CT Day 4 - Surrealism, Castles, Stand Up, and BRAAAIIINS
Today was very much the opposite of yesterday in all the best ways. Museums were open (and free!), there were no bug bites, and the open mic was friendly and fun.
I spent most of the morning exploring New Haven, where I’ve been staying my friend Joy who’s a grad student at Yale. I’ve gotta give her a big shoutout because she’s been super nice in letting me crash at her place for several nights.
I got my coffee fittingly enough at a store called Koffee? (question mark included). So far this has been my favorite cafe I’ve been to in Connecticut. The vibe was chill, the coffee was good, and most importantly they had mini-muffins. If you’re like me, muffins are great but they’re just too big (please read that last sentence in your worst observational comedian voice)
From there I went to a couple of the free museums at Yale. At this point, if you’re somehow finding this blog without being a friend or family member, I should probably mention that I just graduated from Harvard and that my school and Yale have a storied rivalry. I try not to mention Harvard too much on the blog (even though this whole thing wouldn’t be possible without it) or when I’m on the road, not out of shame or anything like that, but mainly because it’s a big school that a lot of people have opinions on both good and bad, and I just want to meet new people as me and not also a collection of their assumptions about my school. I’m neither a genius nor rich which are probably the two biggest presumptions I get, and neither one is exactly conducive for making people want to talk to you. I will say though that I’m very grateful for the opportunities my school has given me, and for the people I met there. The more I travel and meet all kinds of different people, the more I realize how lucky I’ve been to seemingly always be surrounded by genuinely good people. I like to believe that people are mostly good, but just statistically I feel like I’ve connected with an inordinate amount of them.
The main reason I bring up Harvard is that the only times I’d ever been to New Haven before were mainly for Harvard-Yale Football games so my first few impressions were mostly a town swarmed by drunk college kids. Not really my scene. Fortunately in the cool light of day, the town is actually really nice for how much my alma mater likes to dump on it. The buildings in downtown New Haven have a cool gothic aesthetic and it seems like there’s always something going on. The museums are really good too.
I started by visiting the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at the medical school. Cushing was one of the pioneers of neurosurgery and he had a collection of over 400 brains many of which can now be found in this seemingly innocuous basement. Besides the brains there were lots of cool artifacts from medical history, and artwork related to medicine.
I’ve heard the phrase a mind is a terrible thing to waste but this is ridiculous
In between museums I got lunch at Louis’ Lunch, which is supposedly the birth place of the hamburger. It feels like the kinda burger place that only exists in sitcoms and not in real life. It’s no frills, you can get a burger with cheese, tomato, or onion and there are no other options. The two guys working the grill and the cash register have known each other for 30 years and casually rib each other while they’re cooking and they have fun with the customers. I loved it.
After lunch I went to the Yale Art Gallery. The museum had tons of ancient art and more contemporary stuff. I don’t know why a lot of contemporary art doesn’t do it for me but the modernists, surrealists, and dadaists are my jam. They absolutely had their own pretensions but there was a sense of humor to their work. I also for some reason love when art kinda blends the beautiful and the grotesque or feels like it tells a story.
Fun (or possibly dumb) Idea to see if people are reading this: First person to email me the correct names of my favorite painters based on these paintings, I will find a way of sending of you $5.
After that I visited the historic Owl Shop, a cigar lounge in New Haven. I really don’t like cigars but I love cigar lounges for some reason. They’re fun to hang out in, and this one also has a cafe and bar so if smoking isn’t your thing, they’ve got (almost) all your vices covered.
The last thing I did at yale made me stupidly happy and that was just seeing a really big chair in one of the halls. Apparently when William Howard Taft joined the faculty it was unpricedented for americans to be 300+ lbs (different times) so they had to make a custom seat for him in the auditorium.
From there, there were two concurrent open mics tonight both a slight hike away, one in Groton and one in Middletown. I felt like since I’d been to Middletown earlier I’d check out Groton.
Along the way I made a detour to see Gillette Castle State Park. I guess William Gillette, an actor known for playing Sherlock Holmes, built himself a castle in a scenic area of Connecticut and now it’s a state park with beautiful hiking trails. It’s really pretty and also just kinda far out to get to hang out by a castle.
In Groton, I went to the Outer Light Brewery to try a flight. I had had their coffee stout earlier so I was excited to try more, I had a red ale, a kolsch, an altbier, and a barleywine. Everything was really good with the altbier being my favorite. The service was also super friendly, and they got really into me asking people for their favorite jokes so the bartender just roped in a bunch of patrons to just swap jokes around. It was a lot of fun.
I then went to a local favorite place to eat called Paul’s Pasta which is known for large portions of homemade pasta. I had to wait a bit, which I took as a sign that the place must be good. I got the special which was shrimp, sun dried tomato, and spinach in garlic white wine sauce. It was superb, and it came with some mighty fine garlic bread which I feel like was probably intended to be split with another person but I didn’t let that intimidate me.
