laughing skull: a review.

Comedy and Culture in the Bible Belt

They told me before we left that Atlanta is a shitty city. But, I'd never been “down South” before, so I was excited for the week nonetheless. The trip would be filled with business and pleasure, with stops in Atlanta, Buford, and Roswell, Georgia; and Spartanburg and Charleston, South Carolina. I could check another U.S. city off of my list, see the ocean for the first time in my life, and enjoy a week of what I expected to be quality comedy.

We were stuck with Atlanta, GA, because this is home to the Laughing Skull Lounge, host of the Laughing Skull Comedy Festival, and the competition that was our reason for getting involved. Madison's Comedy Club on State hosted the second round of the competition back in November, and Nick Hart advanced to the quarter-finals, which meant Atlanta in April. Stefan Davis funded the trip and performed in the festival; and I went along because I am eager to travel anywhere, and because following Nick and Stefan around has done a good job so far of feeding me material.

Laughing Skull Comedy Festival

The city of Atlanta was every bit as disappointing as I had been warned. No one knows how to drink, a vegetarian meal is not to be found, service is terrible in any venue, and the prices for everything are outrageous. The people aren't very friendly, and there are few attractions to keep the poor traveler entertained. We spent most of our time in Atlanta in the hotels.

The festival itself was pretty disappointing as well, despite the great potential that a week with the top budding comics from around the country holds. The Laughing Skull was its hub, but shows were held at bars and clubs around the area, so moving from one show to another was annoying, at best. We had to drive 45 minutes from Atlanta for Nick's first show Wednesday night, to the tiny town of Buford, GA, and the Buford Variety Theater, a comedy club built in the guts of an old Presbyterian church. The venue was gorgeous, and the staff hospitable; but the show was clearly not promoted at all by the club or the festival. The club usually runs an open mic on Wednesday nights, and a number of their regular comics showed up still expecting that. The showroom holds about 100 people; about 20 seats were filled. Six of them were me, Nick, Stefan, and Nick's family; and we had to leave after Nick's set to race back to Atlanta for the competition show at the Laughing Skull.

The Laughing Skull Lounge is a tiny space located inside the Vortex bar in Midtown Atlanta. The bar is really cool, despite the characteristic Atlanta service. The food looked great; and between the dim lighting, the section of poker tables, and the secondhand smoke that is still legal in Georgia, the bar had a satisfying seedy vibe. The Lounge had a bit of an underground vibe, as well, but more Beatnik than back-alley. The comedians said it reminded them of Chicago basement open-mics. I expected to see a troupe of mimes all in black and berets step out from behind the velvet curtain onto the small stage in front of the theater-style rows of chairs.

Instead, a shitty host stepped onto the stage. He was an entertaining comic, but-- like everyone we saw chosen to host the festival's shows-- had no idea how to emcee. They were all low-energy, they held pages of notes on stage, they forgot the performers' names, they were slow to get to the stage after each comic's set... and a number of other things that the comedians pointed out to me as unprofessional and awkward, things that made the shows dull and uncomfortable compared to the ones that we've become spoiled with in Madison, where the performers know proper etiquette and the crowds know how to watch a show.

The third venue that we experienced this week was the most absurd, in my opinion. Nick was there ahead of Stefan and me, and he sent a text, It 's inside of a Chuck E Cheese. The Funny Farm is located in what apparently used to be a restaurant inside of Andretti Indoor Karting & Games in Roswell, Georgia. We entered through the arcade and dodged the herds of fat families and screaming, sprinting children at the buzzing, clanging, dinging machines to get to the green room. Nick performed in the Politics show in front of an almost-empty room of Georgia Republicans on Friday night, and Stefan performed in the King Davids of Comedy show Saturday night without a single Jewish joke in his cache.

We came out ahead, altogether, though. The boys earned TV credits through the Funny Farm performances; and, because few of the people in charge at any of the shows knew completely what was going on, we were able to get into all of the shows for free as “comics”, and the Funny Farm even gave me a $25 gift card for the arcade simply because I was in the green room when they were handing them out to the night's performers.

South Carolina

Despite any annoyances of the festival, the vacation was still a pleasant respite for all of us, and a great experience for me. I enjoyed the idea of “being on the road”-- the boys were performing, and I was taking notes for a story, a prototype for the artists' life we're each working for.

Thursday we had no comedy business, so we spent the day in Spartanburg, South Carolina, at the lakeside home of Nick Hart's parents. It was 70 degrees and sunny outside, we could see the Blue Ridge Mountains standing in the distance behind the trees across the lake, and Sue Hart made grilled chicken for dinner. Nick and Stefan drove the Harts' Porsche to the mountains with the top down, and Nick gave us a tour of his childhood after dinner. We enjoyed our only good buzz of the entire vacation on vodka-7 and Heineken. Stefan and I slept in the room that used to belong to Nick's little sister, and we woke early to head to the ocean on Friday.

