Will Hines Dot Net

That microphone is very much not plugged into anything.

Performed stand-up on the Union Square L train platform Saturday night as a special guest of Joe Pera, the host. Dan Wilbur also performed. Very fun. It was part performance art, part awesomely challenging stand-up conditions. Joe had done this twice before. I’m only now realizing I never asked him how he came to think of this. I think he liked the idea of 2 hours of stage time, broken into 5-10 minutes sets (the time in between each train departing). Or it just seemed fun? Not sure.

That’s your host, Joe Pera. Tabitha’s phone ran out before we got a photo of Dan.

Here’s how it worked: A train would depart. Joe would wait until one or two people were nearby. If they were girls, he’d offer a compliment. If they were guys, he’d offer to guess their favorite food. Those went over well, sometimes even gathering two or three others. Then he’d do his set — three or four very short jokes. Then he’d introduce either Dan or myself, and we’d take the microphone. You had to project over the echo of the station, over the fan that was blowing directly overhead, and over the frequent announcements. After a few jokes we’d turn it back to Joe to close. After a while, we’d cycle through all three of us in the 5-10 minutes timespan. It usually worked all right. At least twice we had a crowd of twenty or more gathered around. If no one would talk to Joe to begin with, Tabitha would be a plant and ask for a compliment.

It was pretty cool. Besides the very fun silliness of the whole presentation (I enjoyed shaking Joe’s hand as I took the mike and saying “Thanks for coming out, everyone.”) there was the challenge of trying to get a reaction out of the crowd. Most of my “material” is too-subtle stories of being a guy in his late 30s in hipster Williamsburg. Even though it was the L train , there were not many of my peers there. Mostly younger guys and girls, often Latino, heading out for their Saturday night. The fun part was — it seemed they were into hearing jokes. Considering it was one of the most hostile acoustic environments, these people seemed like they were rooting for the material to work. Joe’s crowd work was a hit, and both Dan and I had patches of getting stuff to work.

Dan admirably switched up his strategy with each train. He tried his normal set once, then all crowd work, then a mixture, then addressing the weirdness of the situation — he was adapting and doing better each time! It was like watching Joshua learn tic-tac-toe in War Games. I mostly just talked faster, trying to trim the starts of each of my jokes each time. Good training to edit!

I think we’re doing it again. I am going to wear a tie like Joe next time. And prepare a special subway set.