“I drive a Honda Fit, which is ironic,” Chris Cope said.
A rotund 7-year stand-up veteran, Cope was one of the eight comedians who performed at XS on Monday night. The dance floor, which is usually empty on Mondays, is converted to a comedy club each week so Cope and a revolving lineup of fellow Gainesville Comedy Showcase comedians can perform.
Besides putting out tables and chairs, the bar staff worked the crowd, taking drink orders so people could pay attention to the show rather than walk to the bar for a refill. One of the bartenders, Eric Buskirk, said he has been coming to the showcase shows for nearly four years. He even volunteers to come in on his day off to work the XS performance. He makes it a point to laugh or cheer to rile up the crowd whenever he finds something funny.
“Laughter is infectious,” Buskirk said. “I’m just trying to do my part.”
The show was scheduled to start at 10:30 p.m. but it took a few minutes for the 40-person crowd to settle down with drinks in hand.
The comedians performed about 10 minutes of material each. But Calvin Cole, a featured comedian, took the stage for around 20 minutes and Cope, as the headliner, rounded out the show with a half-hour set.
“Life is all about enjoying yourself while touching other people,” Cole said.
Cole, a 22-year-old UF graduate, has been doing stand-up comedy for about three years and is representing UF on the University Stand-up Comedy Club national team (“U SUCC,” as its members call it) for his second year running. The four-person squad competes against teams from other schools in what Cole describes as an “NCAA tournament head-to-head fashion.”
Crowd voting decides who advances in the competition, he said, and last year the UF team made it to the final stop in Aspen, Colo., before it went out in third place. Cole is optimistic about the team’s chances to go all the way this year, though.
“We’re up against Duke right now,” he said. “And we’re definitely going to beat them.”
The laughs were sparse at times, but they were never hard to come by for Cole and the other comedians, some of who perform up to four nights a week in the Gainesville area.
It’s only the second week Gainesville Comedy Showcase has performed at XS, but the show’s MC, Dave Johnson, sees the Monday night show as the happy medium among the troupe’s other shows, which he said range from come-as-you-are to an almost professional level.
Johnson describes Gainesville Comedy Showcase’s Friday night show at the Clarion Lounge as the show to see for people looking for a professional comedy show in the area. Typically fewer comedians are put on the roster, and they are usually granted more stage time.
It is a far departure from the Thursday night shows at the Clarion Lounge and the Tuesday night shows at 1982, which have an amateur theme. In order to get on the lineup for one of those shows, aspiring comics just need to make the other comedians laugh.
“It really all hinges on what they show us at the Sunday workshops,” Johnson said, “The ‘82 show is pretty much the closest thing to an open mic in Gainesville.”
Tuesday and Thursday are not without their benefits. According to Cole, those shows are when he and some of the other comedians try out their new material.
“There are a lot of regulars at 1982,” he said. “They’re there every week, and I like to reward them with new material whenever I can.”
Johnson said GCS plans to put on a show at XS every Monday at 10:30 p.m. in addition to the group’s other weekly shows at 1982 on Tuesdays at 9:45 p.m. and at the Clarion Lounge on Thursdays and Fridays at 9:15 pm.
