This has been my week of comedy shows. At the Piper Malibu and Meridian Owner’s and Pilot’s Association annual convention we were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear from Norm Macdonald and Victoria Jackson, Saturday Night Live alums. Tonight it was a younger generation at Harvard Square’s Comedy Studio (upstairs from the infamous Hong Kong restaurant). Out of the nine acts featured by comic/emcee Dan Sally, the clear standouts were Rebecca Anderson’s impersonations and Matt Soni’s stage presence. The worst was oldster Gary Sohmers, a public TV junk collector, who said that the secret of happiness was to surround oneself with the stuff of one’s childhood and to hate George W. Bush. To my mind, Sohmers’s only redeeming feature was his graying ponytail, which made him resemble the television producer driving in his Jaguar during the opening scene of the movie Intolerable Cruelty (seen with Spanish subtitles in Bariloche, Argentina).
I’m parking this posting here so that I can come back five years from now and say that I saw Rebecca Anderson and Matt Soni back before they were famous.
I see Sohmers has taken his old hippie shcitck out on the public at large — he’s been spouting this routine for a while. I heard similar nonsense from him 5 years ago when he was trying to sell himself to anyone who would listen…