Stoney McBlaze Comedy
Drake’s Dealership
2325 Broadway
Oakland
Feb. 3, 2024
Comedy is an art form I revere with profound admiration. Maybe it’s because I can’t tell a joke to save my life, butchering even a quippy grade school knock-knock. But comedians, people who understand timing and delivery and whatever magic it is that makes a crowd laugh, possess not only the skill to (potentially) kill, but the courage to get in front of an audience in an effort to tickle folks’ chuckle bone. That bravery is inspiring. I mean, if you’re balls-out enough to get onstage and try to get people to laugh along with you, you’ve already succeeded. The trio of aspiring young L.A.-based yuksters at Drake’s Dealership — Stoney McBlaze and his fellow travelers Ray Lau and Sam Skolnik — brought it with balls of brass.
My partner and I showed up at Drake’s, a brew pub in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood, not just hungry for comedy, but just plain hungry. The place is expansive: an outdoor beer garden, a fireplace, and two large halls, one of which was arranged for the show.
As the room slowly began filling up, I ordered the loaded fries. They didn’t look like much on the plate, but the flavor was fantastic: sliced red Fresno peppers, lime crema, shredded pork, and a dusting of some spice that brought the heat from the back of my mouth to the front, unifying the dish.
The draught Hazy IPA I chose, Drake’s Juicy Hoot, was creamy and citrusy with notes of pineapple — a perfect pairing.
My partner got the cheeseburger (“Yummy,” she said) and the Black Robusto porter. Porters aren’t really my thing, but I had a taste and it was good in that chocolatey way dark beer lovers dig.
But back to the comedy:
After some brief opening words from Stoney McBlaze — “What’s goin’ on, Stokeland, California?!” — I was singled out: “We have an independent journalist in the house.” (We’d acquired our passes from the comedy trio at the door, so my cover was blown from the get-go.)
“They only have a Blogspot site! Haha!”
McBlaze thought I needed a photo of him feigning shouting down a heckler and so posed for one for me to snap, then introduced Ray Lau.
Lau, originally from Seattle, stepped up to the mic with a routine about tallness: “I’m five-eight. For years I believed I was five-ten. It says it on my driver’s license: five-ten.”
His roommate accuses him of being shorter and breaks out a measuring tape. Lau discovers that he is, in fact, five-eight; but also that his member is six inches: “From the back of my butt to the tip of my penis.”
His best bit was about his brother’s Chipotle scam, wherein he asks for black beans but waits until the server has already scooped them before saying he wanted the pinto beans.
“Scamming a 16-year-old for beans?! At what cost? Our morals? We get up to heaven and God’s like, ‘Oh, hell no.’”
Next up was Sam Skolnik, who hails from Petaluma: “I look like I went to Hogwarts if it was in Marin.”
He went on to say he’s been told that he looks like a lot of people including “the liberal Ben Shapiro.”
Skolnik’s jokes ranged from contemporary Tupperware flippancy to renaming an adopted — “used” — dog to the experience of attending a religious wedding at a cathedral, remarking on the crucifix: “It’s hard out here for us.”
Skolnik considers himself “uncool” when at weed shops with his cannabis aficionado pal, Stoney.
Headliner Stoney McBlaze took the stage for his own set. McBlaze is the Jim Breuer-esque stoner persona of Austin Kress who told me he was “Born on the East Coast and raised himself in California.” Attired in a multicolored fleece pullover and a backwards baseball cap, McBlaze also told me: “I’m dressed like a mom from the ’80s on a ski trip.”
Many of McBlaze’s jokes focused on his evangelical — “quarantined” — Christian upbringing. “We have to keep you from a virus called THE DEVIL!”
He went on about how difficult it is to get a job speaking in tongues right out of high school. IMcBlaze entered into a great back-and-forth with an audiencemembers who’d grown up Pentecostal in Kentucky and who recounted getting into a knife fight during a poker game.
Stoney’s set ended with an excellent routine on the perils of masturbation (incorporating the knife fight story into the bit) by reading portions from a book his father had given him titled Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time. “How old were you when you discovered that your dad was a sex pest?”
There’s nothing like leaving a comedy show sated with beer, food, and yuks. Bravo, lads. Hoping to see one of you host the Oscars one day so I can say, “I saw that dude’s act in Oakland when he was just a young brass-balled comic!”
