Alonzo Bodden

Alonzo Bodden owns a room simply by standing still. He is a huge guy with a resonant voice, and he uses his size not to intimidate, but to anchor. His delivery is slow and deliberate. For crowd work, he doesn’t interrogate people. He asks a question, leans on the mic stand, and waits. If the audience gives a weird answer, he doesn’t yell. He stares out at the room and lets the silence do the heavy lifting before offering a soft, flat verdict.

He occupies a specific space as the designated grown-up. As a long-time regular on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, he bridges the gap between club comedy and public radio. He works a late-night basement and a Sunday morning theater with the exact same material, because the joke isn’t built on shock. It is built on exasperation. He is the comic you watch when you are tired of people yelling.

Bodden does not write tight, isolated jokes. He builds conversational blocks of material about politics, cars, and the general failure of common sense. He starts bits by summarizing a news item with total detachment, pausing only to point out the plain absurdity of whatever politician he is mocking. He works best when slightly annoyed. When he gets too enthusiastic about a topic like his beloved motorcycles, the tension in the act slackens.

Before comedy, Bodden was a jet mechanic and trainer for Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas. He realized he liked making people laugh while teaching aerospace workers, and the habit of patiently taking a broken thing apart to show why it fails never left his act.