Funny Business 

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It’s Tuesday night at The Complex, where it’s likely you’d be taking in a concert and shaking some serious booty. Yet this crowd is far from rowdy. Most of the 20 or so men and women gathered are bent over spiral notebooks and legal pads, writing or studying intently, perhaps sipping on a drink. The only hint as to the entertainment that will eventually occupy the small wedge of a stage in the corner comes from the television over the bar, playing Comedy Central’s Tosh.0. For a night devoted to open-mic comedy, the mood is surprisingly serious.

At least until the comics start taking the stage. One by one, they make their way in front of the toughest kind of comedy crowd there is—mostly other comedians—to try out new material or perfect a slight twist on old material. Michael Eccleston shares his thoughts on giving a reviled historical figure a fair shake: “Say what you want about Hitler, but he does have one thing going for him: He killed Hitler.” Gay comic Brett Hodson reveals why he’s looking forward to all the closeted Mormons coming to town for the upcoming conference weekend: “Nothing works better as lube than shameful, shameful tears.”

The ranks of funny men and women have swelled, inspiring comedians to launch weekly or monthly showcases throughout the Wasatch Front. They’re diving into subjects that might be surprising to those who assume comedy in Utah is family-friendly and innocuous. And they’re dealing with the clashes that inevitably emerge in a highly competitive artistic field.

But a comic is only as good as his or her stage time, the number of minutes and hours sweated out onstage before heckling crowds. And with only a handful of local comedy venues, stage time for comics to work on their bits wasn’t easy to come by. In recent years, comics are more frequently turning up in bars and nightclubs to ply their craft, resulting in what some see as a rift in the comedy club scene. Beyond the feuds and philosophical differences, there’s simply a talent pool that seems to be getting larger—and more talented—with each passing week. “I wouldn’t say [the comedy is just getting] ‘riskier’ or ‘edgier,’ ” says Levi Rounds, a past winner of City Weekly’s Artys Award for Best Local Stand-up Comic. “I would say ‘better.’ ”

Change of Venues
While Keith Stubbs’ Wiseguys comedy clubs have been the primary stages for comedians for more than a decade, in the past two to three years, comedy shows have begun appearing at more and more venues. In February 2010, comedian Steve McInelly launched a monthly showcase at Club DJ’s in Kearns. Comedians Greg Orme and Christian Pieper started a regular “Cat Fashion Show With Jokes” at Muse Music Cafe in Provo. Murray’s 5 Monkeys features a Thursday-night open mic. And, most significantly, there’s The Complex, which, in addition to its weekly Tuesday-night open mic, offers a monthly “Comedy With a Complex” showcase, primarily featuring local comics, as well as touring comics occasionally. These all followed the lead of the “Sunday Funnies” comedy night at Mo’s Neighborhood Grill. Stubbs estimates—though he notes that “it all depends on your definition”—perhaps as many as 100 local comedians are regularly performing in Utah.

Why the number of performers and venues has grown so much and so rapidly is pure speculation, but comedian Andrew Jensen believes that the rise of social media plays a significant role. “Now, places who’d never advertise [a comedy show] because they didn’t want to put money into it, they’d just say, ‘You show up and bring your crowd’—well now they can advertise,” Jensen says. “It’s so easy, because they have a Facebook page. You say, ‘We’re having a comedy show,’ then all the comics ‘like’ that page, then everybody who knows those comics goes, ‘What’s that page?’

“I used to make and print out fliers and go out on the streets. And this was like, five years ago! No one passes out fliers on the street [now]. … There’s no footwork. It cut everything in half, and you can see your results.”

And those shows are drawing crowds. A Wednesday open mic at Wiseguys in April was packed, though Stubbs notes that audience size can vary greatly from week to week. At a “Comedy With a Complex” showcase in March, the Complex’s Ben Fuller had to delay the start of the show to drag in extra chairs and tables to accommodate the audience. They were treated to performers like Dean Weber, who began his set by asking the crowd, “Have you ever been so drunk, you couldn’t walk—so you had to drive?” Alex Winitzky rolled out a hilariously surreal explanation for why Oct. 7, 2003—the date Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California—marked “the date and time society was doomed forever.” Self-described “Viking librarian” Cody Eden shared why “getting drunk from wine was like getting V.D. from masturbating—no upside.”

“When I started seven years ago,” Rounds says, “it was eight comics at Mo’s and a shitload of comics at Wiseguys. Now, it’s about equal. It’s definitely snowballing. It’s a snowball on a very gradual hill.”

A Brief History of Comedy
Even a little more than a decade ago, the prospects for a thriving local stand-up comedy scene wouldn’t have seemed particularly bright. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a few Utah venues—including the Comedy Circuit in Midvale, and Johnny B’s in Provo—brought in national touring comedians. For the locals, things weren’t particularly thriving.

