Festival is happy helping rising stars
For the past eight years, Boston Comedy Festival co-founder Jim McCue has thrown everything he can think of into the festival to see what sticks. The first year, he started with a $500 budget and a handful of shows in midsummer, then expanded to include every club in town. That meant driving from Cambridge to Dorchester and then trying to park downtown to see all of the shows, sometimes in a single evening.
This year's festival - which kicks off Sunday and runs through Oct. 13 - is in a much more comfortable place, with a few set anchor shows and a variety of specialty shows and showcases around town. The local content is stronger, with college shows like the Emerson gala and an evening spotlighting Harvard's Stand-Up Comic Society (they call it Harvard SUCS), and even the international element is stronger, with Brian Joyce's "Off the Boat Comedy" bringing in Irish comic Ed Byrne.
The festival isn't as big as Montreal's Just for Laughs or HBO's US Comedy Arts Festival, formerly held in Aspen, Colo., but that's just fine with McCue.
"I think we've found our niche," he says. "We're not Montreal and we're not Aspen; we're more new talent with a couple of big shows. And it's a good niche for us because we have Montreal and Aspen coming here to look for talent now, which is great."
McCue points to Dan Boulger and Shane Mauss, virtually unknowns outside of Boston when they reached last year's finals in the competition. Boulger worked his competition win into a guest spot on a BBC show, and Mauss has appeared on Conan O'Brien twice. While the shows like "Lewis Black & Friends" and the Emerson event, which will feature Denis Leary, Anthony Clark, and Bill Burr, bring in the crowds, McCue wants people to know, "You're also going to see people who, in the future, are going to be big stars."
Harrison Greenbaum and David Ingber founded the Harvard Stand-up Comic Society, which will showcase its talent Tuesday at Dick's Beantown Comedy Vault, with the hope of training those future stars. Harvard is known for humor writing through the Harvard Lampoon and for its theater group, Hasty Pudding, but not for stand-up, even though it boasts alums from Al Franken to "The Office" star B.J. Novak.
"We really want to show that there's some really funny stand-up comedy and this art form is not something that Harvard has sort of forgotten," says Greenbaum. "It's very vibrant, and we have a lot of people who are really good at it."
The club, officially recognized by the university in January, has a core of about seven members, which can swell to 20 at any given time. They meet regularly to brainstorm and critique one another's material and have produced several shows on campus, which, according to Greenbaum, have all sold out. They've already branched out to New York City with a weekly Thursday show at the Sage Theatre, where the group's more polished performers get a chance to play for a paying crowd.
"A lot of clubs at Harvard people join because there are connections and an alumni network," says Greenbaum. "David and I realized early on that since we're the founders, we sort of have to be that alumni network. People who do really well at our club at Harvard have the opportunity to be in an incredible, professional stand-up comedy show in Times Square."
Boston comic and Harvard graduate Baratunde Thurston had just moved to New York when the show started, but he admits he was a bit suspicious about the quality of the performing at first. "I knew it was some kind of Harvard comedy thing," he says, "but that doesn't mean it was a funny thing."
There was no group like SUCS at Harvard when he graduated in 1999, and Thurston isn't even sure the Harvard kids hanging out at the second-floor bar of the Hong Kong knew the Comedy Studio was just upstairs.
His fears were quashed when he saw the first show and it was funny. Now he's the regular host, and he'll host Tuesday's show. "It's definitely helping me out, and it seems like it's helping these guys, too," he says.
The "Off the Boat Comedy" show starring Ed Byrne will also be part of the festival, playing the Burren Wednesday, Thursday, and Oct. 13. Well known in the UK as a regular on shows like BBC's "Mock the Week" and RTE's "The Panel," Byrne doesn't play the United States much. He's only headlined once in this country, at San Francisco's Cobb's Comedy Club, and only played Boston once, at Comics Come Home in 2003. So he'll have the challenge and pleasure, he says, of trying to win new fans.
"It's nice to be able to just dust off your greatest hits and do them for a bunch of people who haven't heard them before," he says from Ireland. "Over here, there's a lot of material I just don't use anymore because people have heard it. So it's nice to just go somewhere where you can do everything you've got in the tank, really."