The bar where the open mic was going to be seemed nice, but fairly empty. As the time got closer, a little voice in my head started saying "Middletown’s more central, you’re more likely to meet other comics there". So it could’ve been a great mic I don’t want to disparage it, but I went with my hunch and drove to Middletown to the Miler’s Lounge.
Regardless of how the mic went in Groton, my hunch was right about Middletown. This was a really great mic. There wasn’t much more of an audience but the other comics and the staff, but everyone was in a good mood, supportive, and there to laugh. The whole evening had a really relaxed vibe to it. It was cool to see the staff at the bar hosting the mic being so into it. Some bars just kinda have mics and don’t really care, but it’s nice to know that they actually like having the comics show up.
Before the mic even began, I realized that I had had an inaccurate impression from the Anna Liffey’s mic. I think the Connecticut scene is probably pretty similar to Boston in that it might give off the insider club vibe at first, but as soon as you start talking to someone first that guardedness comes right down and everyone really is friendly. Maybe the tightness of the Burlington scene spoiled me because after today I was a little embarrassed to have been bummed out about the lack of friendliness last night when I definitely also didn’t put much effort into being social. Tonight I started talking to a guy named Brian Glass, who’d I’d seen at the past two open mics. He was one of the guys who did some of the more confrontational material last night, but after talking to him for a minute I realized he’s a pretty mild-mannered and really nice guy in person. It’s always funny when someone’s on and off stage personas don’t exactly line up.
In general this was a really consistently strong mic. People tried out new stuff, but for the most part everything landed. The host, Sean, was really quick on his feet and did a lot of good ad libbing in between comics to keep the energy up. If I had to pick a favorite from tonight’s lineup I’d say it was Paul Gregory. He hosted the mic at Keagan’s on Monday, and he was a great host, but getting to seem him just do comedy without trying to warm up a crowd and introduce people at the same time was really a treat. He had a very assured delivery and pulled off some pretty clever material about relationships, parenting, and aging. I think my favorite line of his was “Now that I’m older I have to turn the TV off during sex. It’s not that the sex has gotten worse, it’s that TV has gotten so good!”
Most of the comics I’d seen at at least one mic before this week including Brian Glass, Joe Reddington, and Mo Mussa, but because this mic had longer sets and a receptive audience I think this was the most I really got to see them shine.
My own set probably went the best of my sets in CT so far (i swear though even if my observations are colored by my own performance even if I had killed last night and bombed tonight, I think I would still think very highly of this mic and not really dig last night’s). I think I was looser in my delivery, and riffed a little on what previous comics had done before going into what I had planned to do. I think just doing that was a good way of maintaining audience engagement and making a friendlier first impression than the smarmy one I’m always worried I’ll make as someone not already in whatever scene I’m in. I got to try out some new jokes and some old ones I haven’t dusted off in a while, and it was nice to get some positive feedback.
Something this mic did as well as the one at the Hungry Tiger which i might have forgotten to mention was a lightning round after everyone went up where all the comics got brought back up for a minute to say anything that had popped into their heads or try out jokes that don’t quite fit in longer sets. I really enjoyed these lightning rounds at both mic and i don’t know how common it is outside of CT but I think comics everywhere would dig it.
After the show was over almost all the comics hung out for a while and chatted. The place had amazing tacos for $2 so it was worth hanging around, and it was great getting to actually know some of the other comics a bit better. They offered me a lot of good advice for the next couple of state I’ll be going to and for comedy more generally and It made me really glad I went with my hunch to go to this mic. It was a great night.
Favorite Random Sightings: Good Nature Market; “A Time for Lunch!; A Truck for a company called Bimbo; “You were married four times!”- one guy at the burger place to another; Bill Hill Road; Devil’s Hopyard State Park; A license plate that said “Lizrds” (don’t worry the car was filled with lizard stuffed animals so this person committed)
Regional Observations: Connecticut definitely doesn’t have as much rural areas as the other states I’ve been in, but things do get a lot greener when you get out of the center
Albums Listened To: Brutal by Clear Tigers; Buena Vista Social Club by Buena Vista Social Club; Burn You Fire for No Witness by Angel Olsen (at first when the AV club gave this album of the year I didn’t get it at all, but it’s really grown on me); Burnin’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers; Busta Rhymes Feat. MF Doom and BJ the Chicago Kid In the Streets (single); The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart by Bob Newhart (comedy genius); Buzzing About by the Apples (this Isreali funk band does a cover of Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine that is just amazing)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
Our President
What do you call a cow on the ground? Ground Beef
What do you call a pile of cats? A meowtain
What do you call a deer with no eyes? No eye-deer What do you call a deer with no legs and no eyes? Still no eye-deer (one of my dad’s favorites
Why couldn’t the witch get pregnant? Her husband had a hollow ween (that’s two for that one)
