popular thinking

Thursday in Aspen: The 2007 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival

Before my recap, let's get straight to the latest installment of the Shane Spotlight, in which my condo comedy roommate Shane Mauss describes his day.

“I had some meetings yesterday with people who saw my show the previous night and liked it. Those went extremely well. Met more people. And then I had another show at the Belly Up, which comics have been complaining about a little bit toward being on the hit or miss side. From my experience that’s the way the show has been. But our group had a great show. I don’t think it conflicted with any of the important shows, so that helped a bit. First night I bit the bullet. Last night I went up third. That seemed to be a good spot. I mixed it up a little bit. I did about new stuff for almost half of my set. They told us not to. But I was right. Everything went fantastic. I had a great set. Everyone in my group had a great set. And a bunch of people were talking to me afterwards. They seemed to be interested in what I was doing. I got a lot of new contacts. It couldn’t have gone much better.”

Did anyone give you a pile of money?
“No, no one gave me a pile of money. Everyone talks about that, but no.”

Mauss also enjoyed seeing and meeting Steven Wright, and had this to say about the other shows.
“I’ve been incredibly surprised by the level of creativity by essentially every performer I’ve seen. Every performer different and unique, which is the most important thing,” he said. “I think I saw about eight hours of comedy yesterday -- which is a lot of comedy to take in -- and it was all good. that’s how much fun the festival has been.”

Labels: Aspen, comedy