Oregon Daily Emerald staffers Dan Freimark, Ben Kendall and Kenny Ocker will be in Portland all weekend to cover the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and will be updating this post throughout the weekend to review shows, provide commentary and give some behind-the-scenes peaks at what it takes to run a four-day event with well more than 100 performers. @@Guys, just add your posts atop mine but below the lead paragraph and we can use the same story over and over again. — KO@@
2:27 p.m. Sunday, (DF) — A chat with Scott Gimple and Dave Holmes
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I sat down for a chat with the creators of the “Friday Forty” Scott Gimple and Dave Holmes. This went everywhere from the creation of the show to our love/hate relationship with Aaron Sorkin. About 17 minutes in really loud music started playing so we had to move to a hallway (which then became even louder).
Howard Kremer and Kulap Vilaysack enjoying “house band” (Steven) Brody Stevens (Dan Freimark/ Daily Emerald)
9:09 p.m. Sunday, (DF) — “Who Charted” topped the charts yesterday to a packed Baghdad theater with guest Brett Gelman. In the style of the show I will chart the top five moments from the show.
Number five! — Howard Kremer Describing why he prefers lighter forks.
When the band Spoon came up in the top 5 bands that moved to Portland, Kremer went on a tangent on how he prefers lighter forks and how he only has one for some reason. It really encapsulated what makes the show funny. The charts are really only there to make talking points and if that is 10 minutes on what kind of forks are best then that is what it will be.
Number four! — Everyone destroying the worst top five list ever.
The film list was top five films that were filmed in Oregon. When number five was “Bandits” everyone knew we were in trouble. While number one was “Drugstore Cowboy” (a great film) the list left of “One flew over the Cuckoos Nest,” “Stand by Me,” “Goonies,” and “Animal House.” The list was rightfully destroyed by everyone involved.
Number three! — Brody Stevens being Brody Stevens.
Comedian’s comedian Brody Stevens played the house band of the show (he had a tambourine). I can’t really describe brody stevens so here is this video.
Number two! — Bret Gelman destroying a audience member.
During a quiz portion of the show an audience member called out the answer. In response Bret Gelman went on to destroy the audience member. By the end of his rant I’m surprised that Gelman didn’t get a standing ovation.
Number one! — The complete devolution of the show.
By the end of the show all format was lost, and it was glorious.
11:35 p.m. Saturday, (KO) — After taking in The Humor Code, I decided to sit through the Friday Forty with Dan and a former Emerald colleague. But because Dan scored an interview after the show that has audio to edit, I won’t spoil how that went other than to say that I had a blast listening to Dave Holmes and Scott Gimple run their current events/drinking game show. (As a journalist, I’m required to like both parts of the theme.)
After that was complete, aforementioned former Emerald staffer and I walked down Hawthorne Boulevard — the arterial road of the entire festival — to the Hawthorne Theater to take in a little bit of primetime standup. The start of the show was rough, as emcee Claire Titelman’s gag of being dumb kind of bombed with the audience, drawing far more quizzical looks than laughs. Titelman butchered names and facts for the other comedians on a regular basis, and there were quite a few jokes told at her expense to raucous applause. Apart from that, however, the rest of the comedians were hilarious. Many a joke was made about Portland’s whitewashed population and its hipster stereotypes, but other than that, there was quite a bit of diversity of subject matter and style, which made for an enjoyable 90-minute set. Chazz Hawkins, the second comedian to the stage, had quite a few enjoyable moments to get the audience back into the show after Titelman’s performance, and that momentum carried all the way through to the end of the set when Andres du Bouchet captured the audience with a hilarious call-and-response bit that went from an awkward start to a ridiculous-yet-somehow-enthralling conclusion. Despite choosing this show on a lark, it was just as enjoyable as anything else I’ve taken in so far this weekend.
8 p.m. Saturday, (BK) — I didn’t know what to expect when I went to the Bagdad theater for “Lance Bangs Presents: Come Laugh With Us.” It was a bunch of names that I didn’t readily recognize. But, that really doesn’t matter, my comedy knowledge is severely lacking these days as I don’t get let out of the basement very often (not since the “incident”). Bangs is a documentarian, music video producer, among other things. He worked with Spike Jonze a lot, and that’s cool. The show was a mixed bag. It started out strong Emily Heller. She just killed it. Her timing is strong and material top-notch. But, what works for a show isn’t near as memorable as what didn’t. Brett Gelman’s routine was super flat. After he was heckled (and it felt like it was staged,) his come backs were effective but lacking in elegance. Yes, there is an elegant way to deal with heckling. The crowd was lost during the multimedia portion of Bangs’ showing clips of “Jackass,” and a short mini-doc with David Cross about his film “Run Ronnie Run.” Gelman would also get into an argument about one of his video pieces (which was also staged) with Bangs. I’m all for experimental comedy methods, but you’d think they would have tried it out before showing a routine that doesn’t work with a room of over thousand people. It wouldn’t work with a room of 5 people. It just didn’t work. Period. The quality of the show was split half and half. Half was great, I was laughing my ass off. The other half I just wanted it to end. I shouldn’t have to go find my ass until after the show is over.
