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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

Mick Lazinski

A veteran road dog who treats the stage like his driveway.

1 special · 1993

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Mick Lazinski works a stage with the heavy, unhurried posture of a guy waiting in line at a hardware store. He doesn’t sprint to the punchline. Instead, he sets up a premise about fishing or marriage by dropping his voice and leaning into the mic stand, letting the quiet do half the work. He started out doing impressions, and that background shows up in how he populates his stories. When he acts out a conversation with his kids, he shifts his weight and drops his shoulders to physically inhabit the complaint.

Specials

On stage

He is a lifelong American road dog. Coming up in the comedy club boom of the late seventies, he spent the next four decades figuring out how to make a room laugh anywhere. He is the sort of working comic who can play a Vegas casino lounge on a Tuesday and a Wisconsin biker bar on a Saturday. He even teaches the mechanics of the craft, running standup workshops for beginners out of casino backrooms.

The material focuses squarely on midwestern domestic life. He talks about football, hunting, and the friction of a long marriage. The topics are standard domestic comedy, but he moves from one premise to the next without leaving any dead air. He cuts his setups down to the bare minimum. If a bit about his family starts to drag, he will throw away a muttered aside that gets a bigger laugh than the main punchline.

Growing up in Wisconsin gave him an exasperated, neighborly cadence. He expects the room to side with him, and his pacing ensures they usually do.

At a glance

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