Wednesday, July 8, 2009

James Patterson headlines in his home town

Boston comedian James Patterson headlined his hometown for the first time at Mottley's Comedy Club in June. I caught up with him on the street afterwards to see what he has been up to in LA, and get his impression of the show. This is the video of that show, which also included Bethany Van Delft, Ken Reid, and Erik Charles Nielsen. It was a solid line-up, top to bottom, and also the first spot Nielsen had done in Boston for a while.

It had been more than a year since I had seen either of them perform, both of them on the bill for the Great and Secret Show West in Los Angeles last spring. Both had much better sets at Mottley's than I saw in LA, which was probably partly due to the fact that someone stole the AV equipment from the Improv's side room, where they were performing, just before the show started. Nielsen has turned into a standing blur onstage, raging about taking over the world and his love of Jane Austen books, shaking as if he were about to be beamed into another dimension. Which may well have been.

Patterson has always been a smart comic, and he is now much more at ease onstage, and has made the important leap of putting the material and stage presence together. He's the complete comic, and I look forward to the next time I get to see him do a 45-minute set.

Here we are, trying to dodge the Saturday night crowd outside of Mottley's to be comedy nerds. I'm the one you can't see behind the camera.

Part I



Part II

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