To view the complete photo gallery of Friday Nights @ Toast, click here.

by Peter Yezukevich

A new tradition in Union Square continued its inaugural festivities June 25 with the first comedy part of the Somerville News @ Toast series.

Hosted by local comedian Baratunde R. Thurston, the show lured a healthy crowd of fans, friends, and curious onlookers out to enjoy an evening of laughs while imbibing the array of spirits Toast had to offer. The crowd was treated to a dizzying display of assured comic voices, five sets in the span of an hour. The impressively diverse mix came courtesy of Baratunde, who took over booking and hosting duties for the show a few weeks ago, and who obviously relished the idea of molding his own comedy room.

“Tonight’s line-up, I hand-picked them,” said Baratunde, before the show. “This is not an open mic. I tried to get different edges represented in this show. No one is really like another comic here tonight.”

When asked about the comics in the line-up, Baratunde responded with genuine excitement. “I heard about Jason Lawrence through a friend of mine, saw some clips of his and was really impressed. Erin Judge is closing the night out – I’ve worked with her for the past few years. She’s about where I am in terms of career progression, but I’d say maybe even a little funnier. It’s hard for me to say that because I’m cocky. Dan Hirshon is opening the show, he’s a younger fella, a college student. His set has just started to gel, and he’s got a really unique voice. Dan Sulman is great. He does a lot of weird stuff, but when he is doing straight stand-up, he’s great. He’s on the edge, and sometimes he just explodes, or he’ll go into a ball of fury, but either way it will still be entertaining.”

As people made their way though the cavernous environs of Toast and began to settle in, Jason Lawrence spoke about his comedy and his role in the show. “My roommate went to school with Baratunde, and she put us in touch. We emailed, and we chatted and talked about the show. And it worked out. This is actually my first show in Boston. I’ve been doing comedy as a hobby for about three years in New Jersey, New York and Philly.”

Originally from Kentucky, Lawrence finds fodder for comedy in his home life and the world outside the South, particularly school in New Jersey. “I’m going to grad school at Princeton for computer science, but comedy is a growing fascination for me.”

He and an undergraduate friend at Princeton organized a stand-up night at Princeton, which has been successful. “One of the hard parts is finding the time to get on-stage,” he said.

Lawrence drew hearty laughs with his observations on false advertising. “I saw a sign, ‘A-1 Limousine, For People Going Places.’ This was on the side of a van. How pissed would you be if you ordered a limo and some [guy] showed up in a van with the word ‘limousine’ written on the side? Why not push it? Why not call your company ‘A-1 Helicopter, For People Flying Places? Or ‘A-1 Spaceship, For People Going To The Moon’?”

Dan Hirshon lives in Central Square and has been doing comedy for three years. “It has its ups and downs. Now I’m on an up.”

Hirshon just graduated from college. “Lately, my comedy has centered around my job search, my family,” he said. He became associated with this event through performing with Baratunde at Rick Jenkins’ Comedy Studio in Cambridge.

Hirshon’s self-deprecating first line —“What’s Screech doing here?”— immediately won over a crowd whose average age was probably ten years more than his own. Continuing to comment on his looks, Hirshon described a trip to the hairdresser. “I asked how long she thought my hair was, and she said, ‘It’s very curly.’ The last time I checked that wasn’t a form of measurement! I mean, you’re on a road trip and you ask someone, ‘How far would you say it is to Providence, sir?’ ‘Well, it’s straight, then very curvy. That’s how far it is. Curvy.’” He said he realized he was the ‘disposable son’ when his mom said his brother could not go bungee jumping with him. The reason? “I’m not losing both sons in one day.”

Dan Sulman took over the stage and immediately turned on the sparks with his bold brand of wiseacre “I-don’t-need-you” chutzpah. As he took a seat, facing the crowd, he calmly informed the audience that this was a “one-time only” affair. “Turn off all recording equipment, don’t take any pictures.” It would have been obnoxious if it weren’t so surreal. Sulman casually leapt from joke to joke, effectively using silence as segues. “So I’ll tell you why I’m afraid of Chinese people. The way I look at it, you have to assume that they know a little kung-fu. I mean, I know a little Hebrew.” As he ended his set, he began to promise to close with something that would change comedy forever. “But I’m cutting that part out tonight.”

The headliner, Erin Judge, is a Somerville resident and a two-year comedy veteran. “It’s been a really fun time, I love this area,” she said before her closing set. “It’s been an open community toward the kind of stuff I want to do. I like to think of myself as a social critic. Some people call it political, but I think it’s more about talking about issues. I don’t talk about different politicians and what’s in the newspaper—I talk about themes and culture. I have my perspective, and people in Somerville are very receptive to it.”

A Texas native who went to school at Wellesley College, Judge got a job after college at Harvard and moved to the Somerville area. “I started doing comedy in college. I used to sing in high school. At Wellesley, I got rejected from every a cappella group on campus, except the Christian a cappella group. So I turned around and signed up for the campus comedy troupe. It was a tough decision.”

Judge was the very first participant in The Comedy Studio’s “Comic –in-Residence” program, this past January. “It was a tremendous time. Having that much stage time was critically important,” she said.
Judge said she was excited to perform at Toast, where she has spent a fair amount of time recently. “Toast is a great space. I’ve never seen it not a dance club, though, and wasn’t sure exactly where they were going to set up the microphones. But it’s great, and we’ve got a great crowd here.”

On stage, Judge turned her thoughts loose, commenting on subjects like the nightmare that is Cosmopolitan magazine, and the effects of legalized gay marriage. “I feel bad for gay male couples where one of them is named Adam and the other is named Steve. They should just give it up, for the rest of us.

“I’m bisexual,” Judge continued. “Which, for those of you who don’t know, means you’re my type.” The crowd liked that one. When she asked if anyone ever came out of the closet before, it drew a clap or two, and when she asked if anyone wanted to come out tonight, in the club t, silence led to giggles then laughter. “You sure you don’t want to come out in this dark basement?”

In between sets, Baratunde worked the crowd, using his time to tell a few jokes about coming to Boston from his native Washington, D.C.: “I learned that if someone tells you about a hot new hip-hop club in Southie, you don’t go. That is a damn lie! “ He also commented on the strange similarities between the cities. “Sure, my mayor’s a crackhead, but up here it’s okay for Tremont Street to intersect Tremont Street!”

He also looked for guidance, polling the audience on a sad tale in his romantic life to figure out whose fault it was that a “friend” did not respond to his advances. “You ruined the friendship!” she said. “That was the point!” he countered. Was it his fault, or the girl’s fault? Or did the blame lie with his friend Jesse, who egged him on? The crowd agreed with Baratunde: Jesse was to blame. “He gave me bad intelligence. But that’s all I have to say about Iraq.”

Except one more thing, of course.

“We gave the Iraqis six months to write a constitution. That’s hard.” But, Baratunde said, they cheated. “They called up Attorney General John Ashcroft, and he said, ‘Hell, you all can have ours. We don’t use it any more!’”

Baratunde said the next comedy show, July 16, will probably be similar to this one. “There may be shows where we do a 30-minute headliner, a 15-minute opening act, and an emcee, just to focus on one person. Right now, we’re gonna keep it like this and gradually give people more time.”

If the success of the first night was any indication, keeping it like that sounds like a good way to go.