Funny Over Everything is back tomorrow night at the Hollywood Theatre. At just $7, it’s still the best comedy deal in town. Hell, it’s probably the best comedy deal on the West Coast. This week’s show highlights the weird and smart Sean Patton (Conan, Jimmy Fallon, Comedy Central), accompanied by local acts including Anthony Lopez (Bumbershoot, Bridgetown). There’s nowhere else in town you can get this much 2012 comedy at 2002 prices.
The showcase started last summer, when Ian Karmel and fellow comics Sean Jordan and Shane Torres teamed up “to put on the best showcase in Portland,” according to Karmel. And he should know, being that he won the title of Portland’s Funniest Person last summer.
Karmel and I exchanged a few emails about the showcase, where it’s been and where it’s going. There’s a lot of comedy in Portland these days; what has made this show such a runaway success?
“There's a tricky balance in putting a stand-up show together,” he wrote. “You want to make sure the quality is high enough to keep an audience coming back, and you want to do the show as often as you can, because you love doing stand-up comedy. We want the show to be an ambassador between stand-up comedy and the people of Portland.”
Past shows have featured really solid local talent, with headliners including Moshe Kasher, Hannibal Burress, and Ron Funches. This week’s show features Sean Patton, who Karmel calls a truly unique, truly hilarious voice. And he’s right. Patton takes a side door into what we expect from traditional stand-up, and brings the audience along with him the entire way.
Says Karmel, “I think his brand of comedy, weird, wonderful, and hilarious, will fit in especially well with a crowd of Portlanders.” This clip is a couple years old, but here’s Patton congratulating music snobs — not that we know anything about that here in Portland.