A Whale in the room

The rise of Tulsa's comedy scene

“Everybody gets their start with this shit right here. Five minutes at an open mic. No other profession works that way. Nobody walks into an ER and they say, ‘So you wanna be a surgeon? All right, here’s a scalpel, you’re going to do five minutes on this guy. If everything goes well you’ll come back and do seven.”
—Thomas King

I love stand-up comedians. Always have. Even the shitty ones. Which is another way of saying I’ve always wanted to be one of them. Yet, there’s a sizeable gulf between cracking your friends up at the bar and purposefully capturing lightning in a bottle for strangers’ enjoyment. The stage, the audience and the microphone are the great equalizers.

Steeped in Carlin and Pryor from childhood, I put stand-up comedians in the same space as my favorite bands. They were, and are, rock stars—alchemists who elicit involuntary and visceral reactions, noble fools who sometimes change everything. Had a terrible day? Nothing a good comedian can’t handle. 

Tulsa’s comedy lighthouses, The Looney Bin and Comedy Parlor, are no longer the sole outlets for people seeking a night of laughs and the would-be comedians who deliver them. Over the past couple of years, stand-up nights and open mics have been popping up like dandelions. 

When I met veteran comic and burlesque emcee Hilton Price at the Cellar Dweller (the murky lighting and red brick walls seemed a fitting backdrop), it was only an hour before his set at Enso. Wait. Enso?

“My first show was a Looney Bin show, because that’s where I thought you were supposed to do comedy,” Price said. “But now you have four or five places doing shows. That’s the most places doing comedy in Tulsa that there’s ever been.” 

Turns out, venues as diverse as Enso, The Yeti, Lot No. 6, The Shrine, The Amsterdam Room and the VFW’s Centennial Lounge—none of which are traditional comedy clubs—offer weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly performance opportunities for professionals and beginners alike. And we have more working local comedians now than ever.

Price takes an egalitarian view of what some would consider the competition—of which there’s quite a bit. Names like Peter Bedgood, Michael Zampino, Diana Jarvis, Drew Welcher, Dan Fritschie and Sheila Naifeh pop up routinely in my conversations and on social media, pimping appearances or being witty in 140 characters. But they just scratch the surface, especially with the explosion of open mics.

“There’s a ton of people, [but] you hate to think about it being too many people,” Price said. “You don’t want anyone to be discouraged. You never want anyone to want to stop, because they might be the one who really ends up mattering. I’ll never say it’s oversaturated. It needs to be organized well.”

As part of the Blue Whale Comedy Festival, Price will host Byron Bowers, Erica Rhodes and Allison Saft Fri., June 19 at 6:30 p.m. at The Fur Shop.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.”—Henny Youngman

Humor is observational. To filter those moments of lucidity and origami them into a joke takes thoughtfulness, eloquence and the diligence of a craftsperson. And the only way to know if what thou hath wrote be gold is to say it in front of a group of (ideally) drunk people.

Tahlequah resident Shawna Blake has only been doing stand-up for a year, though you’d never know it from her easy confidence onstage. Part of that stems from her time in debate. She’s overcome the biggest obstacle to performing live: stage fright. 

The night I spoke with Blake, she performed at the Parlor as a part of Comedic Distraction, a “Whose Line Is It Anyway”-inspired competition hosted by comic and emcee Tyson Lenard. A graduate of Bedgood’s workshop at the Comedy Parlor, Blake’s endgame is to be a nationally touring comedian. “Just do it” might be a reductive Nike slogan, but it applies here. 

“It takes a lot of work; I’ll do any gig I can get,” Blake said. “The first show I did was Peter’s graduation show, and I did like 10 minutes there, and I’d worked on those over the course of a couple of months. Now I probably have 30 or 40 minutes of material. I can do 30 minutes and feel confident.”

Now something of a staple on the circuit, Blake performs in Tulsa and regionally, working clubs, special shows and private parties from Rogers and Fort Smith to Norman and Stillwater. 

“I do this show in Rogers—The Big Chill—which is a really good show,” Blake said. “A big room. I’ve done it five times now, and it’s a lot of the same people. So if they put you on, you’re going to have to come up with new material every time—a new 10 or 15 minutes. I’m like ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ And the last time, I was like, ‘I don’t have anything!’ like two days before the show. I just have to do it.”

At Blue Whale Comedy Festival, Blake will perform June 20 at 7:30 p.m. in The Fur Shop backyard and host the Erica Rhodes and Nikki Glaser show.

Blake said the festival is “an amazing experience that provides a lot of opportunities for local comics to work with really great talent and big names.” 

“This will be a testament to Tulsa's commitment to comedy,” she said.

The festival’s popularity seems to parallel the growth of our rich comedy scene, whose left-of-center underground appeal somehow still feels undiscovered. It’s something like a D-Fest for comedy. That much-missed music showcase of local, regional and national indie bands snowballed from obscurity into a national draw for Tulsa. At its peak, D-Fest boasted 140 acts on 10 stages across downtown and more than 70,000 attendees. Blue Whale isn’t there yet, but there’s no reason to think it couldn’t achieve a similar level of renown.

Price said Blue Whale “seems like a reaction to the growth of the scene more than a catalyst.”

“It’s trying to be home for the locals and be a home to bring in some big names for a fun party weekend, and so far that’s what it’s doing,” Price said. “… But it seems sort of independent of the scene now.”

Tulsa’s comedians are creating a promising local arts subculture, and I’ll be watching. Because the other night, I wrote a joke. Want to hear it?

For more on Tulsa's stand-up scene, check out Joshua Kline's guide to the 2105 Blue Whale Comedy Festival or Molly Bullock's story on the making of native comedy troupe the 1491s.

For more from Joe, read his review of Mad Max: Fury Road and his guide to the most anticipated summer movies.