No joke: An optician, a limo driver & a dominatrix walk into Helium Comedy Club
"Sorry, guys!" he mouthed to no one in particular.
Ranic was one of eight members of a Comedy 101 class held over the previous six weeks at Helium. Tonight was their graduation show, and his classmates were already here: The firefighter who lives with five women. The optician who's dreamed of doing comedy for 30 years. A retiree who hit the comedy clubs decades ago as a young man in
As for Ranic, the bushy-bearded guy racing in late, his eyes slightly scurried behind his soda-bottle glasses? He's a 33-year-old who has struggled with school, alcohol, disease and the sudden death of his mother. He's back in school now, and he was late this night because he went to Bryant & Stratton's
He's determined to get school right this time, and he's determined to do right by his comedy class, too. Some people in his life have told him he couldn't achieve. So tonight, for Ranic, is all about confronting "the haters."
Moments before 8, class instructor
That was low-key. They sat around with their feet on chairs, drinking coffee and Mountain Dews and Big Gulps. The lights were on, and Lamb -- tapping what he calls his "inner critic" -- piped in with suggestions and tips to boost every joke.
In class, they were never alone.
But tonight, with the lights dimmed, the front of house packed and a spotlight illuminating the stage, they were about to be on stage alone, standing before a crowd waiting to laugh.
* * *
When this group first convened in mid-January, Lamb was the only one standing onstage. This class is his mode of performance. He's been in comedy since 1995, doing both stand-up and improv, but long ago decided to stay local rather than travel. He works full time as a training specialist at the
"You have to install an app in your brain," Lamb, 50, told the assembled group on Day 1. He pointed to his forehead. "I have an internal critic that does the work for me. He never shuts off."
Other than hosting his students' graduation shows, Lamb rarely performs anymore. Teaching is his performance, and though he has a gentle-giant persona with his students, it's an intense experience for him. After each class, he would pace around the club, often staring into a distant wall, decompressing.
Lamb has developed a small collection of comedy instruction sheets which he handed out over the first few weeks. They include the Writing Flow Chart (brainstorm, rant, underline, shorten and rewrite); the Joke Break-Up Page (make a statement, ask a question, give an example, then exaggerate into the punch line); and the Comedy Toolbox (14 strategies, including the Rule of Threes: "First and second are alike, the third is the punch").
The strategies aren't all Lamb's creations; he's a collector and observer -- a self-described "student of comedy." On the first day he distributed a syllabus, pointing out that the first three weeks would be packed with instruction and technique. One of the starting points, for example, would be having each student simply stand onstage and learn how to adjust the height of the mic stand and use the mic itself.
He also assured the students that they would become a tightknit group. "Lots of classes form text groups," he said, "and go to open mics together."
On Day 1, it seemed difficult to envision that happening. Lamb had each student do an extended self-introduction, and while the group was pleasant enough -- and fascinatingly diverse -- they were also awkwardly quiet toward each other.
"There are still tickets for the second show," she said, "if any of you would like to come."
Most of the group sat silent.
Lamb kept working around the room, asking people's reasons for enrolling in comedy school. Many of the answers mirrored ones he hears often:
My friends think I'm funny.
I've done some open mics and want to get better.
It's on my bucket list.
Ranic, sitting in the back, offered, "Haters are my motivators."
A few steps away from Ranic was
That one triggered Lamb's inner critic. He tracks the professions of his more than 200 comedy-school students. He has taught teachers, strippers, lawyers, salespeople, law-enforcement officers and, more than any other profession, electrical engineers.
But McKinivan, he said, was the "only dominatrix."
Except she's not one anymore. McKinivan, who moved to the states and married an American man a few years ago, does something new in her life every year. She's been a nude model for art classes. With her husband, she has motorcycled to most of the lower 48 states. She recently became an ordained minister and performs weddings on weekends.
McKinivan told the class that her eclectic collection of life choices is rooted in the way people treated her as a tall girl growing up. "I was always going to stand out," she said, "so it was license to do what I want."
