Comedy Night Featuring Jacob Williams
City Steam Brewery
Hartford
Jan. 5, 2024
Comedy is one of those skills that everyone thinks they can do professionally because they’ve been funny at some point in their life. But comedy is more than just being funny. Sure, a professional can tell a funny story and make everyone laugh the first time. But can you make the same story funny twice? Or three times?
That’s what I got to experience at Comedy Night at City Steam last Friday. I was excited to ring in 2024 with some laughs; some of the comedians delivered on that promise, while some did not.
The highlight of the show was Darren Rivera, a veteran performer at City Steam. This was my third time seeing Rivera perform. I found watching him instructive on what makes a joke, and by extension a comedian, funny.
The big punchlines in Rivera’s set have remained the same each time that I’ve seen him, but the way that he leads into them is different. He mixes in topical jokes with the energy and reactions he gets from the crowd to put a new spin on his routine. It’s the kind of pleasure you feel when you take a new route to the same store you always go to. Even though I knew the destination of Rivera’s jokes, it was still enjoyable to get there in a new way.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter how much he remixes his approach if the punchlines aren’t funny. And I can tell you that Rivera’s jokes are just as funny the third time as they were the first time.
Humor is in many ways about timing. Less talented comedians often rely on the most simple form of timing there is, the “surprise.” That’s when a comedian says something shocking or unexpected at the moment you least expect them to. Surprise is an integral part of comedy, but it can’t be the whole act.
Rivera builds his performance on a more sophisticated understanding of comedic timing. He plays to the audience to deliver his punchlines, ad-libbing here or cutting a story short there to deliver the punchline at the moment it will have the most impact.
So yes, I’d heard the jokes before. But I’d never heard them at the same moment twice. It might been a joke I’ve heard before. But it wasn’t the same joke.
The best example was Rivera’s routine about the shower.
He scanned the crowd for a lead-in.
“How long have you two been together?” he asked a younger-looking couple.
Six months, they answered.
“Oh I bet you two take showers together all the time, huh? In your 40s, though? Not so much!”
He then described how completely unsexy shower sex is, and how it only gets worse the older you get.
“I don’t remember seeing all these shampoo bottles in the pornos!” he quipped.
Where Rivera’s style was high energy and refined, headliner Jacob Williams was understated and freeform with his material. He leaned very heavily into self-deprecation as his main form of humor. It’s a style that can work, but the performance lacked the energy needed to keep the show from veering into boredom.
The worst part of Williams’ performance was that it seemed that he didn’t have enough material to get through his set. There was a surprising amount of dead air in the set; he even began fishing in the audience for jokes. Comedians engage with the audience all the time to lead into their next bit, but Williams kept returning to the crowd as if he was looking for something funny to come from the audience that he could then build on. With no stage presence and no jokes, it wasn’t long before the audience started to leave in the middle of the set.
Still, even if Williams didn’t impress me, he at least had two supporters in the audience. I sat next to Kimberly and Jayssi, who were visiting City Steam for the first time from West Springfield. They told me they really enjoyed the vibe and the food. As for the comedian?
“I have lots of admiration for Williams, he had a cold crowd and he stuck with it,” Kimberly said.
“Yeah, the world would be a different place if we could all stick to what we love,” Jayssi added. I suppose I can’t argue with that.
NEXT
City Steam hosts Comedy Night on January 12th with comedian Joe Matarese.
Jamil heads to Bloomfield for an Open Mic night.
