It was heavy on the Jews, the New Jersey, the Emerson College and the filth Monday at the College Comedy Showcase compiled by Myles Beckerman for The Comedy Studio in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. There was a lot to like onstage, and Emerson can feel smart about having comedy majors (even if Maddie Thompson says being one “means I am spending a lot of money to keep my virginity”).
One of those comedy majors is Addy Goldstein, a first-year student from Florida who got to the point of her set quickly: “I’m going to tell you something a little raw and experimental about my life. Try to keep it together. My mom just died.“
This was not a bit – or, rather, the bit was that it was true. “This happened last week. You guys, I’m processing it my way,” Goldstein said, “and if you don’t laugh, I’ll cry.”
See almost any movie about stand-up comedy to get a sense of how popular it is in the lore that comics use their set to process something momentous and terrible in front of an audience. It’s not unheard of in real life: Tig Notaro broke through in 2012 with an unrehearsed set just hours after she was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer.
Notaro is a dry, essentially imperturbable comic; that night proved it. That’s not the case for Goldstein, who verged on the manic as she recounted how even her high school bullies were coming to her with sympathy (“And I’m like, halt. What are you doing at my chamber door?”) and the repetition of people expressing that there were no words in the face of such tragedy (“and then it’s followed by a paragraph”). She presented a list of topics to explore aside from her mom’s death (“the weather, the news”) and placed it in a context her future self could appreciate (“My mom died when I was 20 years old, right before the Great War’”). Over a high-energy five minutes she cracked herself up, raising the possibility that the laughter might tip over into sobs.
Nope. After a postshow round of hugs from friends and family, she spoke briefly in The Comedy Studio green room about the set – which, before her mom’s death and funeral last week, was shaping up to be about hot yoga and how she hates it, how much she dislikes her therapist for doing hot yoga, her life, her dog. This set, she said, will ultimately be just one of many incorporated into an end-of-year analysis that must be academic and practical. “We learn about comedy in theory, like the way Aristotle thought about comedy, the way Plato thought about it,” Goldstein said.
“The way we’re trained is that if you have something funny, use it,” she said. “I love my mom more than anything in this entire universe. And I am absolutely devastated. It’s the only thing I can think about. Why not turn it into something positive that will make people happy? I just want to make people smile for my whole life, and I don’t want people to have to be sad with me.”
“This is awful and it’s bad and it’s terrible,” Goldstein said. “But, like, you know what’s funny about it?”
The silver to the Goldstein
Before Goldstein’s roller coaster ride through a Sunshine State shiva, a standout of the night was Jayden Lopez, another Emerson kid. He seems to be on his way to becoming one of the discipline’s top ranters – a Lewis Black with a touch of Chris Fleming surreality and a gift for metaphor that makes everything funny even when it’s not necessarily a joke. The onrush of text and surprise of a vivid analogy counts for a lot here; the idea of a light rain “edging the city,” for instance, is a strange and poetic description that gets the audience thinking in a delighted way … before being smacked immediately after with how it reminds you “of what a shit piss fucking city you live in.” Soren Allwert (yet another Emersonian) was a giddily perverse opener with his own way of shocking the audience into alertness for the night, and had a champion bit for explaining away a peek at his phone and set list: “Sorry, I’m trying to play Angry Birds real quick.” As good as that was, Lopez arrived on stage locked in, with no notepad or Notes app to fall back on for an all but relentless journey with someone who could be one of comedy’s great cranky bastards.
Wins all around, really.
What else was exciting Monday? Truly, Allwert’s smut is a treasure (“You ever laugh so hard you push a silicone cock out of your asshole? Let me rephrase the question, does anybody here go to Emerson College?”); Northeastern University’s Aidan Henderson is such a genial storyteller that you want him to keep going until he finds the joke; and Thompson killed by capturing the uniqueness of being at a second-tier school in Boston, “the only city in the world I can think of where your family comes to visit you and asks to tour a campus you don’t live on.” Mary Ghawaly of Northeastern has a superb whimsy that sharpens delightfully when focused on bad dates with men (“if I really want to piss them off, I just call astrology ‘astronomy’ a few times”); Trent Ford of Emerson had perhaps the best jokes of the night as well as a terrific deadpan callback – he occasionally reintroduces himself (“Hello, my name is Trent Ford”); and Emerson’s Luca Sandoval won over the audience thoroughly with a sparkling, mischievous exasperation that had him exploding-in-anger-but-not-really repeatedly around urban outrages such as the bagel ignorant. Nick Hesper of New England Law has terrific material (on realizing his mom was right about gateway drugs: “Oh, fuck. What else is she right about? Do I not look good in yellow?”) that will shine even more as he hones his acting; Matt Hecker knows how to charm and tell a joke, and don’t sleep on his advice if “you haven’t yet realized you can get a full day off work by just going up to your boss and making up a fake Jewish holiday”; and social media personality Charly Valentine ended the night as it began – filthily – by recounting a story about a dick pic from a Brit that built well (“I’m like, okay, at least it can’t get any worse”) with some solid bits along the way.
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