September 6, 2012
It’s an old joke that comedians don’t like college shows.
Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has several stories about doing comedy shows on college campuses, including one story where he describes his experience doing a show in the middle of a gym hosting a walkathon for lupus. Birbiglia sees these “hell-gigs,” as he calls them, as a necessary piece of the self-employment plan.
While the CAB comedy show last Saturday night in the Barn was nothing like a walkathon for lupus, it still managed to not be an ideal show for headliner Nick Thune.
“Every show is different,” said Thune early on in his set. “It’s fun… but it’s also stressful and frustrating at times,” said Thune, speaking to the experience of doing shows for audiences unfamiliar with his material. “Sometimes somebody comes into the crowd who you can’t control. You’re not aware of his disabilities or whatever.”
Thune used that introduction as a lead-in to one of the funniest bits in his repertoire—the story of having a deaf man in one of his audiences—but his words remained equally relevant to Saturday’s set. For alongside literal disabilities, such as deafness, Thune jokingly included “drunkenness.’ It’s not a stretch to imagine that he was also bent on including ‘college humor’ as a potential disability.
Indeed, more than halfway into his set, Thune remarked that he had noticed something important about the crowd’s sense of humor.
“So far you only laugh at mean jokes and dirty jokes,” he said. “Everything else that I’ve worked so hard to up with…not good enough.”
Even though Thune’s comment was couched behind a funny façade, the aggravation was clear. After a joke about alternative band Nirvana failed to trigger much laughter, Thune scoffed that his jokes were written for people a few years older than those in the audience.
But it’s easy to understand why some of Thune’s comedy fell flat; at heart, he is a hipster provocateur. As if standing on stage picking patterns on an acoustic guitar while telling jokes weren’t already odd enough, Thune has a wonderfully dry delivery, spitting out one-liners with a studied insouciance that makes the jokes bite all the more. Or—in the case of Saturday’s show—bite less than usual. He would have been more at home performing for the usual IMF group than the first-year-heavy crowd that showed up on Saturday night.
So even though Thune owned some of the night’s more sustained laughter, the opener Jared Logan probably won the biggest laughs with his loud, inane rants about bad stand-up comedians and strange sexual escapables.
As a stage presence, Logan was somewhat at a loss, never completely comfortable playing the archetypal self-effacing loser. Besides the insistent allusions to the sorry state of his love life and the constant angling for pity in that department, he dropped references that placed him squarely into nerd camp, peppering bits with LOTR fan clubs and manga. Compared to Thune later on, Logan’s jokes felt stale and incomplete. Thune—even if underappreciated by the crowd—was spot-on: his timing in the bag, voice as wry as ever, and his fingers surprisingly nimble across his acoustic guitar.