The Romane Event celebrates its 7th anniversary at the Make-Out Room tonight, with a showcase featuring headliner Joe Klocek and some of the best comedians in the Bay Area.
The popular stand-up comedy showcase has been running at the Make-Out Room on the last Wednesday each month for seven years, no small task for a San Francisco comedy show.
The physical world loves binaries. Day and night. Life and death. Action and reaction. The social world also loves binaries. If you're not white, then you're black. If you're not straight, that means you're gay. You're born either male or female, and you can't change that. These flavors of intolerance come not only from extreme, "red state" schools of thought, but sometimes from the deepest reaches of our great liberal mecca.
An example? Gender politics. Some queer women who were born female-bodied, for example, overtly reject the idea they share anything with transgender women, tossing around ugly terms such as "bio men" and accusing them of co-opting "real" women's space. Others, however, see gender as a variable and shifting thing, and they embrace the common ground that all queer women share regarding romance, family, friendship, employment, and activism.
It's people from this latter group who organized Girl Talk, Thursday at the the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.
The title alone shows us this camp holds the superior sense of humor.
San Francisco isn't so much losing one of its best comedians (yet) as it is putting him out on loan. Which is to say, W. Kamau Bell will be spending a lot of time in New York later this year to film six episodes of a TV show for FX.
Last year he and a group of comedians produced two pilots for the show, which Bell describes as "my version of The Daily Show." One of the show's executive producers is Chris Rock.
Bell can't tell us what the title for the half-hour show is -- because one hasn't been chosen.
"It's all happening quickly, we're kicking around names right now," says Bell, who has written a blog column for The Exhibitionist -- Kamau's Komedy Korner -- since February 2011.
A statement from Nick Grad, an FX executive, calls it The Untitled Chris Rock/W. Kamau Bell Late Night Show.
It is set to be filmed and air beginning in August, Bell says.
Bell tells us the people hired for the show so far are the executive producers -- himself, Rock, and Chuck Sklar -- and he hopes to bring on board some of the comedians he has worked with closely in the Bay Area.
Care to Make Love in That Gross Little Space Between Cars? is the sequel to The Believer magazine's previous advice book, You're a Horrible Person, But I Like You. Featuring objectively terrible and mostly hilarious advice from bigwig comedians, writers, actors, and perhaps my favorite category, "miscellaneous Canadian rock musicians," Care to Make Love is exactly what you would expect from folks involved with productions like, The Daily Show, SNL, Late Show with David Letterman, Parks and Recreation, and so forth. It's a bathroom read, quick and dirty, with many LULz and only a few outright misses. No one wants to sit on your lap, okay, Bob Saget? Not even John Stamos, I'm fairly certain.
The questions are just as ridiculous as the answers, most of the time. A few examples:
"Is there a manly way to eat cotton candy?"
"Is there such a thing as love at first sight, or is he just looking at my tits?"
"Sometimes I find myself ever so slightly turned on by the juniper tree in my backyard..."
What does it mean to believe, and where do you draw the line? Our ponies find out.
