11:13PM
Pre-show:
I'm at the Comedy Cafe in Milwaukee this week; getting here was a little strenuous: I had Sarah drop me off at the Amtrak station this morning at 1AM. Unfortunately, the station closes from 12:30AM to 3:30AM. So we took a nap in her car until about 4AM (my train was scheduled for 4:30). I slept on for most of the ride to Chicago, where I had a three hour lay-over. Luckily I killed some time by having lunch with Mikey Manker. The train ride from Chicago to Milwaukee was pretty quick and my cab-ride was pretty good. I took a nap and got up around 6.
The show:
Doing announcements at the Comedy Cafe doesn't leave a lot of room for material if you go verbatim off of the laminated card they have. I've been doing the announcements for a while, and was able to get through them pretty quick so I was able to get to my jokes pretty quick. I was only planning on doing my black-name joke and my smoking stuff, but I didn't see a light so I did my sober joke and my black-out material and I closed on my gay-bar story. My set went really well and I got some really big laughs. During my "I don't think that dog even exists, now he's in two jokes" line, I thought I heard the comics in the back laughing really loudly. My second favorite part of the night was when I brought up Dan on stage and said he was the 1987 Pittsburg Swashbuckling champion and when I brought James up and said he saved my life in Vietnam.
The opener this week is Dan Polydoris from Chicago, the feature is Carl Lee from Oregon and Scott Henry is headlining (the last time I was here, Scott was headlining). My buddy James Irving Berry stopped by and did a guest spot.
At the end of the show, I blanked on Dan's name so I said "keep it going for Scott Henry, Carl Lee... ... ... myself and that other guy". It was embarrassing, but the crowd was already getting out of their seats so no one but James noticed.
James and I talked about emceeing at the Cafe, and he said he trimmed the announcements (he isn't doing them verbatim) and moved the Gold-Card announcement to after his set. He said that doing that allowed him to do an additional minute or two up front.