Caden Adrien The comics were dragging setups into storytelling Feb. 3 at The Comedy Studio’s open mic, a problem that became most obvious when Dylan Roy managed to undermine three pretty good jokes about Herb Chambers, the Silk Road and “cereal monogamists” by imagining the audience wanted them as punchlines to long anecdotes. One comedian left the filler on his native North Shore: Caden Adrien, a 22-year-old raised on the works of Mitch Hedberg and Cambridge’s Steven Wright. “They both do it so well that you don’t even know when the joke hits you – until it does,” Adrien said in a call Monday. “I definitely took to that one-liner sort of comedy. I found myself enthralled in the wordplay of it.” Though his first stand-up at 18 included rambling attempts at longer-form bits on 9/11 and the Timothée Chalamet movie “Wonka,” none of that survives into his current work, which is dark, sly and fast. Like his heroes, setups are often just a few words: “My parents always said they wanted to die in their sleep,” Adrien says, “so I think I should be exonerated.”
Iris Kessler The Columbus transplant has been in Boston for only a few months and doing comedy for only three, but slayed Feb. 5 at the Studio by using part of her minute onstage in the “Kill Tiny” format for a great, relatable and self-deprecating joke and the rest to needle the show’s three judges. Her bit about being too big for her own urn when she dies was written years ago and became the first thing she tried onstage, Kessler told the panel – whom she called “three guys who are testing the limits of what a stool can handle” to an appreciative uproar. She managed to slip in a follow-up joke on the same theme, imagining a plus-size customer shopping at a funeral home feeling like shopping for clothes at “an Old Navy, they’re like, ‘We can check for your size in the back.’” Judges Andrew Balestieri, Jack Hall and Aaron “Tiny” Smith engaged, with Hall agreeing he’d had the same anxieties as Kessler. A nice return for a minute of stage time.
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