Event preview
Laughing Skull Comedy Festival 2013, March 27-31. Tickets $15-$20 per event at venues including the Laughing Skull Lounge, Improv Atlanta, Smith’s Olde Bar, the Warren City Club, Limerick Junction and 529. A portion of all proceeds benefit The Lenny Bruce Memorial Foundation. For advance tickets and more information: www.laughingdevil.com/skullfestival/index.cfm.
Prepare to giggle, chuckle, guffaw, then root for your favorite comedians.
In it’s fourth year of funniness, the Laughing Skull Comedy Festival has grown into an important showcase for the rising stars of the current American comedy boom.
The five-day series of events opens March 27 with headline performances at the Laughing Skull Lounge in Midtown and other venues in the area.
But the serious stuff is the ongoing comedy competition, featuring 72 comedians from across the U.S. and Canada vying to be among the top six finalists to make it to the Atlanta Improv in Buckhead on March 30.
Atlanta comedian Marshall Chiles, who owned the Funny Farm Comedy Club in Roswell before opening the Laughing Skull Lounge in 2009, founded the festival in 2010 with the idea of helping his fellow comedians find work and have a good time.
“I always wanted to do a comedy festival, but I wanted to do it the right way, which is bring in the right industry people who can do the right stuff for comedians,” Chiles said. “I got agents and managers together who could help comedians get TV, film and more club work. After four years, it’s considered by many to be one of the best comedy festivals in the country.”
Previous festival headliners include Margaret Cho, Jim Florentine, Gary Gulman, Robert Kelly and Christopher Titus. And the names often can be found performing on the same stages where the competitors sweat it out.
Cho, who spends time in Atlanta around the shooting schedule for the TV series “Drop Dead Diva,” once had an apartment above the Laughing Skull Lounge and continues to perform at the club.
“It felt like I had a comedy club in my house,” Cho said. “It was like an extension of the Laughing Skull green room.”
“But I’ve been around the city and coming to the club for three or four years now. Atlanta is a really great comedy city,” Cho said. “It reminds me of San Francisco in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when you’d see people like Paula Poundstone and Marc Maron and Louis C.K.”
Though she’ll be on tour in Australia and won’t be able to make the Laughing Skull festival this year, Cho said she’s looking forward to being back next year.
“It’s a good place to hang out with other comics,” Cho said. “The level of the competition is so strong, and everybody who comes to the festival is so good. I think it would be hard to win.”
Chiles said that as the festival has gotten bigger and better-known, it’s attracted more comedians from New York and Los Angeles, where getting an agent and getting work can be difficult.
“There are lot of great comedians who have been doing it for a long time who are coming this year,” Chiles said. “I’ve heard comedians say, ‘I live in Los Angeles, but I had to come to Atlanta to be seen by an LA agent.’ And that’s what our festival is about — putting people together and finding the hottest up-and-comers.”
Ricarlo Flanagan, a Detroit-by-way-of-Cleveland comedian known for his off-kilter observational humor and vocal impressions, has been a Laughing Skull finalist twice, coming in fourth the second year of the festival.
“That actually changed my whole life,” Flanagan said. “I was about two years into my career when I came to Atlanta. Comedywise, it put me on the radar and helped me build my reputation. It gave me work, and it put me in front of the industry, which is the best part.”
As much as he’d like to win it all this year, Flanagan said he’s just happy to come back to compete again.
“Even if I don’t win, I’m going to make sure I have a real good time because this is a fun festival,” Flanagan said. “It’s a good way to network and a good way to have fun. You get to know who’s an alcoholic and who’s nuts. We go to the Clermont Lounge, which is like stripper jail. But you learn how to interact with industry people, and that loosens you up a little bit.”
As to his comedy style, Flanagan admits it can be over the top at times.
“I just say ridiculous things,” he said. “I say things you shouldn’t say, and yet I get people to agree with me or laugh at something they shouldn’t laugh at. That’s what comedy is all about.”
