EVENT PREVIEW
2014 Laughing Skull Comedy Festival, March 26-30. Tickets $15-$25 per event at venues including the Laughing Skull Lounge, Improv Atlanta, Smith's Olde Bar, Hard Rock Cafe and Limerick Junction. For advance tickets and more information: www.laughingdevil.com/skullfestival/index.cfm.
Get ready for the funny. The 2014 Laughing Skull Comedy Festival, March 26-30 in Atlanta, promises to be another showcase for the city’s growing reputation as a great place for clubs and comics.
The five-day event brings together producers, managers and agents in search of new talent, and includes headline performances at the Laughing Skull Lounge in Midtown and other area venues.
But the heart and soul of the festival is the ongoing weekend competition featuring up-and-coming comedians from across the U.S. and Canada vying to be among the finalists and, ultimately, the big winner.
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.
“This year, we have a great talent pool, and we have five different venues around the city,” Chiles said. “The finals on Saturday will probably be one of the best comedy shows you’ll see all year in Atlanta. You’re going to have six people who came from a pool of 600 to make it as the finalists.”
One of those hopefuls is Atlanta’s Gilbert Lawand, whose background seems ready made for all sorts of setups and punch lines. Born in Baghdad to Catholic parents and raised on a farm in Warm Springs, Ga., Lawand was an accountant before becoming a full-time comedian.
“I went to UGA and got my MBA from Emory,” Lawand said. “I’ve always loved comedy, but in grad school, somebody talked me into trying it out. When I got laid off from my consulting job, I decided it was what I wanted to do. I went all in about six years ago.”
Though he spends about half the year on the road, nowadays, Lawand still stays involved in the Atlanta comedy scene, doing shows around town and booking the Improv Comedy Club in Buckhead. In 2013, Lawand took first in the first-round competition at Laughing Skull, but didn’t make it to the finals.
“Last year, I was just happy to advance,” Lawand said. “This year, I hope to make the finals, so I’ll be looking at it in a different way. Knowing there are judges in the audience, I sort of treat it like an industry showcase, because that’s really what it is.
“You want to let them know you’re funny, that you can write a joke, and that there’s something different or special about you. That’s where I’ll put something in about my background. And then you want to show how you look at things and how you think.”
Tom Simmons, a comedy club headliner with roots in Atlanta, was a Laughing Skull runner-up before going on to win the San Francisco International Comedy Competition and grab gigs on Comedy Central, Showtime, BET and more. This year, Simmons returns to Laughing Skull as a judge.
“I did it as a contestant twice,” Simmons said. “This is the third year I’ve been a judge, which is very interesting. As a contestant at festivals, I couldn’t always figure out what the judges saw versus what we were doing. Watching it from the judges’ side has given me an interesting perspective from the comics’ side.”
Simmons thinks Laughing Skull is not only one of the best comedy festivals going but one of the most difficult to win.
“You get judged on a number of things: originality, writing, crowd response, confidence,” he said. “Everybody can be funny for five minutes. But Laughing Skull is different from other contests in that you can’t repeat the material you did in the first or second rounds, and as each set gets longer, it becomes pretty difficult.”
As for Atlanta as a comedy town, Simmons regards it among the brightest and busiest.
“I live in North Carolina with my family, now,” Simmons said. “And I tell all these young comics up there to move to Atlanta. There’s stage time every night. Atlanta wasn’t great when I was starting out. It had the Punchline and Uptown. Now, it’s one of the best scenes in the country, with nights at places like the Star Bar and the Village Theater and Smith’s.”
Simmons, who describes his comedy style as “reactionary to mainstream thought,” was inspired by cerebral comedians like George Carlin and Bill Hicks. When he’s not judging at Laughing Skull, he’ll be looking forward to getting up to do a few sets of his own material, he said.
Asked if he had an Atlanta joke, Simmons quickly obliged: “I went to the Clermont Lounge last night and I didn’t see one good-looking stripper. But I did see every Atlanta comic writing a joke about it.”
