Comedy Tonight - Disaster

If my blog were old enough to have an archive, this would be in it. Unfortunately, I did not see fit to write down all the disasters of my life any earlier. This one is old but gold.

At one point, Snarky and I decided we needed to expand our dating horizons. I did a ton of research on restaurants and activities in different neighborhoods than the ones where we lived in hopes of meeting people we would not normally run into during our everyday life. Before venturing all the way up to University area (it's a horrible trip - probably 10 miles away) we decided to check out NoDa. See, we all know that I love to laugh and together, Snarky and I like to make fun of people. It seemed like the perfect choice to go to a stand up comic open mic night. We had no idea what was about to hit us.

So we drive across town, get in an argument with some guy who thinks we should pay him to park in a public parking lot, and make our way to the second story of a building that is on the edge of civilization. As we enter the building, we should have known something was wrong. There were only about 10 people in the entire place. I get my wallet out to pay the $5 cover which seemed completely reasonable to watch local stand up amateurs. Then we reach the table and the guy we are paying looks very confused. Suddenly, I wonder if we just paid some random guy the cover and he doesn't actually work there. Snarky and I stupidly just shrugged and went to find a seat. Like any good church goers, we stayed in the back. As we're sitting there, I'm beginning to wonder if I misread the start time. The place is still empty - just a handful of people. Then it starts - the MC takes the stage to give a welcome and calls out Snarky and I to move closer. Trying not to make a scene, we move into the center area of seats.

Now the show begins. The first poor soul gets up there and tries to be funny....then the next, and so on. Along about person number four, Snarky looks at me and almost simultaneously we realize what has happened. The reason the guy at the door seemed a bit confused is because no one has ever come to see this show before. The only people sitting around us are other participants of the evening. We are the ONLY people in the building who haven't prepared their 5 minute act. Luckily, we realized this before the comedians, because eventually, they too made this realization. Then they started heckling us. You can't walk out when you are the only two observers of this whole mess! So we sat there, not speaking, not even looking at each other because we knew we would immediately just lose it. Never have the two of us been so quiet. Never have we longed so much for something to end (except maybe work). After the last "comedian" performed, the MC asked to make sure we didn't want to say anything. We both politely declined and hightailed it out of there. When we finally hit the sidewalk outside the building we burst into a fit of laughter that had us both laughing so hard that we couldn't see through all the tears.

If I could teach anyone one lesson from this experience, it would be that if you ever want to see comedy, you should probably not go to an open mic night.