Have A Summah - Comedy Meltdown at Meltdown Comics

"I had a lineage. My grandfather was a Marine in World War II. My father enlisted in Vietnam. En-listed. When I was a kid, my mom signed me up for a little league team sponsored by a funeral home because that would be the only way that I would get the experience of wearing a uniform that thousands died for."

This was the joke that opened Friday night's 20th Comedy Meltdown at Meltdown Comics on Sunset Ave, a well-loved event that has drawn comedians like Kyle Kinane, the author of the joke above, to a hot shack of a room in the back of a comic book store. And it was after this joke that the other crowd, not just the comedians or their friends, but the crowd of casual weekenders who wandered into the shop for the limitless Asahi Dry Lager served until 10 PM, realized that the talent of the comedians wasn't at all reflective of the bargain-basement ticket prices.

The low cost of entry must have made the comedians comfortable, too. Three of them (Kinane, Howard Kremer, and surprise headliner Aziz Ansari) debuted new material. I've seen Kinane a handful of times over the past year and his set at Meltdown, a high culture polemic tossed with some low culture minutiae, showed the comedian in top form. It's rare that an artist of any sort can completely shovel out the old and so perfectly incorporate the new.

And it's rarer still when the new material works without any stylistic incorporation whatsoever. In 2007, Howard Kremer's set was good enough to be showcased in a half-hour Comedy Central special. Mostly, the showcase was for Kremer's alter-ego and rap alias, Dragon Boy Suede, designed to do the same for rap as Tenacious D did for folk. But at Meltdown, his set changed completely. Kremer didn't hunch over and hype-mock a culture; he just stood on stage and told us to, "Have a Summah."

Kremer told us about chewing his Summer gum, about rolling around with his Summer partners in the Summer sand. Of course, none of this sounds funny - that's one of the pitfalls about reviewing a comedy show - but in the heat of Meltdown's back room, Kremer's Summer stories took on, as a friend put it, a true vitality, imploring us lost Angelinos to appreciate the gift of our single spectacular season. It was as if we were witnessing A Prairie Home Companion from an alternate universe, one in which that radio stalwart manages to be funny for those of us under the retirement age. Kramer's was easily the best set of the night.

As with any variety show, it wasn't all good. Paper Hearts creator and Michael Cera's pseudo-muse Charlene Yi showed once again that the audience member having the most fun at a Charlene Yi performance is … Charlene Yi. Aziz Ansari had the rotten luck of having to follow Howard Kremer, but fortunately for Ansari, he happens to possess an unapologetically quick wit. Some light heckling from the front row was addressed and dispensed without remorse.

Standing in the back of the room, the comedians were as boisterous as the audience. Most of them write for, or star in, television shows. All of them decided to donate their time to what is ostensibly a charity. And you can't help but feel special when sitting in a room like that, drinking beer out of an Asahi tallboy, enjoying the final days of Summer.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine