Willkommen! Before It’s Too Late

Is live comedy in Texas the last unfettered art in the U.S.?

The Secret Group, Houston

I paid ten dollars to see a lineup of emerging comics in Houston the other night. For what I got, I would have paid hundreds.

In recent months, I’ve spent a bit of time in comedy clubs in Austin and Houston. I’d bet my sinister hand that it’s the last place to consistently find sophisticated, deeply honest art in the United States, along with an audience that will allow it. What’s allowable out in the world, creatively, is getting narrower by the month, but here—these artists aren’t going down without at least telling a painfully good joke.

Back in June of last year, I drove to Austin with a friend who does some standup, and we spent the better part of our weekend at The Creek and the Cave, on East 7th.

After 14 months of pandemic languishing and only watching standup on TV—i.e. solid but sanctioned stuff*—my time in that Austin club hit like water balloons in the middle of a drought. It may have been the most pleasurable shock of my life. The comics had come in from Los Angeles, the Midwest, and New York, and there were some native Texans, too. They worked out material. No topic was off limits—there was no sacred cow not worth murdering with direct hits.

At one point, in the daytime, my friend was outside with some other comics and I was inside to watch a drag queen comedy lineup, and I laughed so hard I thought I’d throw up. Middle-aged gay men in lipstick do not give two shits about anyone’s widdle feewings, especially when performing pretty much only for each other—thank god this is as true today as it was 10, 20, 30 years ago—and I felt like someone had just cut the shackles from my own ankles.

The comedy scene in Houston seems to exist on an even deeper level of this delicious inferno—I’m talking Houston comics now—and I have theories about why. Houston is the only really big, seriously cosmopolitan melting pot in the state.** It’s famous for being not zoned, and it’s arranged in a Gulf-Coastal ward tradition (First Ward, Second Ward, etc.), so in comparison to DFW, Austin, and San Antonio, it’s more integrated. This makes it more like New York City in disposition, but the truth of Texas’ stubborn libertarian streak renders it closer to the maggoty Big Apple of yore—before the internet and Rudy and PC sensibilities scrubbed NYC clean. On the Houston comedy stage now, it’s as if the rules haven’t arrived yet, or haven’t banished all signs of actual human nature and its cravings. Houston is like the frontier—the last vestige of the Wild West.

After watching six Houston comics the other night—seven if you count the host—I kept yelling at my friend as we walked back to the car: “They’re pirates! They’re pirates! They still exist!”***

By that I mean the new talent of all classes, ethnicities and sexual orientations know that when they are on stage in Houston, anything goes, everything can be funny, and the competitive one-upmanship is alive and kicking—and the point is to exploit this specific geography-based freedom. I know it’s typical in live comedy that crowd laughter eggs on a comic to more and more extremes, but with most of these comics the other night, they kept pushing and pushing each bit until they hit that magical Grand Guignol landing they didn’t even know was there before they got there, and the entire room orgasmed. Over and over. The audience was young and old, Black, Latino, Asian, white, trans, straight, you name it. It’s Houston. We’re free here. Everyone was in on the catharsis. Demanded it, in fact.

A couple of key things really stick with me about that particular Houston lineup.

One: as many of us already know, the rote side of identity politics is a deadweight on jokes. The diversity in the lineup, at least half whom progressives would deem to be from “marginalized” groups, did their best work when they transcended these labels, or what woke narratives expect of them, and instead just went Full Human. The trans comic who hosted, for instance, who seemed like the greenest on the stage that night, started out a little creaky, but when she stopped trying to check in with the not-present Stasi activist class, and let herself feel her audience, she let rip poisonous jokes that were as poetic as murder ballads. She soared. She was as dark as Oscar Wilde, and while her trans-ness may have played a role in her love affair with the death fantasia, the quality of her jokes were fully grounded in shared, extremely human nihilism.

Two: liberal jokes about racist bigots have been stock-in-trade of every late-night talk show host and SNL sketch for years now, but jokes about racist bigots are still funny and can still feel fresh, because sometimes wing-nuts we encounter really are so stupid they deserve to be made fun of. I’ve been forgetting that lately. It was good to be reminded.

