Tonight is potentially a great night for local stand up comedy in Hollywood, and Los Angeles in general. Come see me perform at the Hollywood Fringe Festival tonight at 11pm on the Fringe Cabaret Stage. I’ll be trying to make you laugh with a bunch of other great stand up comedy-folk.

I’m excited to get up tonight. As I wrote about in a previous blog post, I’ve been diving deeper into stand up comedy this year after sharing some of that energy with the crazy web projects I’ve been putting out recently. I always appreciate being surrounded by others who are psychologically twisted enough to also pursue laughter as a career path. It’s nice checking in with everyone, and seeing ‘where they are’ in the development of their craft. Hopefully, I’ll be looked upon favorably by my peers, but even if I bomb like NATO, I mostly plan on having a damned good time on stage.

Los Angeles is a crazy place to be a comedian. It’s hard to tour from here (no cities nearby, unlike the Northeast and Midwest), it’s hard to perform locally here (tons of nightlife and culture to split an audience’s attention), and it’s hard to focus exclusively on stand up comedy here (a career is constantly surrounded by other thriving entertainment industries like film, television, web, and marijuana). That’s why I’m reacting so strongly to this stand up comedy festival. A massive, de-centralized place like Los Angeles, with so much talent just laying around, needs things like festivals to centralize it’s entertainers a bit and allow for things like a scene to coalesce. Sure, that can happen at clubs in piecemeal, but the whole idea of a stand up comedy festival is celebrating what those clubs represent: the idea of stand up comedy.

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So, that’s my goal for tonight.

What do you think? Am I talking out of my ass? Or are my eyes on the prize? Leave it in the comments.

You can find details for this show on my stand up comedy calendar, OR:

RESERVE (FREE) TICKETS: http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/standup

FACEBOOK EVENT: https://www.facebook.com/events/312283285525256/

(I’m also performing next week on June 23rd on the Up Stage.  More on that to come in a future post.)

M