Font ResizeA comedian's nightmare might look something like what I sat through one night at a club. Comedian after comedian launched into his set only to fizzle out a few minutes later.
Nothing helped. The sight of the angry crowd and the smell of fear made me: 1.) Buy the guys a drink, and 2.) Pat them on the back and tactfully suggest a career counselor.
Stand-up comedian Ryan Cronin has never bombed. That could mean he is supremely talented or he just hasn't been at it long enough.
"There is something wrong with you if you don't get butterflies," he said. "But it takes a special kind of ham to want that much spotlight on you."
Cronin, who lives in Oakland, gave up the stage and endless meals of cheap ramen for stand-up comedy a few years ago and is riding the resurgence of Bay Area comedy clubs filled with people who need a laugh right about now (See: recession, war, scandal, etc.).
He is not famous, at least not yet. Clearly, his career choice was a gamble. The joke is that comedy doesn't pay much better for newcomers.
"Stand-up comedy is one of the lowest-paying jobs, I'm pretty sure," said Cronin, who describes himself in one skit as the love child of Elvis and Bob's Big Boy.
He also enjoys pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. He is not into health food, but he's into champagne. Cronin also is not Rupert Holmes. Holmes wrote the piña colada anthem "Escape" and is now a writer. The two bear a slight resemblance
Cronin said his comedy comes from a "bizarre state of observation" about the mundane aspects of life — television, nursery rhymes. For example, a mockumentary he made is called "The Fat Pack." Episode 1: "Fear and Bloating in Las Vegas."
Sounding like David Attenborough doing an impression of Robin Leach (if the bombastic Brit did reality TV), he parodies the lifestyles of the "out-of-breath and sweating."
He also collaborates on the satirical puppet show "AnimalTrash," which lampoons current events and politics. See it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDk-baZL8hM.
Cronin said his comedy is a tightrope act, balancing safe material with obscure references and off-the-wall humor that only 3 percent of the audience gets. He developed his sense of humor growing up in Cincinnati. It wasn't until years later, after studying theater at Ohio State and trying his hand as a serious but starving actor, that he landed at the Comedy College in San Francisco.
He was funny to begin with, but the Comedy College gave him a protective environment to learn how to write and perform unique material and develop a stage persona.
"Comics are not like that when they get offstage — let's hope not," he said.
He was a finalist in the 2007 and 2009 Battle of the Bay Stand-Up Competitions. Now he plays clubs around San Francisco, including the regular Saturday night Stand-Up Project at the San Francisco Comedy Club. The project is the brainchild of Kurtis Matthews who was shocked (shocked, I tell you!) at the "deplorable" state of Bay Area comedy in the late 1990s. After the '80s comedy boom, San Francisco was a devastated area characterized by smug political comics, alternative comedy with elliptical material, boring sketch and improv, disorder, and a general breakdown of society, according to Matthews' Web site.
The Stand-Up Project is an alternative to posh, two-drink minimum clubs that are hard to break into. It's more like The Second City in Chicago and the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York, where up-and-coming local comics can test material and crack jokes that are too off-color or just too quirky for the mainstream. It's intimate and BYOB.
The Comedy Off Broadway Oakland is the East Bay option at Miss Pearl's Jam House on Thursdays and at The Washington Inn on Fridays. The comedy can be hit or miss. But Oakland definitely needs a sense of humor right now.