Three, and this is the doozy: the last comic on that night, who killed—and killed and killed and was so loose and rangy it seemed he might explode into shards of broken beer bottle and cut us all to ribbons—also slipped something into his act that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

We were all gasping for air about halfway through his set, and he seemed increasingly pleased and propulsive, but then he did a quick aside about how he develops his material on Houston stages, but when he takes these jokes on the road, he has to cut about “ninety percent” of them. Because not only do the audiences of unicorn snowflakes not appreciate his jokes (I would have guessed that)… but that they don’t even get them. This comic, by the way, is probably all of 28 years old. His affect is gimme-cap tweaker. His jokes were not only not PC. They were rank, and totally verboten.

What he’s describing though isn’t just a generational thing. This is a wiring thing. This is a nature-over-nurture thing. This comic (and others on stage that night) is a person who was born to see and speak the truth, and cross forbidden borders—a real pirate—and here he was telling us about something we already sense and dread, though he didn’t have to say it explicitly: That there are a lot of “comedy fans” out there who do not have the language or psychological insight to find the world hilariously absurd. They have lost all sense of irony. Either because this insight has been beaten out of them by the culture wars, or because they—having lived their whole lives under the social-media surveillance state—have never been allowed to think freely in the first place. They’ve never experienced a culture awash in free thought. So they don’t miss it or value it. This comic’s Houston-born jokes are gibberish to them, a foreign language coming to them out of a time machine, or from the planet of We’re All Gonna Die Anyway So Lighten The Fuck Up.   

This phenomenon he’s describing goes beyond the comics who have admitted that they don’t play college campuses anymore because it’s too oppressive. What he’s seeing, as he plays rooms all over the U.S., and what I’m saying here, is that real pirates are rare and getting rarer by the year, and the farmers are ascendant, and will do away with him, with all of us, within the next few years, because the coddling of the American mind is not a mirage. It is an incinerator of insight to human psychology, of the way the world actually works.

When describing these rooms in Austin and Houston, I am to a degree describing a scene that feels like Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories/I Am a Camera, also known as Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The dank club scene of the Weimar Republic in 1931. The freaks, the unmentionables, the sexual deviants, the vaudevillians—this was their last dark and sticky stand against encroaching fascism. The forces that threaten to shut down the comedic gifts of Houston’s best in 2022 are more totalitarian than fascistic—now it’s about thought crimes—but the mood is the same. The cabaret is luxurious transgression. It’s decadent nastiness. It is the actual space for reckoning with humanity’s need for catharsis through levity, through collective physical release.

Worth hundreds of dollars? More. That’s how invaluable these artists’ work is, how rare. Willkommen! Outside it is winter. But in here it’s sooooo hot.

---

*I do purchase and watch, on repeat, Louie CK’s “unsanctioned” standup, that no platform will take. He’s done some of the strongest work of his life these last couple of years.

**A note on Austin. For those of us from DFW and Houston, Austin has been, for many years, a kind of “toy town,” i.e. cute, shiny, navel-gazing, kinda theme-parky, and a real loss of what was once an actual bastion of freakshow culture (c.1960s-1990s). When people outside of Texas go on about how Austin is so great, or how Austin is the only place in Texas they would consider living, we roll our eyes and move on and let them live in their quaint blue-state headspace. But right now, Austin does not feel like a toy town. It feels shittier—like a crowded, painfully expensive sprawl that’s held on to some old pirates, attracted some new ones, and is also dealing with an explosion of homeless encampments. Gentrification on steroids mired in nimbyism. Like a mini Los Angeles! So, welcome, Austin, to reality bites. You are a real city now, like the velveteen rabbit. We suspected you’d get here sooner or later.

***See: Dave Hickey’s 2013 book Pirates and Farmers. In Hickey’s worldview, people fall into one of two categories. Farmers “build fences and control territory.” Pirates “tear down fences and cross borders.”