“It was dismal,” says Rodney Norman, a Utah native who had started doing comedy in Kansas City before relocating back to Utah circa 1999-2000. In addition to the occasional shows run by eventual Wiseguys founder Stubbs at Brewvies and Fats Bar & Grill, Norman recalls, “There was one open mic at a VFW bar in Highland … and that was pretty much the scene.

“[Comedy Circuit] would never use anybody local at all. Never. So there was a comedy stage in Utah that nobody from Utah could ever get on.”

Norman places the number of regularly performing local comics during that time at around eight; Stubbs estimates between 10 and 15. As they respectively ran comedy shows at venues like Fats and Jordan Commons, Norman recalls, “[Keith and I] got talking, that we needed an actual place rather than doing this piggy-backing on everybody else.”

Stubbs—a touring comic with a business background in his pre-comedy career as a stockbroker—had already run a club called Laughs (originally Laffs) in Ogden from 1996 to 1999. Unable to reopen as Laughs because he’d sold the club and the name before a brief relocation to Seattle in 1999, Stubbs instead found a one-time church building in West Valley City that opened as Wiseguys in February 2001.

It might have been considered something of a leap of faith to open another Utah comedy club, but for Stubbs, it was actually a pragmatic decision. “You can’t make money [as a comic in Utah] in my opinion … and that’s why I opened Wiseguys,” Stubbs says. “I was touring and I figured, ‘I’ll just open this and survive on it.’ There’s not enough here to live on, to have a life.”

It still proved challenging to build something as simple as a regular open-mic night at Wiseguys. Norman—who quit his day job at the Utah Transit Authority to become the manager of the West Valley Wiseguys—recalls the natural competition between comics as one of the obstacles. “Usually you start bringing your buddy, but they come and see you when you’re really bad, and then they politely decline to come again,” Norman says. “So open mic turns out [to be] doing stage time in front of other comics, which is like the worst audience you can have. … At first, you’re in awe that these people are so funny. Then you hear their jokes over and over, and you think you’re funnier than them. Then you think nobody’s funny.”

Yet it remained a goal to provide a place for local comics to get better—again, for pragmatic reasons. “We tried to bring everybody along,” Norman says, “because we were trying to get comics strong enough to open. You get the locals strong enough to open for anybody, then you don’t have to bring in other people.”

Can He Say That?
As Wiseguys was able to build a brand—and establish a place for local comedians to perform—the natural desire of comics to push the envelope bumped up against questions of what kind of content would work for a Utah audience. Many local comics began to feel that if you wanted to perform at Wiseguys, it was wise to watch your mouth.

“When we’d perform at Wiseguys,” recalls comedian Christopher Stephenson, “there [were] a lot of guidelines as far as what you should be writing your material about. … ‘You’ve got to tone it down, you can’t swear, you can’t say ‘bitch’ or ‘fuck,’ you can’t talk about abortion, keep politics out of it.’ ”

“I swore there once,” says Troy Taylor, who performs stand-up as well as improv as part of Toy Soup. “I said the F-bomb, and I got in trouble for it. They said they had to change the parental rating.”

Norman acknowledges that there were instructions he would give to open-mic’ers during his tenure at the West Valley Wiseguys. “I would say, ‘You can say whatever you want. We don’t want you to feel we’re restricting you artistically,’ ” Norman says. “ ‘But, keep in mind, if you want me to recommend you to be on a show, here’s the expectations: You’re not going to be dropping the F-bomb. It’s not that we have the rule, it’s just that the audience will get up and walk out. Here’s what’s going to work here, it behooves you to do it that way.’

“We just encouraged people to work clean to begin with, it just opens them up: ‘Look, if you want to be successful in this market, this is what you have to do.’ One guy, he was very funny; ‘I want to recommend you for doing shows, but you keep dropping the F-bomb. If you can just learn to clean up, you can play other shows.’ And he just disappeared.”

Wiseguys’ open-mic nights have since moved to the location in Trolley Square on Wednesday evenings—and if a recent show is any indication, if there ever were any content limitations, they’re now long gone. A full lineup of 30 comedians covered familiar territory involving relationships, yet also ventured into abortion, child molestation and other dark avenues—with an extremely liberal sprinkling of “fucks.” While other comedy clubs around the country—including bigger markets like the San Francisco Bay area and Phoenix—provide specific recommendations for comics’ open-mic material, Stubbs opts not to do so.

“I just let open mic be what it is,” Stubbs says. “Do your thing. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna book you. But do your thing. I get asked that question every week: ‘What can I do onstage?’ Do whatever you want.”

