“Crowned with ivy, portrayed as a young woman with a joyous air, Thalia was the muse of comedy and short poems about the rustic life. She carried a mask or a trumpet and wore boots.”
— James Sewell, one who knows
Six degrees of Kincheloe
The comedian faces the audience. Only a mic stands between them. The room is as full as occupancy rules allow. Crowd work. Punching up. Sight gags. The crowd is generous with their laughter and applause. Timing is everything and word order needs to be precise. One comedian asks the crowd if they want to see her imitation of herself before she stopped drinking, a person she describes as an oversexed Bonobo monkey. The crowd does. What happens next is comedy gold.
For those paying attention, Kingston is currently experiencing what amounts to a full blown, stand-up comedy renaissance. The first Thursday of every month at Keegan’s. The first and third Wednesday of every month at Night Swim. Select Tuesdays, once a month at Tubby’s. And then the Unicorn Bar just joined in the fray last Wednesday.
“It’s a genre we want to present here,” explains bar owner Francesca Hoffman. “This was planned before the election, but the timing is right.”
Among them all, only the open mic at Night Swim, called Night Mic, which started in July, isn’t in some way, convoluted, adjacently or directly affiliated to Lauren Kincheloe.
A stand-up comic herself who bartends to pay the bills, a tireless supporter of comedy and comedians, Lady Ha Ha, Kincheloe does not cotton to social media.
“I did do Instagram recently, because everyone was like, come on, check it out! But it gave me just tons of anxiety. Not posting made me anxious. Posting made me anxious. I started one for the comedy show, but I was like, I just hate this so much. Also, I am not having any trouble… ow fuck me. I’m having trouble not running into the Murphy bed. Shit, that hurts. Fuck, ouch.”
She has just barked her shin against the frame of a bed that folds out of a closet. Which is funny. She catches her breath before she says: “Word of mouth is working fine.”
Like the motto of the Kingston Plaza, when working to get a handle on the comedy scene in Kingston, all roads lead to Kincheloe.
“I had been doing stand-up in L.A, when I moved here in 2019, and I thought, oh, let me go check out an open mic, I want to go get up on stage and do a set,” said Kincheloe. “This is pre-pandemic. And there wasn’t even one open mic. Nothing. There was the Colony in Woodstock, but that’s a bunch of singer-songwriters. I just wanted to know where the comedians were at!”
As reported in Hudson Valley One in 2022, out of her need for comedy, the Squalid Gold Comedy School was born.
“So I thought, well, maybe I can, you know, start something. I didn’t really know if I could teach anything but I figured I would try.”
Since then, twice a year, over six weeks, Kincheloe nurtures those who aspire to be funny in front of a live audience, showing them how to construct a premise, helping them hone their writing, encouraging their daring and then, on the seventh week, pushing them out into the spotlight in front of a rowdy crowd on a stage in the Stockade Tavern. Over the course of five classes, Kincheloe has single handedly been responsible for the release of 40 newly-minted comedians into the ecosystem. The sex crazed Bonobo was one of them.
“Go forth and multiply,” Kincheloe snickers.
A clown, a dentist, a barista and a drag queen walk into a bar
Max Miller, who bartends the comedy night Night Mic at Night Swim, is a Squalid Gold graduate. He’s gotten up in front of the mic a few times at the bar near the traffic circle on Broadway.
“I’ll probably go up next time. I’ve nothing written. I’ll just kind of riff,” he says. “Talk to the wallpaper for a couple minutes. Everyone’s kind of work-shopping.”
Miller remembers his first stand up bit fondly. He says when he watches the video recording he can see his hands trembling from the nerves, the bright light in his eyes, the realization hitting him that he can’t see the audience’s faces.
“I had an aunt that was a clown,” Miller says. “You have to be comfortable with yourself on some level, being called a clown. I almost want to say ‘fuck you! I’m no clown!’ But I wonder what it’s like to just abandon that notion entirely. Of being taken seriously. And just be a clown.”
