How was it Lane? Get to meet Maria again? Go to the signing before the show? Did she throw a few new jokes in the mix?
It was great. I did. I did. Absolutely!
I showed up at Ameoba, and Maria was there with the other CoC comedians. They were all corralled at a table behind a little picket fence, like they were Santa Clause. There was hardly any line. So I went up and said hello, and Maria looked at me funny like she recognized me. So I reminded her that I gave her the Pug Life T-shirt at the ThrockMorton, and then she remembered.
I gave her a couple of DVD's as a present. One was "Little Voice", which is a good Micheal Caine movie about a shy girl who can do dead-on imitations of famous female singers. The other was a Tracy Ullman stage show where she tells her life story. Maria seemed to like them and said she would watch them. I put my email address inside the DVD's and wrote a note to her that she should email me and tell me what she thought, but who knows. She signed a CoC poster for me "Thanks for the wonderful gifts. PUG LIFE 4 EVER. Maria Bamford". That was about it. Oh, and I got autographs from those other guys, whatever their names are.
Maria's set at the Independent was unbelievable. She's gotten even better since the last time I saw her.
She came out to huge applause, people were shouting and going crazy. She opened with the wonderful Baby Jesus voice mail messages. Oh, and she did her bit where she acts out a map of the world. She did a little bit of it at the Throckmorton, but now it's expanded to about 5 minutes and it brought the house down. She'd go to each country and say "And here's the US, going "We're number 1" and here's Canada going "Oh, we're so sorry" and here's the MidEast, here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors,
everybody's really mad!!. I know, you had to be there, but she got a lot of applause for it.
Let's see. She did a new piece about trying to convince a character at County Mental Health that she needed therapy. She did another new bit about starting an atheist missionary service, so when people said "My God! I've lost my job and my house and my wife left me and there really is no God is there" she could be there to say "Welcome to the flock! Welcome home!"
And she did something similar to the superdelux eppy on OCD where the therapist kept suggesting wilder and wilder obsessions. There were some other parts I don't remember off the top of my head. I tried to record it with my phone, but it didn't really turn out. She closed with her hacky female comic character, which she's fleshed out into a much longer bit. It really killed.
Anyways, she was awesome. Much better than I've ever seen her. No hecklers, everyone loved her, so I never broke the seal on my pepper spray. I can't wait to see her do a full hour at the Punchline in February. SLP, you've
got to come!
All the comics had improved from last year, actually. Brent Weinbach did all new material and he really killed. And Brian has gotten a lot better too. Doug Benson was on the bill but didn't show up for some reason (which I'm assuming was drug related).
I've got to say this, as much as I love Maria: the real star of the show was Patton. I usually like him, though I've never been a huge fan -- but at Friday's show he just blew everyone away. I'd say that most of this 15 minute opening and almost 1/2 of his 1 hour set was obviously improvised. He did a lot of crowd work, where he was riffing off of people in the audience. He pick someone and ask where they were from or what they did for a living, and no matter what they said he found a way to make it funny. He was unbelievable. I've been trying to learn how to do that in my stand up, and trust me, man, it's hard. Even Maria, with all her unbelievable talent, stays away from crowd work.
He was funny at the record store signing too. He kept picking up the announcement mic and cracking jokes ("Will the scruffy 20 year old wearing the Che Guevara t-shirt and smelling of patchouli oil please come to the front of the store to roll his eyes at the new CD releases?").
So it was a great show. This time I brought some friends instead of going by myself like I did last year. We all enjoyed it.
