My Night at the Fat Black Pussycat

I once went to the comedy cellar with the most boring guy I ever dated, and still had a blast, so figured it was a good activity to do with an out of town guest on a rainy Monday night when there was seemingly nothing else to do.

We met up with a friend of my friend's (who also happens to benamed "Zoe W.) and tried to get into the 9:30 show without tickets, and had no luck. We basically got laughed off the block. Apparently, even on a rainy Monday night in June, The Comedy Cellar is a hot spot. We found a bar called "The Fat Black Pussycat"* that was conveniently serving $1 Margaritas (and also, oddly, advertising "Live Nudes!" in the basement) and decided to get drunk and wait it out until we could try again for the 11:30 show. 

Three Babes At The Fat Black Pussycat
(Have I ever looked worse?)

Again, No Dice.

Just as we were about to give up, a creepy guy popped his head out of the bar next door and asked if we had any interest in attending a free comedy show that was starting in 5 minutes.

Considering this was the same day as our bizarre experience the Hologram Museum, and we were already a little bit tequila-tipsy, we were pretty much up for anything. And, let's be honest, he had us at "Free!" 

The creepy guy, who was quite clearly very high, ushered us behind a black curtain (this was becoming the theme of the day– I swear it wasn't as unsafe as it sounds) into the back room of the bar otherwise known as the "performance space" 

"You three, sit here" he told us, and gestured to a table directly in front of the stage. 

There were 7 people total in the room: the three of us, two girls we later learned were from Turkey and didn't speak a word of English, and two men, one of whom was wearing a fedora and the other whom was enormous, decked out in layers and layers of gold chains and bragging loudly about the fact that he was "Akon's record producer" (or somerthing). 

The first comedian came on, and immediately got into reckless verbal argument with Fedora guy and Akon's producer when they started heckling him, so they left.

And then there were 5. 

The comedians were terrible. One of them actually YELLED at me for laughing at his jokes, because even he knew they weren't funny. They all kept asking me what race I was, and got really mad when I told them I was a boring, white, Jewish girl from the East Coast. One kept calling Zoe, Alix and I the "Varsity Squad," and referring to the other foreign girls as "JV," which I think may have been a compliment to us but honestly the jokes kept falling so flat it was really hard to tell. 

One of the comedians, named Raj Mahal (who genuinely believed he was the first guy in the world to come up with that name for himself, and was horribly disappointed when Alix told him she went to high school and college with two different guys who had the same name) was actually mildly funny and sort of hot, but kept talking about his "very serious girlfriend" which was a huge disappointment to us, who as the only audience members were trying to flirt with him out of boredom. 

Luckily, as we discovered after the show when we were taking fireball shots with the talent (we'll get to that in a second), a lot of what comedians say "happened" to them isn't actually true (I'm sorry, but did anyone else know that? Like was Louis CK ever even actually married?) and Raj Mahal was single. Unluckily, though, he had zero interest in any of the three of us — probably because we were funnier than he was. 


After the show was over, in an attempt to hit on Raj Mahal, the three of us and all of the male comedians went to the front of the bar to get drinks. Yes, to confirm your suspicions, we were the only patrons in the bar. Somewhere along the way, we managed to lose the Turkish girls — probably after they used Google Translate to figure out what "JV" means. Somehow, most likely because comedians make less than three unemployed girls (there goes my dream future career) we ended up treating them to drinks for hours. One of them got so drunk he repeatedly asked me if I would consider making a threesome tape with him, at which point we decided it was time to excuse ourselves to Artichoke Pizza.


I'm going back to the Comedy Cellar on Thursday....