Gong the Show

Tonight, the good people at Comedy Bar will host the fourth edition of Gong the Show, their offbeat and unpredictable comedy competition. Kate and I will be there with bells on, and if you’ve got five bucks and you like to laugh, then you ought to be there too.

My brother Jon, seen here in a state of abject horror as he watches contender Mark Andrada try and drink a dozen eggs, is the reigning champion of this thing. In fact, he’s won all three of the shows they’ve hosted so far, and the big question tonight is whether any of the other comedians on the bill can take him down.

Much like the original Gong Show, the judges can “gong” any competitor whose act they don’t like, forcing them to leave the stage immediately. That, combined with the show’s open format, leads to a lot of offbeat comedy that lives and dies according to the audience’s inability to look away.

At a recent show, for example, my brother performed a tribute to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys – by which I mean he went on stage with Wilson’s name written across his bare chest, and proceeded to eat a pie while fumbling his way through a piss-poor rendition of “Be True to Your School.”

“What I’m hoping,” he told me the morning before the show, “is that they’re just going to let me keep going because they’ll want to see if I can eat the whole pie myself.”

They did. And he did. And he won. So there’s really no telling what everybody’s going to do tonight.

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