The ocean was my favorite. This part of the vacation was absolutely unreasonable and totally necessary. We were told that the drive from Spartanburg to Charleston would take about three hours. With a stop for breakfast at Waffle House, Stefan's Yankee driving, and a car on fire on I-85, it took us four. We spent twenty minutes at the beach before we had to turn around and head back to Spartanburg to meet up with the Harts to head back to Atlanta for Nick's politics show. We spent fourteen hours driving that day. But, I saw the ocean for twenty goddamn minutes. I collected seashells, I held a starfish, and I tasted salt water.

Aside from a week off of work, the greatest benefit of my trip was simply the experience of traveling. I experienced Southern hospitality, cooking, driving, and... “diversity”. I experienced a tour schedule and a sleepless night in the plane, the train, and the automobile that got us to Atlanta from Madison. It was but one more taste of the world outside of Central Wisconsin, another one to whet my appetite for more, an experience worth even Atlanta and bad comedy.

21 to 2

A Complete Sexual History

The first time Stefan and I had sex, it was meant to be a rebound. Six years of marriage had just ended without closure, and I needed comfort. I needed a chance to reap the benefits of being alone in the midst of all of the bullshit of it.

He had the air of a stud, sexy and available. A few weeks earlier, he had left Nick and me at the bar, saying, “I've gotta go see about a girl.”

An hour later, he met us back at the Compound. “She was passed out.”

After just a few late nights of whiskey, weed, Perkins, burritos, coffee, movies, jokes, and more honesty than I've shared with anyone I've known less than six weeks, it was clear that behind the promiscuity he was a god damn sweetheart. After the first night, I knew this wouldn't end with a rebound.

“How many girls have you had sex with?” I asked him that first night. I wasn't sure if I was curious or concerned, but it seemed an appropriate question.

“Twenty-one.” He grinned a little sheepishly. “You make twenty-one. And you? How many guys?”

I returned the sheepish grin and rolled over so that I was staring at the ceiling, avoiding his eyes.

“Two.”

“So that makes me--”

“Number Two.”

Number 14 called him last week while he lay in bed with me. He checked the caller ID on his phone, rolled his eyes, and looked at me.

“This is my life,” he said reluctantly.

He only dated her for a brief period, but they have been friends for a long time. She had been in his bar that night, wasted, this girl with a job and a fiance, who never drinks. When he told her he was leaving town for the summer, she burst into tears.

“Oh my god! I'm going to miss you so much!”

He smiled and served her a glass of water. “It's not really a big deal. I'm coming back in a few months. Our relationship won't really change. At all.”

“I'm going to miss you so much!”

She wouldn't leave the bar without a hug, and she came back to knock on the door after she was kicked out.

“You've got to just go home,” he said. “Get home and sleep this off. We can talk in the morning.”

She called him four times before he left work, and he finally answered on his way home.

“We're having an afterparty!” she shouted drunkenly into the phone. “Come over!”

“I'm tired,” he replied. “I'm going home.”

He didn't answer when she called again. Four times between two-thirty, when he lay down next to me, and three a.m., when he finally turned his phone off.

“How is she still awake at three a.m. after leaving the bar so drunk?” I asked.

“She's gotta be doing drugs... she doesn't do drugs. I don't know. She's bored and unhappy.”

“I think we're at that point in our relationship where I should find your old girlfriends on Facebook, look at their pictures, and see how much prettier I am,” I mused a few days later.

“Oh, you probably don't have to do that to know,” he replied. “I can just tell you about them if you want to hear it.”

That sounded like it would get weird. Of course I wanted to hear it.

“It was just a string of sad and lonely people. Just sex,” he admitted. “We were satisfied to leave each other silently in the morning as long as we never had to spend a night alone.”

When I came to the Hart Compound the week before Christmas, Number 20 had left a tray of cookies at the door, an apology for Nick Hart. They called her “Ivy League”, a snob from Harvard who was entertained to be slumming around with them. She called Nick an asshole and Stefan, with disdain, “a bartender”.

They come into his bar a lot, more than any of us knows, I think.

He came up to me at the bar last night, lowered his eyes, and said, “There are five of you in here right now.”

I grinned and looked around, trying to imagine who the others might be. Number 19, 15, 9, 16, and me. I didn't know who any of them were, and none of them knew that I was there.

