Crass Laughs

In the last few weeks, as I’ve stuck my head into Kansas City’s burgeoning stand-up comedy scene, I’ve found myself pondering motherfucker. How did this word — this taboo of such universal power that it would make Caveman A clock Caveman B right in the caveman junk — replace the word um? Linguists tell us that its recorded usage came some 70 years ago. But what matters is that, as it caught on, it shifted from childish insult to boast of badassedness, from unutterable curse to the sole reason that Samuel L. Jackson doesn’t have to act anymore.

And now, with most of the shock wrung out of it, it’s hard not to wonder what new taboo could replace it.

This brings us to the small pool of Kansas City stand-up: If laughs were air, too many motherfuckers would be drowning. There’s some talent out there, and we’ll get to it, but first let’s acknowledge the bad.

At Open-Mic Thursday at the Embassy two weeks ago, the race to sink deeper than anyone else climaxed with a comic suggesting napalm as the cure-all for Iraq. It’s a war, he tells us, where we’ve fought like pussies. His last line, and the last line of the night: “Little baby terrorists can’t tumble out of a vagina that’s charred shut.”

A couple of minutes before that, on the subject of Greensburg, he’d offered this: “Does anyone give a shit that six Kansans got wiped off the fucking Earth?”

This was open-mic, so I won’t bother dragging his name into this. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer him the kind of caustic truth he only imagines he’s spewing: You think you can top Hollywood’s crassness? Take Hostel: Part II, where a dude reportedly gets his dick sliced off on camera. That’s coming to theaters Friday. Come Christmas, they’ll probably be selling it at Wal-Mart. Face it: Only way you can shock me is if you write a joke that makes me laugh.

Dark and dirty can be hysterical, of course. Skip Clark scored with a bit about “white women with big asses,” saying “Now brothers like me got a dilemma: Do I want a big old ass or a big old ass with good credit?”

Dustin Kauffman came on so dirty, you wanted to give his mother a slap. But he did it with spark and intelligence, and he won huge laughs with a bit about what he’d do if he’d been born female: “I’d have a huge pussy. I’d take a load in the face while smiling like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. Because that’s the kind of woman I’d be — a hero.” Kauffman was rakishly stylish, rocking mutton chops and all-black suits, and he stalked about the stage like he was marking his territory. Yes, he offered little more than dick jokes, but his were often superior dick jokes, delivered with a ragged poise. At another show, he announced that sex should be “like consensual domestic violence,” and the little smile he flashed afterward, before tearing into the next line, had me spitting out my whiskey.

I also caught Kauffman at Comedy City’s The WTF Show, where he and his Bastard Sons of Comedy will be guests again this Saturday night. WTF is a rowdy comedy rodeo run by Dale Hilton and Dave Free. By hosting WTF and the all-stand-up Comedy Closet, Comedy City offers something rare for local comics: steady stage time in front of paying audiences. Dark and dirty reign there, too, but the comics are seasoned, some even professional, and most bother to dig something up when they sink deep.

The WTF crew projects filmed sketches off a laptop; these are short and barbed, crisply edited and usually imaginative.

Meanwhile, Comedy Closet host Dave Free’s apple-cheeked boyishness allows him to get away with shouting “Clap, you worthless fuck-sticks!”

Free is an upbeat, commanding performer, who has chops enough to work clean if needed. He likes imitating wanna-be suburban gangsters, saying in a blustery whisper “Mom’s making Stove Top, G.” Free’s area-specific material is some of the best in town, particularly his complaints about the Kansas City Zoo, where you get “an animal every five, 10, 15 miles.”

Conrad Courtney is also effective and altogether more daring. He’s a rangy, unshaven sicko whose dark place is wonderfully fertile. It blooms funny. He plants jokes where you don’t expect them and spins bits into stories — dark stories. He talks about seeing a stripper slip off her pole, smash into the stage and break her nose. I leaned in, laughing and horrified, relishing the detail. He talks to instead of at the audience. Then, from nowhere, the darker-than-dark punchline: “Talk about a fucking hard-on. It was almost like I did it myself.” There’s a thrill there, perhaps akin to history’s first motherfucker: the jolt that somebody said that, and the deeper jolt that I’m laughing at it.