Thunderfest: Comedy Bacchanal
July 12-16, Wonder Bar,
186 Harvard Ave., Allston
Tickets: $10-$15
617-351-2665, www.wonderbarboston.com
www.thunderbarcomedy.com
Boston’s already crowded festival scene gets a new entry Tuesday when “Thunderfest: Comedy Bacchanal’’ launches at Wonder Bar in Allston. The festival will run for five nights with a series of themed shows featuring some of the best comics in the city, including Kelly MacFarland, Gary Petersen, and Al Park. Headliners Langston Kerman and Kurt Metzger appear later in the week.
Metzger and Kerman have both been gaining more attention lately. Metzger, 39, has been doing comedy for 17 years and has worked on some high-profile projects. He’s been a writer on “Inside Amy Schumer’’ since its inception and was tapped by Louis C.K. as one of the bar regulars in the Web series “Horace and Pete.’’ He’s working on material for his second hourlong stand-up special and hosts the “Race Wars’’ podcast with fellow comic Sherrod Small. He’ll play Boston for the first time Saturday.
His punch lines can be abrasive, and he enjoys the challenge of trying to win over a crowd that might be uncomfortable with his humor. “If I think it’ll be hard to get your laugh, I like the challenge of trying to make that happen,’’ he says. He cites a joke he tells about how his grandmother, an atheist, won’t get into heaven, but a murderer and cannibal like Jeffrey Dahmer might. He is especially happy to apply his knowledge as a former Jehovah’s Witness minister. “It’s a joke I like to tell, because I’m following the exact rules of how going to heaven works.’’
He also tells a joke about how he’ll never forget where he was when he heard Michael Jackson had died: He was at his father’s funeral. Someone burst in and gave the news. “We were devastated,’’ he said. “My mother collapsed. My 12-year-old brother started crying and grabbing his crotch to try to bring Michael back to life somehow. It almost ruined that funeral.’’
Comedy exists in a space beyond politics and morality for Metzger, where the only way to judge a joke is by how funny it is. To Metzger, the laugh, even if it comes against someone’s will, is all that matters. “It doesn’t have to be correct, it doesn’t have to punch at the right target, it just has to be funny, and funny is its own thing,’’ he says. “There is no moral component to it at all. Often it’s immoral. But there’s a difference between jokes that you say to your friends, a joke that we’re just going to laugh at, and then the joke you say to everybody. My whole trick is making a crowd feel like they’re my friend and we can laugh at this together.’’
Kerman, who will be on the “Thunderlove’’ show on Thursday and “The Bad Bad Show’’ on Friday, is a true up-and-comer, having broken out with an appearance on the “New Faces’’ showcase last year at Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival. The 29-year-old got a few slots opening for Eric Andre at the festival and made contacts that led to several roles on television pilots. One of them, HBO’s “Insecure,’’ got picked up and is slated to debut in the fall. Kerman has a recurring role on the show.
For someone who’s been doing comedy for roughly six years, the last one has been a whirlwind. It feels like a good start for Kerman, who also aspires to act and write. “I think my goal is to do all three, to do a show that I write and I act in and get to do stand-up whenever I want,’’ he says. “I feel like I’m starting to build toward that.’’
Kerman is a familiar face in Boston comedy. He moved here from Chicago to get an MFA in poetry from Boston University. “For a while, that’s what I wanted to do, was travel around and make no money reading poetry,’’ he says. Eventually he found he preferred the freedom of stand-up to poetry. He did use his education to become a high school English teacher for a while, a job that inspired some of his material. “This is a fun game I like to play with my kids,’’ he said once in his act. “It’s called ‘guess whose mom is going to wear pajama pants to tonight’s parent-teacher conference.’?’’
Onstage, he’ll talk about being a light-skinned black man or growing up poor in a socialist household, but he doesn’t consider himself a political comic. “I would say more sociopolitical than political,’’ he says. “I don’t go up and have very direct comments on Trump or Benghazi or whatever the big conversation is in the papers. But I’m especially interested in race and culture and identity.’’ In one joke, he talks about how his mother is black and his father is Jewish. “Which may explain why I’m so frugal . . . with my pigment,’’ he says.
“Thunderfest’’ is an extension of the regular Thunderbar comedy shows that happen at Wonder Bar. Owen Linders and Conor Loughman cofounded Thunderbar, partly as a wide-open creative place. “Our hope is to show the community what we’ve been building at Thunderbar Comedy,’’ says Linders, “a place that loves unique voices, encourages artists to take risks.’’
Thunderfest: Comedy Bacchanal
July 12-16, Wonder Bar, 186 Harvard Ave., Allston
Tickets: $10-$15
617-351-2665, www.wonderbarboston.com
www.thunderbarcomedy.com
Nick A. Zaino III can be reached at nick@nickzaino.com.
