohler was equally on point. Holmes absolutely killed it though.

Local hero DeAnne Smith brought self-awareness to the surface by first pointing out to a front row reveler that she’d try not to mention his (pink and purple flowered) shirt, then turning on her “liberal educated white person” hang ups, as well as pointing out that she was the only comic in the room with a vagina, before repeatedly telling us we could suck her balls anyway.

By the end, shit got weird. Smith was followed by Jerry Minor, along with a rapping jester and a man in nylons with no underwear playing a recorder.

By the time you are hit in the head, lightly, by a bread slipper and told to throw it back at a ping-pong paddle-waving Australian Sam Simmons, you’re kinda ready to go home. But, really, it’s just long enough, and really, really worth it.

There are three more nights of the Alternative Show with host Andy Kindler, all in English, with seven different comics each night. July 26 – 28, Katacombes, 11:59 a.m. ■