CONCERT REVIEW
Comics successfully fend off unruly crowd with humor
by Seth Rogovoy(PITTSFIELD, Mass., May 13, 1997) -- A feisty crowd gave a handful of stand-up comics from New York a challenging workout on Saturday night at the Studio. Fortunately for those who came to be entertained by the professionals, the comedians were more than up to the task of facing down the taunts of a few obnoxious loudmouths.
In fact, the show turned out to be a showcase for improvisational comedy at its best. This is precisely where stand-up differs from staged comedy. The tension between the comic's script and how well it is delivered in the actual, interactive here and now before a live audience is what gives stand-up comedy its edge and excitement.
It was indeed an edgy, two-and-a-half hours of comedy, as one by one, hecklers tried to distract the comedians from their routines. There is as much an art to heckling as there is to responding to hecklers, however, and the comics definitely had the upper hand, as the hecklers at the Studio offered them little to work with other than unintelligible ejaculations of gibberish or surrealistic non- sequiturs. As a result, it was easy for the comedians to make the hecklers look stupid, providing the rest of the crowd with comic relief at the expense of the hecklers.
Ironically, it was Mitch Fatel, the soft-spoken, very mild-mannered headliner, who finally shut up the hecklers for good. Part of his success was due to his masterful passive-aggressiveness in handling the hecklers; the rest was simply because of his marvelous routine, a character act somewhat recalling Andy Kaufman, featuring a "socially retarded" loser who just cannot quite connect with women. Fatel complained that he just "never got the guy manual" with instructions on how to be a regular Joe. What he did get, however, was the gift of comic timing which allowed him to remind the audience repeatedly, "I'm really funny; I was on TV," and make that hysterically funny.
Chris Arcudy also faced off the hecklers, albeit with a bit more aggression and less passivity. His routine bounced from drugs to baths, showers, PMS and back to drugs, but the biggest laugh he got was when he ridiculed the traffic flow at Park Square. "It's not a square, it's a rotary," he pointed out.
Vic Henly got off to a roaring start with jokes about his Alabama accent and poking fun at Pittsfield and even at North Adams -- both towns always good for a few laughs. He also came right out of the chute attacking one of the more vocal hecklers in the crowd, thereby getting the audience on his side from the get-go. His material soon petered out, however, when he resorted to tired jokes about Bill Clinton and Al Gore smoking pot in the White House.
Vanessa Hollingshead did not fare as well as the rest, and her failure to connect with the audience served as a signal lesson in what differentiates successful stand-ups from the rest. Hollingshead's material was not at fault, nor was her stage presence. What she lacked, however, was the ability to engage the crowd in the here and now. Instead, she rattled off her material seemingly oblivious to the fact that it wasn't going over -- or, perhaps more accurately, it was going over, right over the heads of her audience all the way back to New York, where jokes about beggars in subways and the connection between incest and Calvin Klein undoubtedly work better.
William Stevenson did a great job as emcee throughout the evening, disarming the crowd within seconds of taking the stage by drawing attention to the anomaly of his appearance as virtually the only black person in the room. "Where are the black people? You don't have any black people in Pittsfield?" he asked.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 13, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
Next Article || Previous Article || Back
