The joke’s on me

If you are interested in stand-up comedy, come along to an open mic every Thursday from around 20:30 at Padá Omietka, Vysoká 37, Bratislava. Check out the venue on Instagram for more info!

Oscar Brophy, the author, is a co-owner of Padá Omietka.

Every comic should have a short, self-deprecating introduction they can roll out at the start of their set. Some call it an ice-breaker. It’s something that should begin the process of endearing you to the audience and getting them on your side. One of mine is:

“Hello, my name is Oscar. I’m from Ireland and I live in Bratislava. So yes, I’m an alcoholic.”

Trite, but it lets you know the tone of what I’m going for.

My friend Alan Henderson’s goes something like:

“I’m a professional stand-up comedian. In English. In Slovakia.”

Not only does it admit the futility of his actions, but it tells the audience—yes, I know it, you know it, we all know it. Let’s have fun with it.

Why the hell are we trying to do stand-up comedy? In English? In Slovakia?

Because we have to.

Stand-up comedy in Europe functions kind of like a multi-level marketing scheme for people with personality disorders. You have this thing inside you, this desperate need to be seen and heard. And if you don’t live in a place where that’s an option, you have to make it one.

When I moved to Bratislava eight years ago, on my very first night here, I attended a show by "Jokes on You", a group founded by Siavash Motlagh—a prince of Persia. The accessibility of comedy in this city was something I’d been sorely missing in the west of Ireland.

And so I stayed and began getting on stage. I did not have the knack for it. I tried to write jokes, but they sucked. I leaned on my “act” at the time, which was musical improv—getting the audience to shout words at me while I attempted to turn them into a song. I am not a musician, so I usually had someone with me to play guitar.

This worked—until it didn’t. Songs such as "Cop Dog" and "What If Batman Was Godzilla and Ate Banana Bread" have limited comedic value. But I continued, undaunted. God bless the patience of people in those early days.

I once travelled to Vienna to perform. I stood in a swish Viennese wine bar and read, off a sheet of paper, a story I’d written about Donald Trump eating a cat into a microphone. That was not the cabaret they had in mind. Despite the silence from the audience and the cringing from the hosts, I simply did not get the message that this might not be an appropriate medium to express myself in.

Would I ever find my voice?

A crash course in comedy

In late 2018, I moved to Prague with my ex. I was chafing after two years in Bratislava and wanted to move on to, as I saw it, greener pastures. I knew Prague had a strong comedy scene, and I saw it as a way to up my game—regular open mics and events where I could flex my comedy muscles. I started going to shows and making friends. I still wasn’t having much success in making people laugh, but suddenly my whole social circle revolved around this one activity, which was something I had never experienced before.

The big change came when my girlfriend at the time and I found out we were expecting. Our lives became filled with uncertainty. I was in a foreign country, still barely a man, feeling all the feelings one could possibly feel. And yet, this was when I actually started feeling confident on stage—because, finally, I had something to say. I could express the thoughts and feelings swirling in my head while making them funny, without outsourcing my inspiration.

Moving back to Bratislava to start a family was inevitable, so I decided to make the most of my last nine months in Prague—soaking up everything I could from the comedians, promoters, and producers I met along the way.

During this time, I met my future business partner, Mitch Leffler. Like me, he had just started in comedy and planned to build his life around it. As it happened, Mitch was in something of a transitionary period himself—his time in college was coming to an end, and he didn’t know what his next move would be.

“Come to Bratislava,” I said. “Let’s recreate the Prague comedy scene there!”

Comedy in Bratislava – what could go wrong?

The folly in this statement wasn’t immediately apparent. Cities with English-language comedy scenes tend to have large numbers of native English speakers. Hell, they have large numbers of people full stop. Bratislava, however, defies convention in this regard.

The system before was that "Jokes on You" would run a showcase every now and then. Travelling comics would either contact Siavash Motlagh to find a venue and market it, or they’d sort that themselves. There’d be maybe one or two shows a month. Now, we’ve got a minimum of one open mic a week, sometimes two.

We’ve performed in some strange locations. Secret bars after midnight. Indonesian restaurants. Petržalka. We’ve battled indifference, language barriers and outright hostility.

After much trial and error, we’ve managed to build the English-language scene in this city up from the ashes into something… well, half-respectable by European standards. The capitals in all the bordering countries have us beat, I’m afraid to say.

Slovak people aren’t quite as outgoing as other Europeans, and the foreigners who move here for corporate jobs aren’t much better. Still, after five years, we have an audience and a venue.

We have our weekly open mic with wildly inconsistent attendance. We have shows with wildly varying revenues. Only the top 5 percent of comics based in continental Europe could ever hope to make a living doing this. We’re in it for the love of the game.

Networking

The great thing about comedy is that it’s a network. You meet someone at an open mic randomly, then you see them again two, three, four years later. They might not remember you, or you might not remember them, but sometimes you end up finding your best friends.

Another really great thing is that you occasionally meet actual high-level professional comedians. This isn’t the case with other art forms. My first week in Prague, I met a guy who had two Netflix specials. Since then, I’ve met a few genuinely well-known names in modern US comedy. Can you imagine just being a random acoustic guitarist and bumping into the likes of Ed Sheeran or Bob Dylan by chance?

Booking the white whale

I heard on Reddit that disgraced comedian, film director, and TV star Louis C.K. was doing some very low-key, unpublicised shows in Romania and Bulgaria. He had been cancelled the year before for masturbating in front of women without their full consent. He was radioactive—one of the first guys to get MeToo’d.

The gears in my head started turning when I heard this. I did some digging and found the promoters of his shows in Romania. I emailed them and asked, "What do you think about bringing Louis to Bratislava?" They called me back and said, "Yes, can you get us a 2,000-seater venue?"

This was well above my pay grade, given that I was booking open mics in the basement of an Indonesian restaurant with a capacity of about 20. So, I handed it over to Alan Henderson. He somehow managed to pull off two back-to-back shows in the now-demolished Istropolis theatre. Did anyone other than Louis C.K. make any money from this? Not really. But I got to see a world-class comedian twice.

A poster from Louis C.K.'s Bratislava show (source: Jokes on You)

Louis C.K. has since been "uncancelled", having a mini-comeback when he won a Grammy last year for Best Comedy Album. But in 2019, he was truly at his nadir if he was popping up on my radar. That’s the power of comedy.

After listening to me bang on about this for so long, you might be wondering: "But is he funny?" Sometimes, sure. Not necessarily in a way that I’d take on the road or record an hour. Maybe someday in the distant future. For now, I’ll keep plugging away in the comedy mines, getting sharper and funnier as the years roll on.

In the end, comedy is about timing. Timing is about rhythm. Keep trying to find the rhythm, and you’ll get it eventually.