Review: Garofalo Gabs & Grabs From Her Comedy Grab Bag At City Winery

Heigh-Ho, My Merry Rainbow Tribe! Bobby Patrick your RAINBOW Reviewer here… Grabbing that silent T from cabareT to bring you all the Tea!

Late last week, my angels, your rainbow reviewer had another fab laugh-fest at City Winery, when Thursday night’s 8:00 set brought us a personal fave, Janeane Garofalo. A somewhat legendary symbol for Generation X - though at 58 she just squeaks under the scratchy barbed wire of babyboomerism - this tiny titan of comedy has been making us ALL laugh for well over 30 years now. A self-professed comedy addict who acts for money (167 IMDB credits is a nice piece of cheddar, plus 2 Emmy Noms) but whose heart is all for the art of standup and its necessary marriage to writing - and write, Garofalo does.  She writes and performs in clubs and rooms all over the country, be they small or cavernous, like City Winery, and while the house was not completely sold out (sacrilege!), there was a healthy-sized crowd last Thursday, ready for what JG was serving.

Kicking off the set was warm-up act Todd Berry - the funniest sleepwalker this rainbow writer has ever seen. With his ultra laid-back delivery, somnambulic voice, and strident cadence, one might expect Berry to be a snooze fest, but his setups about prosaic topics like apartment leases and cats belied the solid punch of his punchlines each time. A comic who is a bit odd but who knows how to work that oddity by flying low to the ground and then lobbing hand grenades at the crowd, Todd related to his audience by letting us know where we might be falling short in our ability to find him funny. At one point Little Bobby’s champagne cork chortle exploded, and Berry remarked, “A nice pop of laughter there.” His grimly mocking and cynical take on life does not foment a laugh riot, but his slow-burn comedy style gives one the giggles over and over again and was the perfect warm-up for his headliner.

We have all heard the expression “Comedy in a bag,” haven’t we, my angels? But perhaps we have never seen one… that is until we have seen Janeane Garofalo pull out her comedy bag on stage and place it on a nearby music stand. From this bag, she would pull out various pages, slips of paper, or cocktail napkins onto which had been written topics, jokes, and ideas that she would wave around like hankies, talking in her acerbic tones about subjects that amused, bemused, or irritated her. The thing about all these bits and bobs of comedy emerging from her laughing sewing bag is the way in which she stitches them together. She may be talking on the mundanities of life or topical political nonsense AND she often has an askance point of view about it all, but once she has explained her POV, she has made it ours as well… and so we laugh at her and at ourselves. Her height notwithstanding (because it don’t stand very high) she is a low-to-the-ground person of Irish and Italian immigrant stock, born and raised in Jersey, and although she might be mistaken for a real-world version of Daria, she is someone we have all known and liked… with caveats. “The more you put yourself out there, the more reasons you give people to dislike you,” she says, but she moves ahead with it, either fearlessly or just not giving a $&i+. Either way, the lady is funny and she has continued to be so for these 30+ years. She may have never sold out Radio City (which, by the way, she should), but that just makes her a little bit more ours. Our smart, sharp-witted, and sharp-tongued comedy assassin who belongs to all of us who hear her music, and while we can’t really dance to that music, we CAN walk aggressively, with a slight scowl and a raised eyebrow to it… and that’s more than enough for us, as well as our evening plus-one, standup comedy aficionado Jennifer Leigh Houston, who left us this voicemail the next day:  "Dude, it was so awesome - she was absolutely incredible, maybe even a million times more than I thought it would be.  I was, frankly, quite astonished. It was A Mazeballs."  And so, to this lady that Little Bobby considers a comedy legend (and despite the fact we’d like to give her three, just to piss her off and see if we wound up in her comedy bag)... we give Janeane Garofalo …

5 Out Of  5 Rainbows!

PLEASE Don’t Bother With Janeane Garofalo’s Web Site… It’s a Single Page that Has Not Been Updated Sine 2016 But It Is: HERE

The Same Goes For Her Insta, Which You Can Find: HERE (but what’s the point?)

Her Twitter Is ONLY A Year Behind And It’s: HERE

City Winery Is Programing The Best Of The Best In Comedy & Other Entertainment. Check Out Their Webbysite: HERE

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