(Note to Joel ... I saw this pic of you with these people and a cow and I couldn't resist. Note to fans, Joel does not tour with this cow, or any other cow as far as I know.)
There are 3051 seats in Long Beach's Terrace Theatre. I think they all might have been occupied last night for Joel and opening act comic Chris Porter, though as I sat under the first balcony at the back of the orchestra I couldn't see the upper decks.
I sat behind "pierced-neck girl" (OUCH!) who brought her parents to the show. I came this close (fingers not far apart) from smacking her mom for letting her get her neck pierced. It's right by your brain stem, not a place to invite infection.
(This is a good reason for me not to have kids, they would be locked in a room with the works of Abbott and Costello and the Friends DVD boxset to keep them occupied. Extreme? Maybe, but a neck piercing? Her strawberry blonde ponytail covered it half the time, what was even the point? And what is the point of a not far from 20-year-old woman getting a neck piercing anyway?)
Also, down the row from me was "Overweight Salman Rushdie" who I knew wasn't actual Salman Rushdie because his date was age appropriate.
So, lights dim, Porter comes out. He's a traditional stand up with actual material (more on having actual material later) and was very funny. You might know Porter from Last Comic Standing (season four) or a bunch of stuff at FunnyOrDie.com that you should see that's really twisted. Twisted is good.
Porter's riffs on the Axe body spray crowd are genius.
But the main event is Joel, and he comes out to wild applause from the crowd (apparently every last one of them fans of The Soup -- and you could tell there were a lot of TV junkies from their physical makeup.
(Meaning most of them -- and me -- could skip a meal and really not feel it.)
Now Joel is not a traditional stand up (he's an actor who got a job being funny on TV) and this isn't really a traditional stand up crowd. He knows his audience and immediately starts with his Ryan Seacrest material.
Actually, Joel is at his best during the show talking about tiny people -- Ryan and his two sons Eddie and Isaac.
The Seacrest material is a little bit hit and miss, but the recounting of the day E! shot their Summer 2008 promo really hits, especially the Khloe Kardashian as Bigfoot lines.
The second half is much better material, however. The stories about his family work really well. Joel has a dad like mine that thinks he's still the invincible pop with the honey-do list despite his age, and that worked really well with the adults with aging parents part of the crowd, which was considerable. In fact, I was surprised that so many people around my age were in the room. I thought it would be a younger crowd.
I think Joel could probably do 20 minutes on his son Eddie alone. He recounts a great story you might have heard in the press about what happened the day him, his wife and the kids were in In-And-Out Burger when a little person walked in. This is where his material and his confidence is strongest, joking about his family while obviously loving every inch of them.
All in all, a very satisfying night out, that started with some great BBQ at Johnny Reb's and ended as usual with Homer rushing to the door when I got home.
Joel's in Thousand Oaks tonight with Porter, and if you're in that area and there are still tix available I promise you'll have a great time.
And, btw, Joel's personal website is finally all built out with all kinds of great stuff on it, so click over there for his tour schedule (some East Coast dates are rescheduled) and clips and audio and pics and all the usual info.
Sorry, Junkie--good blog, but I couldn't disagree more with this review. While Porter was funny in a traditional stand-up way, we found Joel to be a huge disappointment. He's funny on TV when he has something to react against (I won't say he's funny on TV when he's got someone else writing for him, because that would be unnecessarily mean and cruel), when the audaciously bad clips he shows set him up to respond. He's funny and edgy and self-aware and it works really well.
But last night there was nothing, really, for him to react to, and it was all on Joel to delivery the funny. I felt he missed the target most of the evening. The audience participation piece was a disaster, and the television material felt, well, a bit warmed-over and pro forma, like he was throwing out show titles and riffing on them because he knew his audience expected it. His material on his family, and particularly on his son, was cute-ish but lacked much of a punch or payoff -- I was reminded of backyard evenings a whole other sexuality ago, swapping my-kid-did-the-funniest-thing stories with other parents, and we all found it highly amusing. But while I had to bring hot dog buns or chicken salad or something to those evenings, I didn't have to pay for the privilege.
All in all, I think I'd recommend sticking to The Soup for your Joel McHale fix.
Posted by: Evan | March 14, 2009 at 03:18 PM