The Next Stage
Nevertheless, the perception that comics who wanted to work “blue” weren’t what Wiseguys was looking for led to an interest in finding alternate venues for stand-up. There was also the simple reality that a single three-minute open-mic set once a month—which was the frequency at the West Valley Wiseguys—wasn’t nearly enough to allow a comic to improve. In 2003, Troy Taylor got an inquiry from the then-manager of Mo’s Neighborhood Grill in downtown Salt Lake City about starting a weekly comedy night on Sunday evenings.

“Not too many comics showed up, maybe five or six,” Christopher Stephenson recalls, “so we could all do basically as much time as we wanted. … It was a lot more exciting than just doing three minutes of stage time every week. Troy had no preference on content, so you could talk about anything you wanted to talk about without getting kind of ‘talked to’ after the show.”

“It was just so freeing at Mo’s,” says Andrew Jensen, Taylor’s Toy Soup collaborator, “because there was no one looking over your shoulder telling you you’re a bad person.”

Eventually, however, stories began to circulate that Stubbs was either directly or indirectly discouraging comedians from performing at venues besides Wiseguys. Stephenson says, “I’d basically followed the rules until I got in contact with Troy and I found out that you can do what you want to do onstage; it just has to be a different stage. It was after I took classes from [Wiseguys] that [encouraged comedians] to perform more, or it’s not really going to go anywhere. So I got really excited and I told [Stubbs] one day that I was going to try to get more stage time and do this show on Sunday and still be able to do Wiseguys shows. And that was when he said, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, go do that. Just don’t come back here.’

“I didn’t really know that I was going to get told not to come back anymore. I had heard that you’re not supposed to do other shows. But at the same time, I just weighed out my options. Three minutes a week, maybe a few opening spots … I just decided I do need more stage time and be able to write about what I wanted to.”

“It shouldn’t be a competition at this point,” Levi Rounds says. “The main thing that makes any comic good is stage time. And if I were running that business, I’d say, ‘Go out there. Perform. Get on stage twice a night if you can.’ The better they get, the more shows I, as a business-owner, could run and do well and bring people out.”

Stubbs rejects any notion that he has blackballed comics from Wiseguys for playing other venues. “There are comics right now that work for me that I know work all over the town. And I’m all right with it, and I don’t care. I have no problem with comics getting stage time. I’m a comic; I know what it’s like to get on stage. But when it gets down to it, I own Wiseguys, and I’m the biggest advocate of Wiseguys—understandably, I hope—out there. I don’t care about other places. I really don’t. I cared about it at another time in my life, when I was new, hoping that my business would survive. Because it’s not easy. … I know how hard it is now, though, to keep it going, to keep it interesting, to keep it entertaining. And it’s difficult.”

Making It
For all the growth in opportunities for comedians to get stage time, there’s still a sense—as Stubbs believed when he first opened his own club—that anyone serious about making a living at comedy can’t expect to do it in Utah alone. Recent breakout success stories like Last Comic Standing contenders Marcus and Ryan Hamilton have either taken to the road or re-located to larger markets. Rodney Norman moved to the New York City area four years ago, and John Hilder will be performing a farewell show at Club DJ’s K-Town Komedy showcase before relocating to New York. Andrew Jensen and Troy Taylor estimated that in 2011, they probably made less than $2,000 from performing comedy. Comedians who work every available gig still—like local professional actors—generally work day jobs or wait tables to pay the bills.

Those who do continue to perform regularly—moving past those first tentative open-mic gigs to more regular work—still have to navigate the tricky territory between their own preferred style and the expectations of audiences locally.

“Honestly, every show I do, 10 percent of the people are pissed off, don’t like anything I say,” Levi Rounds says. “But 90 percent of the people really do like it. … I’ve had people say, ‘My friend came to see your show, and he said he hated it because you talked about religion, but I kinda wanted to come see it.’ So it doesn’t hurt me necessarily; it’s only helped. I never did it specifically to go against the grain or anything. That’s just who I am.”

“Clean comedy has its place, but that’s not what I’m doing,” Hilder adds. “My philosophy is, a great joke shouldn’t offend everyone, but it should offend someone. If my mom likes a joke, it’s probably not one I’m going to use onstage.”

Stubbs, meanwhile, continues to book national touring comics like Dave Attell, whose material is outside what most might perceive as the Utah mainstream—though he admits it took him some time to realize that there would be a receptive audience: “I think the audiences here—and I don’t want it to sound insulting, but they’re a lot more savvy, a lot more hip than I gave them credit for. And that’s my fault. I didn’t know that they knew some of the comics that I knew, because I’m in the business. But they know. They know more than you think they do.”

What they might not know—yet—is how many talented comedians are living right here. “There’s this perception by Utahans about Utahns, that Utahns aren’t funny,” says Norman. “You don’t have to be from L.A. to be funny. … Utah has turned into one of the best places to start doing comedy.”

Funny how it’s worked out that way.