Laugh Riot

Illustrations by Casey Burns
Photography by Heather Christianson

Like piano-keyboard ties, acid-wash jeans worn high with white Reeboks, and a pre-Seinfeld Seinfeld with a full head of hair, stand-up comedy seems a relic of the Reagan years. Something that boomed with Robin Williams, then also suffered a cocaine comedown, as cable TV and strip-mall comedy clubs gorged and exhausted performers and fans alike.

That was my attitude, anyway, as I drove south to Puyallup on a recent evening for the opening round of the Seattle International Comedy Competition. (Translation: "International" means Canada.) It's my first night in what will become a three-week odyssey of almost nightly stand-up. Two flights of 16 comics are in the race, starting with five-minute sets all around the state—Capitol Hill to Kent, Pioneer Square to Puyallup, Ellensburg to Walla Walla. Five of them will make the finals, which begin this week in and around Seattle. The winner bags $5,000, with another $10,000 split among the remaining contestants.

The name Puyallup alone invites a rim shot and fart joke, and I'm bracing myself for the formula: "You know, the weird thing about dating Puyallup women . . . " Then perhaps a bit of stage pantomime that could involve having sex on the hood of a '78 Camaro. Then the punch line with the tired '80s embellishment: "On crack!"

Established in 1980, the year before the Comedy Underground took residence in the basement of a Pioneer Square sports bar, the contest's past local winners have included Ross Shafer (who hosted KING 5's long-running Almost Live in the '80s and also had a talk show on Fox), Peggy Platt (still working locally), and Bill Radke (longtime KUOW voice and now co-host of NPR's Weekend America). The most revered champion is Mitch Hedberg (1997), who moved here during the '90s, helped established the "alt-comedy" genre, and made it to Letterman and other big-time gigs before his drug-related death last year. Perhaps the most successful competitor is Patton Oswalt, who now plays a sidekick on The King of Queens and also shows up on Reno 911! Some consolation to the losers: He didn't even reach the finals back in 1995.

The Underground, where the final face-off will take place Sunday, Nov. 26, and Giggles in the U District are the sole survivors of Seattle's '80s comedy boom. Back then, says Ron Reid, who co-runs the competition and manages the Underground, "There were five [clubs] in Seattle. People went nuts. It was the prime going-out years of the baby boom. It was a demographic thing."

But those days are over. "The bottom fell out in '90 or '91," Reid says. "There's not a lot of money. People are doing it for the love. There's a certain amount of purity. It isn't very commercial on a club level."

OUTSIDE THE LIBERTY Theater in Puyallup, a nicely refurbished, 84-year-old movie hall used most often these days for wedding receptions, a half-dozen comics smoke nervously. Not only is this Puyallup, but Puyallup on a Wednesday night, and the two-hour show begins at 8. The place is half-full, with a polite, thoroughly sober crowd who look like they'll be driving minivans home to the kids and baby-sitter. It's pre-election season, and all the yard signs I've seen have been solidly pro- McGavick and supporting property-rights measure I-933. As the performers puff away, you can imagine each of them shuffling their mental 3-by-5 note cards: Bush jokes, out. Iraq war jokes, out. Ethnic humor, out. Oops—out of note cards.

"A lot of these guys don't have a deep bench," says Jim Heneghen, emcee for the first week and a runner-up last year.

Tonight's routines present a rather numbing procession of dick jokes and riffs on white guys who can't dance, no-good exes, and errant kids. The guy who gets the biggest laughs does a well-rehearsed routine about shagging a woman who moans through one of those throat-cancer voice boxes. No surprise, he wins the evening. (The judges for the contest are mostly local media types. For two nights, judging will be done by industry scouts from Comedy Central, CBS Paramount, and the E! network.)

The competing comics are about evenly split between practiced road performers from L.A. and elsewhere, with slick headshots and confident stage demeanors, and a more DIY, ragged Northwest crew, including a fiftysomething black woman from Tacoma with artificial hips who jokes about her falling breasts and stomach-stapling surgery. It's not hard to tell the two regional factions apart.

Among the locals, the most sitcom-ready is Geoff Brousseau, a lumpy, put-upon regular fella straight outta Lake Forest Park. His is an immediately recognizable, relatable TV persona, an exasperated chronicler of the white guy's burden— living in a complex called Camelot Park ("You ever notice the shittier the apartment, the fancier the name?"), a divorced father with another kid on the way ("I'm gonna name her Dreamkiller").

"My act is absolutely 100 percent autobiographical," Brousseau tells me. "I don't sit down with a newspaper and come up with material." He takes a meat-and-potatoes view of comedy. "I don't consider it a fine art. Stand-up is respected between rodeo clown and stripper. I don't really write to be 'edgy.' I try to be honest. I want to completely hold nothing back." The everydude character he crafts, the voice he says he's trying to hone, "is sort of a cynic . . . an intelligent dummy." The Puyallup crowd likes him, and the judges score him among the top five that evening.

Emmett Montgomery: Conspicuous silence

Heather Christianson