Last night was thoroughly cool. I went down to the 11pm show at the Comedy Cellar in New York’s West Village to say hello to a very funny individual, Ted Alexandro, who happened to be performing there. I had not seen him since he was in Hong Kong, and he was gracious enough to get me comped tickets for the evening.
Going there as his guest and seeing the show and being at the club was certainly cool enough to make some mouths drool when I get back to the HK comedy circle, but it didn’t end with that. As the act following Ted was on he went upstairs to grab a drink and hang out for a bit before leaving – as he’d been feeling a bit under the weather recently. I went up to chat 5 minutes later, and who do I see in the stairwell smoking with an entourage of people but Dave Chappelle.
I get upstairs and say ‘Hi’ to Ted, and say ‘Do you think Dave is going to go on stage?’ Ever the whimsical man, Ted responds with an appropriate ‘Dave who?’, which in fact was fairly appropriate, as Dave Attell was scheduled to perform before Godfrey on the lineup, and his going on would not be that odd. So I informed him of my recent discovery.
‘Dave Chappelle is sitting down in the stairwell – you didn’t see him coming up?’
This turned the interest in the evening around, and we both head back downstairs and grabbed some seats in the fairly full venue. Ten minutes later Dave took the stage to a massive crowd response. The time was quarter to one in the morning.
Dave is known for popping in unannounced at random venues and doing sets, and has even been known to do marathon shows – as when he set a new time record for longest stand up comedy at the Laugh Factor in 2007, only to have Dane Cook come in later and break his record again with a seven hour show. Last night was a night like those – except that by the end of the 5 hour and 10 minute long set, the laughs/minute ratio had certainly diminished. He still had us laughing to the very end, which is a difficult thing to do after 5 hours – at one point around the 4 hour mark saying “It looks like what we have here is a Mexican Stand-Off.”
The jokes went all over the board, with a lot of random audience interaction, including when I translated a Japanese phrase he used to order at Starbucks in Japan. The first hour was good, the second was alright, and the last three were weird. Dave played piano, sang a random collection of 80’s pop songs, and even had an audience member pull out and play solo saxaphone as he sang along on stage. Professional comedians who came to watch his show, like George Wallace, had come and long gone, and by the time he left the stage only around 15 of the originally packed house remained.
I’ll admit, I managed to stay through to the end of the show, getting out at around five to six in the morning. I could see blue in the sky already as the sun was probably coming up around the eastern edge of the sky. I got home 5 hours later than expected at my friends apartment, which had caused her some fear for my life when thinking what could have happened to me on the walk home at two in the morning down Houston St. I assured her there had been no hookers involved in my late night – a fact that she refused to believe, despite my logical arguments as to how it could not be true (I’m too cheap!, You’d be able to smell it on me by now!) If the night itself had not already been weird enough for you, I had another random encounter when I awoke 3 hours later.
Crawling from the grips of my nap/trying-to-change-to-China-time-a-day-early-by-accident stupor, I pulled open the laptop and dialed in a few key sites: email, facebook, whatever else happened to be open. Ooooh look, a new friend request! Who has found me today? My 11th grade AP US History teacher Jane Serkedakis. Sometimes, life’s little stories are just too weird to be made up.
And that concludes the story of my last 12 hours of wake and sleep. It’s an odd life, but someone’s gotta live it.