Taking this all in was a 60-year-old man in a baseball cap who introduced himself by his stage name, Tony Slungini. He was not new to comedy: In the mid-'70s, while stationed with the Army in
"If you go back to
Silverstein did it. Buscemi did it. Slungini didn't. That stuck with him, maybe even gnawed at him.
"I saw how Silverstein did," Slungini said. "You know who he is?"
"What's his first name?" Lamb said?
"Andy."
Andy. Andrew ... Lamb got it.
"That's Dice Clay."
Back then, in his 30s and 40s, Slungini was working as a teacher, and then in government, and couldn't break away from career and family to take a shot at following Buscemi or Dice Clay.
But today, he's retired, his kids are grown, and he has money. He also has a girlfriend who signed him up for this class.
"Here I am," he told Lamb. "Forty years later, trying to do it."
* * *
Over the next few weeks, the eight students evolved from the awkward-kids-in-class phase to a collection of characters who played off each other's idiosyncrasies and helped their classmates grow. During the first couple of weeks, Lamb hand-held the group, using broad topics "drugs" and innocuous ones like "breakfast cereal" to help his students learn how to strategically brainstorm and construct a joke. It was mostly silly but there were moments of poignancy, like when Topliffe, referring to his girth, said softly, "Food is my drug."
Soon, though, he would be building that tiny moment of self-reflectiveness into comedy, cracking jokes about his stoutness by comparing himself to
By the third week of class, McKinivan decided to adopt a stage name,
Is the story true? Yes, and the dom-crew and their client got out fine. It should be noted that one of the key comedy tools Lamb teaches his students is exaggeration, so you can never take comedy too literally. So when Chi, the actress, concocted a story in which her mother-in-law asked her at
Or when firefighter
When
And when
After the last class, and one day before the graduation show, Lamb emailed the group.
"Your personas really came to fruition and we found our voices along the way!" he wrote, and later added, "Consider yourself prepared for tomorrow."
* * *
As Ranic rushed in just before the start of the graduation show, his classmates were settled and calm about taking the stage. Hodkinson sat at the bar with his girlfriend,
The limo driver MacMillan, who was adopting "Big Mac" as his stage moniker, was standing alone. Somebody asked if he was ready.
"I was born ready," he said in a tuba voice.
Lamb set the order of the show strategically: After an opening act by
Last was Topliffe, whose tables of supporters were certain to help him end the show on a cheery note. That played out: Topliffe, at ease on stage and playing with the crowd, more than doubled his allotted five minutes. When Topliffe crossed the 10-minute mark, the Helium sound guy cut off his microphone feed.
Topliffe, fully absorbed in the give-and-take and completely unaware of time, looked confused.
Lamb, who had been staring nervously at the stopwatch on his phone as Topliffe crossed from six minutes to eight minutes to double digits, whispered to him from the wings, "Say, 'Thank you, that's my time.' "
Topliffe, still exuberant, repeated the words and walked offstage. "I just riffed up there," he said in the bay of the club. "Love it! Love it!"
His crowd started chanting for an encore, though they didn't get one. Even for a student show, the clock eventually rules. Ranic learned that, too. Wearing a black-and-red Deadpool hat and going by the nickname "Bigg Redd" -- "two g's and two d's, just to be different," he said -- he delivered an act that poked fun at his auditory processing disorder. He got laughs, but when his act spilled well over his allotted five minutes, music started playing and he had to walk off.
A problem? No. After the show, Ranic put it in perspective: In his 20s, he had a DWI. He tried and failed at college. When he was 25, his mother died unexpectedly. She was only 51. He struggled with depression. He was diagnosed with diabetes. He developed a sensitivity to seeing others struggle like he was. "I don't like seeing people in pain," Ranic said.
When he was diagnosed not long ago with auditory processing disorder -- a condition that makes him hear words differently, he realized, "I could use this to my advantage. Maybe I could make comedy out of this."
Ranic did, with lines like this one: "If you said you want to kick my ass, I might have thought you said, 'Want to smoke some grass?' I'm like, 'We're cool, right?' "
The clock may have been an obstacle, but Ranic made the crowd chuckle. They were laughers, not haters. There was no pain. He was cool with that.
___
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