Miller says he used to listen to Vesti La Jiuba, a tenor aria from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera Pagliacci, before going to work.
“It’s an opera about a sad, quintessential clown. Finds out his wife’s cheating on him, five minutes before he has to perform and he has to put on the makeup. Nothing more human than a sad clown. I think about it every now and then. Path I could take.”
And then there is Tom Cingel, he too a Squalid Gold graduate, who started an open mic in February, Out to Lunch Comedy, first at The Salt Box, a bar just across the parking lot from the Ulster County Courthouse, before taking it over to Keegans where it found a permanent home.
Cingel, whose day job is as a dentist, kept it going into the summer but found the time required to run the event demanding.
“It’s a lot of work,” says Cingel. “To reach out to people, put up flyers, do social media. Post videos from the event.”
He handed the show off to another comic who in turn passed it onto current showrunner, Matt Toledo. But drawn to the challenge and problem solving aspects of constructing jokes and delivering them, Cingel still hits up open mics. And as a dentist, he always has a steady supply of audience on which to workshop his bits.
“The actual specialty of dentistry is to dentally entertain people,” Cingel says. “So when I’m chair side and I’m working on people, I’m part ’dentertainer’. Once you goof off and you relax, the patients relax. They’re like, okay, this is great. This is fine. I’m having a good time.”
Cingel likes to gear his material towards current events and when he reads something in the morning news he’ll often run it past his captive audience.
“Did you hear there’s another Fox news correspondent that’s going to be the head of a governmental agency? That’s one right there. So I just try my material out. They have no choice but to laugh to some degree because I’m taking care of them.”
Totally susceptible to the intoxication that joke-telling provides, AJ Jordan, 25-year-old Rough Draft coffee jockey, might be the hardest working comic in town. He sleeps, drinks and breathes comedy, performing stand-up as often as he can here in the city and wherever else he can find venues in surrounding municipalities. When he’s not doing either, he’s writing jokes.
“I had always personally wanted to do stand-up comedy, going back to when I was five, six years old. And I just never knew how to get started. I got to know Lauren and then I took her class.”
Jordan, who only just entered the comedy arena in the Spring, grew up between Kingston and Poughkeepsie — I’ve got dual citizenship, he says — now hosts a monthly open mic comedy night which he started at the midtown live-music bar, Tubby’s. Jordan also added a variety show to the calendar, featuring live rockers and a curated list of comedians, called Sunday Service.
On Mondays, that rare day of the week where Jordan is not working, he’ll go down to blitzkrieg comedy audiences in New York City, hitting up three or four open mics in a night, among them the lottery competition he recently discovered at the Flophouse Comedy Club.
“It’s like a bucket pull system where they pull names out of the hat. You do a set and then you get rated. The top three sets of the night tell one more joke. The winner gets money.”
Last Monday, he did not win the money. He says he slipped up and missed a joke, and wasn’t able to bounce back.
“I would consider that a bomb,” says Jordan. “One of my worst performances.”
Sooner or later, if not immediately, every comedian does it. The bright light in their face. A room full of strangers. Coughs. Pity laughs. Bombing.
“Just a few days before that, I had done a restaurant show, and they just didn’t want to hear me,” said Jordan. “I just got eviscerated by a bunch of people eating fried fish.”
Sjoerd Dijk empathizes. Another certified Squalid Gold comedian, his last set at Jordan’s open mic at Tubby’s, wasn’t great.
“I had new material that I had just written that day and I bombed,” Dijk says. Joke after joke fell flat. Still he persisted. “At the end I was like, I know I have one funny new thing that I wrote and I’m just going to say it.”
He told a joke about a game he plays with his wife for sexual excitement, wherein she buries him in the dirt of the garden and then digs him back up, in order to call him a dirty little turnip. The joke worked.
“But the rest of it was not comfortable,” Dijk says. “It was five minutes of bombing.”
