Kevin Meaney / Bill Maher

It amazes me that a small comedy club in Webster can draw such talent as Drew Carey (coming in August), Gary Valentine in February (Kevin James' brother), and recently Kevin Meaney ("that's not right!").  We dragged our friends Daren and Cleve to see Kevin perform, and since we were among the first to arrive, got a table right down front. The 190-seat club was about 2/3 full, and a woman at the next table explained that the performer gets the cover fee (in this case, $15 per person), and the club makes its money on food and drinks.  Happy to support the venue, we did our part in ordering food and many beers before the warm-up comedian leapt onto the stage.  He was a kid (in his 30s...) from Buffalo and was very funny, but the real belly laughs came when Kevin took over.

He spent the first part of the show explaining his marriage in light of his actually being gay. Then he moved on to some fantastic impressions, sang a very funny 'duet' with Frank Sinatra (he actually is a very good singer) and ended his set by playing all of the singers from "We are the World" (his best were Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, and of course, Michael Jackson).  There wasn't any give and take with the audience, so I was surprised when the warm-up guy returned and said he and Kevin would be in the back selling DVDs, etc.

As we headed out the door, we could see that he was posing for photos taken with audience members, so I dragged Charlie back to get a shot of me with Kevin.  Someone else offered to take the photo with my phone, but after several attempts with the flash not working, Kevin graciously offered to have the photo taken with HIS phone, and to email it to us!  So now we have Kevin Meaney's email address........


Two days later, with visiting friends Margie and Mokhtar, we went to see Bill Maher at the Auditorium Theatre.  We had decent seats (row S, orchestra right) in this 2900-seat venue ($58 per person and a nearly sold-out crowd - you do the math!).  He was hysterical, of course, first hitting on politics for about an hour (you can guess which party he ridiculed most, but the other one wasn't totally spared), then moving on to religion (in the same vein as his movie Religulous), and finally other random topics.  Interestingly, he consulted a notebook to prompt him for his 'bits' fairly frequently during the approximately 2-hour performance, and occasionally got ahead of himself in a joke and had to backtrack.  There was no 'meet and greet' afterwards, but we left smiling and looking forward to our next comedy outing - back to the Comedy Club in August to see Judah Friedlander (Frank of the funny hats from 30 Rock).