Number 19 was crazy. “I hooked up with her the night before she went into rehab and was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Number 9. “We were two sad and lonely people incapable of having a relationship. We had sex twice in one night, and moved on.”

Number 15 liked to do a lot of cocaine. They enjoyed a lot of late nights, talking and boozing until 7am.

Number 16. “That was just a one-night thing. A one...afternoon thing, actually. Word on the street is she loved to lick guys' assholes. She didn't do that for me.” He shook his head.

Number 18 was one of those Madison bicyclists who doesn't wear deodorant.

“She was beautiful,” he assured me, “and clean. She just didn't believe in underarm hygiene, apparently.”

I nodded and kept my face blank. Yeah, it was definitely going to get weird.

“How many girls have you had sex with, Lady?” he joked with me to refresh the mood.

I looked him in the eye with a straight face. “Four. Never alone. You know.”

He raised one eyebrow, surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Sure, I know.” Number 12 and 13 were roommates.

He met Number 11 while he was working at the Essen Haus. She was there with a bunch of girlfriends. They all ordered pastel-colored drinks that tasted like fake fruits. She ordered Scotch on the rocks, so he asked her out.

“The first thing she told me about herself was 'I'm never with a guy longer than three months'.”

After they had been dating that long, she finally asked to be his girlfriend. He accepted, but broke up with her the next day.

“I couldn't get that three-month mark out of my head. It was over.”

He met Number 7 on MySpace.

“I had just moved to Madison after a string of failed relationships in Ohio. I was lonely; I wanted her to be my girlfriend so bad.”

Number 8 was his girlfriend for a year when he was twenty-four. They had the same birthday, but she was four years younger. When they visited her parents for the holidays, he had to sleep on the couch in the basement.

“I'm disgusted with myself right now,” he admitted to me. “Sixteen girls in three years?”

“Fourteen of them in the last two years,” I pointed out.

He shook his head. “I could have done without most of them. Just you. And Number 8, she was my girlfriend. And Printer Girl; I guess that worked out. She gave me a six-minute joke.”

Printer Girl was Number 10; she was staying with his neighbor. She was cute, and her fiance had just dumped her. Stefan knocked on her door around four a.m. New Year's Eve, glanced to the guy on the couch behind her, introduced himself to her, and said,

“Anytime you want to fuck me, I'm right upstairs.”

A few days later, she was at his door. “No one has ever said anything like that in front of Mike.”

Number 3 “is currently trying to get me involved in a pyramid scheme. She told me she's starting her own business, and I can make a lot of money.”

Number 4 had lots of tattoos and she was fat. But she was nice, and they both liked Alkaline Trio.

He met Number 5 at a house party and just slept with her once.

“She was in high school. I thought she was eighteen,” he told me.

Number 2. “I had sex with her in the back of my van in the parking lot of her boyfriend's church. She was almost off of her period,” he added. “Her boyfriend wanted to murder me. Because we were friends. But, he stole her from me first.”

He has loved Number 6, Number 1, and Number 21.

He dated Number 6 for two years, until she left him for a rockstar. He fled to Madison to start over, and later brought her here to try again. They signed a lease and opened a bank account. They lived together for six more months, until he left her for his art.

“We still keep in touch. She does a lot less drugs than I do, so it usually takes her longer to call.”

Number One is raising his son.

I am probably just as crazy as the rest of them; only Number 22 can tell that.

Number 21. Our paths crossed with impeccable timing; two artists wanting to avoid the next lonely night, willing to accept the bitter truths of the past, living this moment without a thought for the next because every moment we've ever planned has passed by in spite of our plans.

We'll hold onto his twenty names and my six years, and move onto tomorrow with neither ignorance nor shame; and against the odds, we'll avoid sleeping alone for one more night.

first mayoral debate 2011

Mayor Dave meets the Hart Camp.

The Candidates

appearing in alphabetical, rather than biased, order

John Blotz

Dave Cieslewicz

Dennis DeNure

Nick Hart

Paul Soglin

the hart compound.

Scenes from Campaign HQ

"She called me an asshole for no reason, then offered to make up for it by baking me a dozen cookies. I said, 'Make it three dozen and deliver them to my house before five p.m. tomorrow, and we'll have a deal.' I told her to ring the bell three times, leave the cookies at the door, and leave, and she fucking did it. She broke the deal, though; she only rang once. So fuck her, dude. Don't call her again.”

This is why I love this house. The chocolate chip cookies come with a story. And they are the only food in the house besides the PBR and Jameson, so once they run out, these boys are going to have to find someone else to fuck with, I guess.

I am watching Nick Hart and Stefan Davis write an email response to a series of questions from the Isthmus about Nick Hart for Mayor. We are all drunk on PBR and whiskey. Nick leaves town with his brother tomorrow afternoon, so this needs to be done now, they believe. Good plan, I think.

Stefan is at his MacBook, recording. Nick is standing and pacing, dictating in the dark living room. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is paused on the TV screen. I am in the kitchen cooking rice and beans. The dog Echo is curled on the chair. Adam Hart is on his computer across the room.

“This campaign thing is getting serious,” Stefan says.

“You're right,” Nick replies. “It's getting serious,” and makes a show of grabbing his whiskey drink from the coffee table and taking a drink. Ice rattles. He scans the silent room over the top of his glass.

Stefan recites the first question. “Why are you running?”

“I am running for Mayor--” Nick begins.

“We are running for Mayor.”

“We are running for Mayor,” Nick continues, “Because we want to finger the status quo.”

I am far too drunk to consider the implications of this statement. I dish out four plates of rice and beans and pour some coffee.

Nick takes another drink and says, “This is for a good cause.”

“Which is...?” I ask.

“To be named at a later date.”

Stefan, Nick, and I are working and watching a movie in the living room, and Adam appears in the doorway from his bedroom and says, “I've been trashing pop music on YouTube. People think I hate Asians now. I don't know how I got that rap.”

I'm not always sure how I end up here each night-- can't usually recall the reason or the drive through town. My memory fades back in about the time I walk into the kitchen, hit the bowl, dish up some munchies, and pour a glass of water. But it's never a decision I regret, and each night here makes me want to be around for the next.

It started as a professional relationship, really, but quickly became blurred when Nick Hart said, “Have you ever used a vaporizer? 'Cause we just got one.” Getting fucked up at three a.m. on three bags of weed vapor will inevitably blur labels like “Journalist”, “Comedian”, and “Mayoral Candidate”.

As Stefan Davis dropped me at home that night, he said, “Just so you know, everything is on the record; Nick and I agreed to that.”

“Thanks for the permission,” I replied. “But nothing is ever off the record. I'm here to tell your story.”

“What the hell is she doing hanging around with guys like us?” Stefan asked Nick when he got home.

“Dude, she's an artist.”

It is an Editorial itch that drives me to the Hart Compound, a compelling inner voice that says Oh, it's going to be good here. It's movie Sundays with day beers; it's a drive to Perkins at five a.m.; it's waking up Nick Hart to hand him a bowl while he half-sleeps naked in bed; it's Stefan presenting the candidate with a Mayoral pie at seven a.m. to celebrate a successful start to campaign season; it's the coziest and friendliest little dog who is madly in love with Nick and Adam Hart; it's Nick and Adam wrestling like kids on the couch calling each other faggots to point out the absurdity of the beliefs of the people they grew up around in South Carolina. It's a household where they know what it means to be a Gonzo asshole, and they love it.

I arrived in town after a trying Thanksgiving weekend and texted Nick.

“What are you up to tonight, Nick Hart? I want to find you and take shots of Wild Turkey whiskey. I need a Gonzo shot in the arm after four days of family in Central Wisco.”

And he indulged me. We met at the Argus and ordered the shots from his campaign manager, bartender, fellow comedian, friend, and roommate.

As Stefan set three shots in front of us he said, “This won't end well.”

I raised my glass to meet theirs and said, “It's not supposed to.”

My neuroses fit in well in this household, and I like that.

“She's pretty quiet tonight,” Stefan worries.

“She's just recording,” Nick assures him.

The Hart Compound is filled with those moments that make the writer and the comedians alike exclaim, “Write that down!”, that these moments are shared and remembered.

Nick has been surviving on comedy and unemployment for 18 months now, and the unemployment is about to be cut off. We can't picture him with a job, and it actually makes me kind of angry with the world that such a man will have to work like a sucker to make a living. Such a man ought to be able to survive in life by sharing his art with the world.

“I'm kind of hoping that this mayor thing will work out,” Nick says in response to our concerns about his job search.

The Hart Compound is a place in such juxtaposition to the Real World that anyone who enters can't help but realize that such hope can make things happen in the world. Each moment in the Hart Compound is one moment farther down the rabbit hole, one step closer to the artists' life, further from the reality we are trying desperately to fend off. Nick's seemingly naïve belief that things in life will simply fall into place becomes more and more plausible as I watch life fall into place around everyone who enters the Compound with an open mind.

“I am a firm believer in 'If you act like big shit, they will treat you like big shit',” the candidate explains simply.

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.

nick hart for mayor.

“It's an idea; it's not the best idea, but... ideas grow... We're just putting it out there.”