6 p.m. Saturday, (DF) — interview with Chris Mancini
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We sat down with Comedy Film Nerd’s Chris Mancini to discuss the website’s upcoming book, future plans and whats wrong with the modern film industry.
5:30 p.m. Saturday, (KO) — As someone who’s new to analyzing comedy, The Humor Code’s five-person panel explained a lot of the science behind comedy. University of Colorado researcher Peter McGraw and Denver-based journalist Joel Warner were joined by comedians Pete Holmes, Myk Kaplan and Mary Mack, with the former two providing scientific hypotheses and the latter three providing comedic context. McGraw’s research — aided by some hilarious jokes — paints a picture that jokes go over best when they threaten people but are benign enough to not be taken seriously. The mechanics of how that’s done changes on a person-to-person basis, just like taste, but that theory applied with the comedians’ jokes throughout the set, and also with the commentary of McGraw and Warner. The 90-minute lecture was hilarious and informative, which is something I wish I was better at, in both regards. I accidentally did learning on a Saturday night.
2 p.m. Saturday, (DF) — Bridgetown by the numbers — There is a lot that goes into running a comedy festival, so here is a light breakdown of some of the festivals stats.
Performers – 247
Volunteers – 150 (doing everything form tickets and selling merch to driving comedians around)
Venues – 11
Shows – 97
Most Shows at Once – 10 (Friday at 8:00 p.m.)
Total Run Time of Shows – 6.06 days 2 more days than the festival itself
Comedian Doug Benson intros “Con Air” at the Benson Movie Interruption. (Dan Freimark/Daily Emerald)
9 p.m. Friday, (BK) –Doug Benson’s movie interruption while watching “Con-Air”– Doug Benson, Kulap Vilaysack, Jimmy Dore and Matt Braunger made like MST3K while watching “Con-Air” for our enjoyment. I’m not sure if he could get away with more because it was Doug Benson, but it did produce a few chuckles from myself and my comrades. Of course it goes without saying that Benson was remarkably high at the time (shocker). There was a great deal of silence during the action packed scenes so I felt they may have been totally tripping out when little Nicky Cage and his mullet-prison-hairpiece jump out of exploding shacks in slow-motion. I know I was tripping out. The line outside had already grown to epic proportions before they started seating people and the theater was packed. Now down to brass tacks: was it fun? Was it worth it to go see it? Am I wearing pants as I write this? It was fun enough that it was a pleasant diversion, but if you weren’t drinking beer while watching it (the only way to see “Con-Air,” really) it may have fallen flat. Was it worth the 15 bucks? Ehhhhhhh… not really. If they gave out a free beer, then it would have been. But then, everything is better with free beer. They should break the news to cancer patients that way. “I’m sorry you have terminal thyroid cancer. So, have a medically sterilized Miller High-Life and good luck.” The answer to the pants question is… well, you know the answer to that.
Comedians Graham Elwood, Janeane Garofalo and Chris Mancini discuss summer blockbusters. (Dan Freimark/Oregon Daily Emerald)
7:30 p.m. Friday, (DF) — Han shot first — “Comedy Film Nerds (podcast)” is the baby of Chris Mancini and Graham Elwood and can be summed up by the show’s tagline “Han shot first.” They have a deep love of films, but a equally deep disappointment in the modern film industry. Today in Portland, they held a special live episode with a packed Mt. Tabor Theater. This recording is one of the better episodes of the show that they ever recorded. One part being figuring out their tributes for the “Horrible Director ‘Hunger Games’” with Michael Bay being one of the tributes that gets killed trying to get to the cornucopia and with audience suggestion of Quentin Tarantino (whom they love) to be the “Career” sent from the CFN district. Another part of this was due to the amazing guest Janeane Garofalo, who played off Graham and Chris as they went through the summer movie preview. For the second year in a row, the live episode in Portland centered around the summer movie releases which ones to see and which ones to skip (hint: see “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises”). There was also a special drop-in by fellow comedian and film buff Doug Benson of “Doug Loves Movies” and “Super High Me” to play “The Leonard Maltin Game,” a trivia game based on figuring films our in reverse order of actors listed. The show was hilarious and will be availible as a paid episode on comedyfilmnerds.com, to subscribe to the standard podcast click here
11:36 p.m. Thursday, (KO) — The first show I took in — my first comedy show ever, actually — was “Conspiracy Theory Live with Jesse Ventura,” a panel-style mock TV show led by James Adomian. Adomian’s over-the-top impersonation included a shirt stuffed with sweaters to match Ventura’s less-than-svelte physique, a gravelly voice and a fake bald hairpiece, one that “Ventura” says was cut from a goblin mask and used to keep himself safe from facial-recognition software. The key to the entire hour-long bit, which went from the monologue through the audience interaction to the end of the panel discussion, was the constant allusions to Ventura’s successful career as a professional wrestler and his successless career as governor of Minnesota. The guest appearances from characters including G. Gordon Liddy (John Roy), wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts (Steven Benaquist), non-wrestler Jake “The Snake Roberts” (Eric Andre, who, in character, dropped his drawers at one point) and Bradley Manning (Johnny Pemberton) brought brilliant moments of current pop culture interspersed with absurd conspiracy theories, and made for a hilarious start to my experience at the festival.