The pizza wasn’t free and Dave Chappelle made no surprise appearance (I mean, we knew he wouldn’t, but Amy Miller’s very clear, unambiguous statement that he WOULDN’T be there, like, kind of gave me hope?), but Amy Miller and Sean Jordan’s Friendship and Pizza Party send-off Sunday night at the Aladdin Theater was pretty delightful regardless, making good on Jordan’s promise early on in the evening that it would be “way better than a Dave Coulier show.”
Miller and Jordan are Portland’s most recent stand-ups to leave the local scene for LA, a trajectory that will be familiar to anyone who gets their start making art in a mid-sized city, only to leave for greener (read: bigger) pastures. A grad school acquaintance once said that every time one of his friends broke into publishing, he felt like one of those aliens in Toy Story, watching a pal be whisked away, presumably to a better place. This is the state of comedy scenes in mid-sized cities, and it’s the state of art-making more broadly as well. The conditions that allow for comedians to make their way to the top in a city like Portland are exactly the conditions that make moving to LA an appealing prospect.
And so we bid this year’s graduating class adieu. On hand to say their goodbyes the only way they know how were fellow stand-ups Bri Pruett, Gabe Dinger, Anthony Lopez, Nathan Brannon, and Phil Schallberger and Jordan Casner, who hosted a fake, very weird sale of Jordan and Miller’s personal belongings no longer needed in LA; the wares included “Amy Miller’s glass ceiling,” which Casner and Schallberger tried to break, to comic/sad effect.
Bri Pruett closed her set—which included her joke about objectifying male cyclists, one of my personal favorites—with an anecdote about performing with Miller at a show in LA, where Miller was introduced as “the queen of Portland comedy.” A man turned to Pruett, she said, and asked if it bothered her to hear Miller identified that way. Pruett said no, because, “There can be two queens.” It was a rare instance of putting into words an annoyance women breaking into male-dominated fields often face—of being invariably compared to other women doing the same thing, and artificially pitted against the people who should logically be their closest allies.
Pruett wasn’t having any of it, and took the opportunity to voice her support for and appreciation of Miller. It was one of the most touching statements about gender in comedy I’ve ever seen.
Miller took the stage after her many openers. She would go on to deliver a long-con joke about her Twitter enemies, like “Kelsey, from Kansas City, Missouri,” followed by Sean Jordan’s final hip youth pastor impression as a Portlander. The whole thing would coalesce in an unexpected Rihanna cover sung by Miller herself, surrounded by the show’s full lineup backed by the Decemberists’ Chris Funk, Ural Thomas and the Pain’s Scotty Magee, Adam Shearer of Weinland, the Thermals’ Hutch Harris, and Bitch’n’s Emily Overstreet. But before all that happened, Miller broke her often-dry persona and simply said, “I wanna just cry for 20 minutes, but I can’t.”