Whenever I visit my hometown of Reno, Nevada, I bring some of my Bay Area friends with me. My friends love joining me because they view Reno as a cheap-thrills utopia. You mean we can get steak, eggs, beer and a stripper at the same place for $10 total?
But the part of Reno they love more than anything else is the casino shows. Tickets are cheap, and for $5 extra, you get VIP seats, which are in the front row and come with champagne. The brochures for these spectacles boast such reviews as “Loosely based on the hit Cirque du Soleil” and “Nothing like you’ll see in Vegas!”
These statements are not lies. My friends and I once witnessed a show in which several dancers were thrown into the air, and their intentioned receivers clumsily dropped them. It was like those white people in infomercials dropping bowls of food. In between the dancing segments, a white rapper stood on a large block to discuss the importance of labor unions. He forgot some parts, so he simply yelled earlier lines whenever he got flustered. We still talk about this performance and mindlessly buy tickets everywhere to whatever Off-Vegas show is playing just so we can watch a live garbage fire unfurl before our eyes.
“An audience member told me I wasn’t funny and that feminism was ruining America. Then another dude in the audience defended me by saying I was funny. Then the first dude told him, ‘You’re just saying that because you wanna fuck her.’ Then those two argued about my humor and fuckability for a minute or two.”
Not all performances are admired for their artful implications or grace. Some are merely remembered for their absurdity or the performer’s persistence in the face of utter defeat. Here are some of the moments local artists say left an unintended lasting impression for years to come.
Ash Fisher, Comedian
I bombed so hard at a cafe in Oakland last fall. I was doing 20 minutes right after a badass jazz band had played an amazing set. The acoustics were terrible, and the combination of jazz and comedy is not sensible. Audience members shouted comments after every joke, thinking they were helpful and not understanding that stand-up isn’t a conversation. About 12 minutes in, a pissed-off-looking young white dude yelled, “You already told that joke.” This was untrue, as I have a logical, planned flow in my stand-up sets to get me from joke A to joke M, and I had definitely not repeated the joke. Then he told me I wasn’t funny and that feminism was ruining America. Then another dude in the audience defended me by saying I was funny. Then the first dude told him, “You’re just saying that because you wanna fuck her.” Then those two argued about my humor and fuckability for a minute or two. I said something mean and mildly clever to the first dude, finally got a laugh as he scowled, then got the light to get offstage and hurried out of the club.
Jake Arky, Playwright/Actor
My parents never really had the chance to see any of my work while I was in college in New York City, so when I was home in Salt Lake City one summer, I decided to produce a stage reading of a new play I’d written. It was not a good play. It was long, misguided and way underdeveloped. Worse, this play contained a lot of graphic sex. Onstage. Sex of any sort never went over in Salt Lake City. Even worse still is the fact that my dad is a total prude and becomes fidgety at the mere mention of a proper noun for any type of genitalia. Nevertheless, for three grueling, hot, stuffy summer hours I made friends and family — my parents front and center — sweat through my play about a lesbian robot who anally rapes the men at the video-game company that created her. We did not schedule an intermission. We did not serve refreshments. My father continues to bring it up to this day.
Nicole Odell, Actor
I work for an improv theater and training center in San Francisco that does a lot of corporate workshops. We got hired for a retreat, and immediately there were a few warning signs that it was going to be a fiasco.
The planners of the event were two very nice women who came back to the room we were waiting in and took shots of tequila. They then told us that the whole company had been drinking pretty hard all day. The women did not end up attending our performance. The room was full of drunken, untethered corporate testosterone.
The show wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a true disaster until we did improvised storytelling. We were told beforehand that one guy in the audience had a birthday, so we decided it would be fun to ask the audience, “If we told a story about Greg’s birthday, what would it be called?” One individual yelled out, “The Time Greg Almost Went Home with a Tranny!” The room exploded in laughter, and they all started yelling it. We couldn’t get any other suggestions from them, so we went with it. As I recall, the story itself was about Greg actually finding true love with a “tranny,” so we tried to neuter the offensiveness as much as we could. Back in our room afterward, the director of our group, who also performed with us that night, came back to the room we were in and informed us that the woman in charge of the lights was not only a trans woman, but cried in the back of the room while everyone was screaming the birthday suggestion. I wanted to apologize to her in person, but she had left, so instead I just spent the entire ride home crying and picturing that poor woman and how she must have felt.
Deborah Murphy, Actor
I played one of the mean sisters in “Cinderella: the Musical.” During the scene where the stepsisters tear up Cinderella’s dress for the ball, I got so into character I actually tore Cinderella’s dress. The actress who played her was not wearing a bra, so her breast was exposed. I learned the hard way not to be so in character that I forget the reality that I’m in a play.
Priyanka Wali, Comedian
A Caribbean comedy producer invited me to perform in Trinidad and Tobago. I had my doubts about the whole deal because I wasn’t sure if my jokes would be appreciated in the Caribbean, but he was a big fan of my material and finally convinced me, saying, “They speak English in Trinidad,” and that because I was Indian, I would be warmly received by Indian audience members.
It was the biggest show I have ever done in my life—a literal stadium with 2,000 Caribbeans. I was watching the other comedy acts before me, and I realized I wasn’t even close to a Caribbean sense of humor. On top of that, the accents were so thick, I couldn’t even understand what was being said that was so funny. I knew I was going to bomb as soon as I started my first joke onstage. First minute of my set: complete silence in the entire stadium. You could hear the cars driving on the road a mile away. Within two minutes of my set, people started booing to get me off the stage. I’ve never been booed by so many people in my life. As humiliating as that experience was, I am so grateful it happened. My skin got so damn thick after that.
Chris Conatser, Comedian
Two years ago in Austin, a friend of mine and I were performing guerilla-style-comedy shows at different venues like Waffle House and Dairy Queen. We went to Sugar’s Uptown Cabaret, a strip club, and the manager liked us enough to give us a shot. My friend went first, and his set ended in someone threatening to kick his ass.
When I went up next, the crowd of about 60 horny dudes and 20 or so dancers never really quieted down. My first joke flopped. During my second, the DJ interrupted me and said the punch line, scoring the only laugh of my set. In the middle of my third joke, a stripper grabbed the mic away. She was cheered, and I was jeered off the stage. Lesson learned: when there is no music at a strip club, nobody makes money. The strippers hated us; the crowd hated us; and my friend hated me for giving up too easily. It was the worst night of comedy for me, but we had good sets at the next strip club we popped up in, so—you know—never give up, or whatever.
All photos courtesy of their respective performers.
