according to the isthmians.

the business of comedy

Meet the Isthmians of Comedy.  Stefan Davis is the one with the mohawk and the kid; Ryan Casey is the Teddy bear with a drinking problem and a Girlfriend; Nick Hart is the paranoid pothead who is running for Mayor; Dave Pickett is the big scary guy with all the drug stories; and David Leon is just a figment of your imagination.

Comedians gathering at the Argus
for an open mic Monday.

Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin's comedy scene.

I went into the Argus Underground recently, looking for my usual beer and entertainment on a Monday night, and I found myself looking in on a comedy workshop, an improv business meeting of the small number of local comics willing and able to show up on a Monday night through the recently-empowered Wisconsin winter. I was entertained, nonetheless, and intrigued by the way work gets done in the business of comedy. Comedy writing workshops are probably among the most interesting business meetings to witness, where a room of people joke the entire time and actually make progress in their work. A round of laughter in a brainstorming session in any other business is not usually followed by “Yes! Go with that one”.

The Isthmians host this comedy open mic every Monday night at the Argus Underground, and it is only occasionally turned into a workshop like this when the turnout is low enough to allow ample time for feedback to each performer. The open mic is an opportunity for any local comic to try out new material or to get behind the microphone for the first time before facing, or possibly being cut from, Wednesday's open mic at the Comedy Club on State. The event is attended almost exclusively by comedians, with an occasional sprinkling of the supportive and yet-unjaded friends of the newest performers. Most Mondays, I am the only person in attendance who does not get on stage.

Whether it is for comedy, dinner, drinks, or a punk show, one walks into the Argus Underground with the mixed feelings of walking into Grandma's basement and of discovering a well-hidden cove of Madison artists.  Monday night open mics at the Argus have the vibe of hanging out with friends in some dude's basement. Between ten and twenty guys, and one or two females, gather in the basement of this Capitol Square bar, drink beers and whiskey, tell stories and jokes, and subtly jab at each other's egos. The ceilings are low, the rooms are small, the lighting is low, and the walls are covered in stonework and wood-paneling. A pool table at the back of the room is used as seating, and a bar in the corner sits dark and untended. Everyone there knows everyone there, and when a new face appears in the crowd it is immediately conspicuous, though welcomed with excitement.

“We don't get a lot of girls here,” Dave Pickett told me as we were introduced on my second visit. “Girls that stick around. And laugh.”

Not a lot of girls would laugh at the things I laughed at, these jokes told by 20 to 30-something-year-old men to a drunk audience of the same. Few punches are pulled, though even this jaded audience will occasionally flinch at the mention of the C-word or abortion.

Stefan Davis

At a recent open mic performance at the Comedy Club on State, to a crowd filled with an unusual proportion of college students, a large group of out-of-towners chatting amongst themselves up front throughout the show, Davis ended his set with a joke he had vowed never to do on stage.

“How do I know when my girlfriend is pregnant? When I am writing the check to Planned Parenthood.” Then he swigged his whiskey, said, “Thank you, I'm Stefan Davis, everybody,” and ducked off-stage with a wave of his hand at the low moan of the abashed audience.

“Why would you do that joke?” I asked him later, knowing that he knew how offensive and, frankly, unfunny it would be.

“Because I hated them, and I wanted them to feel as uncomfortable as I was.”

“[It's like] therapy,” Ryan Casey said of getting on stage. “Like, 'I know you weren't prepared for that, guys; I know you just wanted some laughs.”

“I am a bartender for a living; I do comedy to exist.”

-Stefan Davis

While Davis's cynical on-stage stories guarantee that he will remain, as he hopes, slightly hated by his audience, Casey's conversational venting-- combined with that Teddy bear belly-- makes him impossible not to love regardless of the content.

“I hug Ryan Casey probably more than I should hug another man,” Stefan Davis admitted.

Ryan Casey
(photo courtesy of David Pickett.)

“Some women like a guy with a Teddy bear shape,” Casey says of himself.

On sight, one's immediate urge is to be thrown into an exaggerated bear hug with Casey. At the age of 30, he already has the invitingly jovial demeanor of your favorite uncle, a lovableness that, to his good fortune, follows him to the bars and on stage. Through an angry ranting joke or superfluous drunkenness on a Tuesday night, Ryan Casey still naturally begs for that hug.

Each of Madison's comics adopts a stage persona that hyperbolizes his off-stage personality.

Nick Hart

“My delusions of grandeur are way too big for me to bomb,” Nick Hart said, referring at the moment to his performance on-stage. But these dozen words could be easily applied to anything he does. Hart is unapologetic as a comedian, using his stage time to say what he planned to say, following a joke with a comical “Fuck you guys, then” when the audience doesn't laugh, and he parallels this attitude in the rest of his life. Hart decided to run for Mayor of Madison for 2011 after following the local news convinced him of the simplicity of the task.

As Dave Pickett settled onto the stage last Monday, fellow comic Joanne Poniatowski scooted closer to me in the booth we were sharing up front, a few extra inches from the stage.

“I'm moving this way so he can't...tell a joke at me.”

Dave Pickett

And she is right to fear a Pickett joke being told “at” her. When Dave Pickett looks you in the eye, you can either show your weakness and shrink away in discomfort, or you can meet his gaze and live with what's behind it. I saw him hold a table of newcomers in the audience hostage with a joke for some seven minutes once, describing with gruesome detail the effects of too much heroin use on the human body, as the rest of us watched on with pity and the poor folks at the table tried to listen and laugh at what they tried to guess were the appropriate moments.

David Leon
(photo courtesy
of David Kelly)

“David Leon puts on a show that demands intensity and imagination from his audience,” explains Leon's Comedy Club profile in a severe understatement. Leon is engaging and hilarious each moment that he is on stage, putting his heart and his imagination into creating a performance for his audience. He is creepy and quirky with a high-pitched voice and a mustache that must be grown only to intensify the creepiness. But he is also stoned most of the time, so his relaxed gaze and his childlike giggles cut through any real feelings of creepiness in his audience.

“Is it gettin' a little weird? I like weird. Weird's cool. Fuck it, then.”

-Dave Pickett, Roast of David Leon 2010

The business of comedy, it seems, is simply Laughter.

“All I did all night was make people laugh, 'cause they don't know how to do it on their own,” Nick Hart said after one performance.

Any of the venting and the preaching and the creepiness are worth it, to be a part of the laughter and applause that fills a showroom of people who for a moment understand something exactly as you do.  The Isthmians of Comedy each know how to bring this to their audience in their own way, and together they are poised to storm through Madison's comedy scene, "putting the F-U in funny" in every basement and dim stage they can find.


*The Isthmians of Comedy continues to grow with new comics.  Follow www.isthmiansofcomedy.com for the most up-to-date information.