Tyler and I sat down at the Argus with 2011 Mayoral candidate Nick Hart and campaign manager Stefan Davis a couple of weeks ago before their performance with the Isthmians of Comedy.

They've got a few ideas to throw out there; some at first glance seem more feasible than others. All-out legalization of marijuana. Relaxation of police patrols throughout the city. Marijuana farmers' market, perhaps? And, for those of you who are beginning to worry that a Nick Hart administration would exist to simply make Madison a better place to party than it already is, he also taught us a thing or two about the poor quality of the city's water.  Why did you have to buy a water filter as soon as you moved into your new apartment?  Improving that is on the list as well.

And for those of you who, like me, want a politician to tug just a little at your heartstrings, first on their list is to take care of the homeless problem in the city.

“If you can't take care of your fellow man, you are failing as a society,” Nick told us.

Nick Hart announced his intentions to run for Mayor of Madison on August 11^th during a semi-regular appearance at Open Mic at the Comedy Club on State. I saw him for the first time about a month later at Open Mic, reading to the audience from an anti-drug flyer and pointing out all of the details of psychedelic drug use that it got wrong. He was hilarious, and he spoke to a topic that caught my attention, and just before he left the stage he said, “I'm Nick Hart everyone-- oh yeah, and I'm running for Mayor!”

photo courtesy of Isthmians of Comedy

I thought, Wow, I need to remember this guy. But, the PBR and Jameson shots are only $2 each during Open Mic, so I didn't remember to look into the Nick Hart campaign until about three weeks later, when a reappearance at Open Mic sparked my memory, and I finally wrote the name down and got in touch with him.

The campaign, for now, consists of three guys: Nick Hart, the candidate; Stefan Davis, the campaign manager; and their “legal guy”, who was unable to make it to the interview but gave this advice to his partners:

“I'm busy tomorrow night, but I trust you...Keep it short. Serious campaign ideas, personal freedoms. Lay off the drug stuff for now.”

“So, we did exactly what he said not to do,” Nick said, realizing that legalization of marijuana was, in fact, the first campaign idea that he had discussed with us.

Well, his target demographic is the 23- to 34-year-olds of Madison, Wisconsin. As a local comedian, he is targeting the “bar crowd” of the city. So, “the drug stuff” will certainly capture their attention, as it did mine, and the rest will impress us enough to keep us listening and to encourage a group that is typically uninterested in local politics to start paying attention.

“They don't get to just keep doing business as usual. [We'll] throw a monkey wrench in there and make them [think] 'Oh yeah, we have to worry about that factor,” Nick said.

It's not about winning, necessarily; the campaign hopes to capture somewhere between 5-15% of the vote. It's about trying to “keep them honest and throw out new ideas”, putting out someone who will run to the left of Democratic incumbent Dave Cieslewicz and upset the stagnant political landscape of the city.

photo courtesy of Isthmians of Comedy

Nick and Stefan are the founding members of the local comedy troupe the Isthmians of Comedy. The group performs with a plethora of local and visiting comedians, but officially includes these two, and David Leon, David Pickett, and Ryan Casey. The comedians met through the Comedy Club, where all regularly appear at the Wednesday night Open Mic.

“'It's a publicity stunt', that's what people say. 'He's doing it for his comedy career,'” Nick told us. “Well, why do you think Mayor Dave is doing it?”

Nick Hart's “civic exercise” exists to challenge the status quo, to ask the questions that aren't asked, to offer a candidate left enough to challenge Mayor Dave's position as the “liberal” candidate and bring up the issues the incumbent has ignored.

And, being a comedian offers some great benefits that Mayor Dave's campaign doesn't have. The traditional candidates are restricted to political correctness, focused on protecting their image as professional public figures and pleasing as many people as possible.

“Because it's comedy,” Nick said, “you get to say whatever you want.”

And he's saying it in a dark basement late at night to a room full of drunk and stoned young Madison comedy fans. There won't be anyone questioning his image anytime soon.

And, these comedians don't have anything to lose; a win means a major accomplishment for newcomers and an upset of the entire political arena of the city, and a loss just means a damn good joke.

As Nick put it:  “We don't have to worry about them. They have to worry about us. Because we don't care.”

I've never looked twice at municipal politics, not even as a UW student, where political propaganda from all sides is shoved in my face anytime I walk through Library Mall. Nick Hart offers municipal politics wrapped in an attractive package of Jameson, PBR, and stoner jokes, and I am hooked. He's got the vote I would never have cast, and one more dedicated fan of local comedy to boot.

You can keep up with Nick Hart on Facebook.