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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

No Joke

Corey Adam

Stand Up! Records · Album · 2015 · 40 min

An audio release composed entirely of crowd work and heckler interactions.

Listen on Stand Up! Records(opens in a new tab)

Corey Adam ditches prepared material entirely for a release built out of crowd interactions, off-the-cuff vamping, and heckler shutdowns. The tracklist of No Joke is dedicated to the moments that normally end up on a cutting room floor. Instead of crafted setups and punchlines, the Minneapolis comic spends the recording sparring with the room, whether he is challenging an audience member to a mustache-wrestling contest, addressing an unusually young patron at the bar, or demanding a spectator uncross their arms.

Originally funded through Kickstarter before being picked up by Stand Up! Records in 2015, the album captures Adam during his tenure as a regular in the Twin Cities comedy scene. The project relies strictly on stage presence and quick reactions to side conversations and people who simply refuse to stop talking. Without a safety net of rehearsed jokes, he is left to rely on spontaneous Monkees references and complaints about an audience member’s chewing gum to fill the time.

The set list

3 bits

  1. Invitations to moustache wrestle

    Comic engages audience members in ad-libbed challenges and mustache rivalry.

  2. Pop-culture riffing on Dirty Dancing and The Monkees

    Off-the-cuff asides and references tossed into interactions with audience members.

  3. Kid at the Bar

    A multi-part recurring open-mic interaction across the album addressing an audience patron.

How it plays

Tone
Irreverent, pugnacious, sarcastic, and improvisational.
On stage
Pugnacious, quick on his toes, combining friendly, off-the-cuff humor and sarcastic, improv-driven crowd engagement.
Pace
Spontaneous and lively, described as feeling like a diss-rap battle and a masterclass in stage presence and control.
About
crowd work, audience interactions, hecklers, impromptu pop-culture references

What the critics said

Praised as a master-lesson in stage presence and audience command that dispels the notion that crowd work is merely a cover for comedic deficiency.

In the room: Raucous open mic atmosphere filled with hecklers, side conversations, and energetic back-and-forth banter.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: music.apple.com, kickstarter.com, fishpond.com, brokeblogmountain.blogspot.com, amazon.com, en.wikipedia.org.

Backstory

Created to challenge the comedy community stigma that crowd work masks deficiencies as a comic, the project was originally crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign before being released by Stand Up! Records.

Details

Released
Runtime
40 min
Where
Stand Up! Records (album)
Topics
After
Jokes (2018)

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