Modified On September 18, 2007
On our recent trip to Seattle, to perform in that city’s Mainstage Comedy Club, we had the pleasure of meeting and working with some of the comedians who form the People’s Republic of Komedy. They were enthusiastic about standup and they weren’t about to sit around and wait for someone to give them stage time– they produced their own weekly showcase, The Laff Hole. Along the way, they’ve learned a thing or two about the business, the art, the craft of standup. And they’ve picked up some ink– most recently, making the Organization Shortlist in the Annual Genius Awards issue of The Stranger, a Seattle entertainment alt-rag.
The Stranger described the PROK as a “four-man comedy collective” who “obliterated The Stranger’s legendary, decade-long… bias against local comedy and turned us into relentlessly vocal proponents.”
At the very least, The Stranger admits to the bias.
But the brief piece on the PROK also contains this:
Live comedy is always a crapshoot, and PROK’s weekly showcase– Laff Hole, Wednesdays at Chop Suey– isn’t immune to bombing comics. But the ultimate worth of any collaborative comedic venture can be calculated by a simple equation: Does it rock more than it sucks? Week after week, PROK’s Laff Hole rocks way more than it sucks– a small miracle that’s placed PROK members Daniel Carroll, Kevin Hyder, Emmett Montgomery, and Scott Moran at the center of Seattle’s blooming alterna-comedy scene.
Okay. A compliment… sort of. A backhanded compliment counts as a compliment. But then, there’s this:
On his own, each of the dudes is funny; together, they’re hilarious, managing the remarkable trick of being four twentysomething white guys with identifiably different comedic styles.
Now they’ve veered from being merely biased into being stunningly dumb and boorish. Can anyone explain the difference between this statement and, maybe, “All those Def Comedy Jam comics are the same to me.” or “You know, I can’t tell them Asian comics apart!”
The Stranger, for all its hipness and coolness, ultimately tends to sound like the blue-haired grandma or the beer-swilling lout, incapable or unwilling to make distinctions between hard-working artists because… well, because they’re all white and male. And you know… they’re all… the same!
We wouldn’t want to spoil what is, for the PROK, a triumph– being mentioned as a contender for a Genius Award is a major deal. But we would like to suggest that the folks at The Stranger grow up a little and not only acknowledge their hideous bias, but take some pains to actually get rid of it. All it would take is some critical thinking.