Dijk was in attendance at the Unicorn Bar for the venue’s first ever open mic night held on November 13. Drink in hand, he opted to sit it out, content as a member of the audience.
Called Mother Mic, the flier referred to it as a queer comedy open mic. Half of the MC team for the evening, Caroline Contillo explains the queer emphasis.
“You don’t need to be queer to tell jokes here,” she says, “but you should probably be an ally.”
Owner of the bar, Francesca Hoffman seconds that.
“That’s kind of the vibe at Unicorn,” she says. “My joke is that we’re a hetero-friendly establishment.”
“I used to do stand-up in New York City,” said Contillo. “I moved up here four years ago. I really kind of craved a community of people who you could be creative with and try stuff out. And since then, a couple other open mics have actually sprouted up. So it’s been really interesting to see the Kingston comedy scene kind of rapidly, like mushrooms overnight, kind of sprout up. And then, coincidentally, we are also part of that.”
Contillo, who spells her last name, “C, O, N as in night, T, I, L as in lesbian, L as in lesbian, O,” is not affiliated with Kincheloe or her comedy school, but Contillo’s co-MC for the evening, Andy Monk is.
But he was already funny before he met Kincheloe. When on stage he possesses that sharpened, bifurcated wit distinctive to drag queens, whether or not he’s gussied up.
“Sometimes I just don’t get the laugh that I know I deserve. And it’s not because the jokes aren’t funny,” Monk says, positing that the sexual sophistication of the crowd at a queer bar is more advanced than a straight bar crowd. “Tonight, I’m looking forward to telling my same old dick jokes, without having to explain any of the backstory.”
As showtime was drawing near, there were only three people that had signed up, which appeared to play on Monk’s and Contillo’s nerves. It was only the silence before the noise. By the time the show had kicked off a crowd showed up to jam into the seats and pack the room standing.
The line-up was front loaded with Squalid Gold alumnis, Chewy Altamirano, Jess Edelman, and Abe Uchitelle.
A sampler:
“I just want to feel the room out a little bit. How many queer folks do we have? Perfect. Hey fam, we’re going to be okay. Straight people? It’s okay. It’s a safe place. We got any bisexuals in here? Good. Would never want to leave you out of anything. Ever.” — Jess Edelman
“I am out at work, but I’m actually in the armoire, which is what I call code switching in front of my coworkers, not in the closet necessarily.” — Andy Monk
“So the county is divided into districts, and every two years, everyone in each district chooses their most attention-seeking narcissist and sends them to the sixth-floor conference room above the DMV to battle for sport. I am Uptown Kingston’s tribute to the arena.” — Abe Uchitelle
“For the lesbians, do you find that when you’re in an establishment or a store, that people generally feel like maybe you own it, or they think that you’re in charge? Do you experience that? Now that I live up here, it happens at farms a lot, which is very exciting to me, that people think I am farming. I was picking up my CSA veggies a couple weeks ago, and this woman came up, and she was kind of like, when are you guys gonna have eggplant again? And I was just like, well, you know, whenever the goddess consents, we’ll get eggplant again.” — Caroline Contillo
The Zeitgeist
Squalid Gold Alumna Lana Tchirkova refers to Kincheloe as the Mitzy Shore of Kingston. While Kincheloe is fine with being compared to that dearly departed Los Angeles comedy club owner, she wants to put it on the record that she’s not claiming responsibility for creating the comedy scene in Kingston.
“Stand-up has been for a while now really capturing our cultural imagination,” says Kincheloe. “Culturally we move through cycles of it being hip and it not being hip. I mean, I didn’t create the interest in the subject matter. That’s happening culturally. Right now America is interested in stand-up comedy. It’s having a moment in the zeitgeist.”
Asked whether comedian steerer would be an appropriate title, she opts for comedian wrangler. When I tell her that language suggests they’re out there in the wild and that she’s trapping them, Kincheloe says:
“Well, they are. People who want to get up on stage and be vulnerable in front of an audience? Oh, they’re out there. They walk among us.”
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