Review: Stand-Up Comedy at Red Fish

[I missed another post yesterday, my apologies. What can I say, I was
hungover....]

Boulder's brewery and restaurant Red Fish hosts an open mic stand-up
comedy night every Sunday, and true to Patton Oswald's observations,
it's filled with freaks, boring status quo comics, and true
visionaries. The freak had to be the MC, a bearded gay fellow in his
30s whose "bits" amounted to long, rambling accounts of his encounters
with Denver queers while getting high. And I thought the MC was
supposed to be the best comedian in the room? The boring comic was the
first guy I saw, a huge black man who did the standard "I got a job
with the cable company" type of schtick, peppered with copious
expletives. Copious expletives were the theme of the night, actually,
and even though I might the last person you'd expect to take offense to
frequent F-bombings, it really seemed lazy and, well, undignified.
"Fuck" and "shit" are a sure sign of both an undisciplined mind and
weak writing skills, vacuous emotion-triggering filler used in lieu of
more interesting nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It also gives one the
patina of being a "badass", which the comedy scene has seemed to have
devolved into becoming a home for. Following the black guy was a comic
known as "Hippie Man", a tall, 40-something authentic Boulder hippie,
who read his jokes from a clipboard and was full of self-deprecating
quips and hemp-tinged dick jokes. He was actually the best comic of the
night in spite of all of this, even using the clipboard to keep track
of which jokes bombed and which ones killed. Following him was a Denver
indie rock kid who bragged about shitting his pants and offered topical
perspectives on dolphin gang rape and other fun. He gave early signs of
visionary status only in dealing with a heckler in the crowd, a
"jackass in a Gap shirt" as he called him.