Submission 19

Comedian Bio

Ryan Brown began doing stand up in North Carolina and became a fixture of the local scene before leaving for New York where he now pays rent on the Upper West Side. In addition to hosting and producing School Nite Comedy Hour, a monthly showcase at SideWalk Cafe, Ryan can be seen at bars and clubs all over the city including Comic Strip Live, New York Comedy Club and more. Outside of New York, he tours the east coast as one of the founders of Escape From New York Comedy and has been featured in the Cape Fear and Asheville Comedy Festivals. Over the course of his career he's worked with notable comics including Dave Attell, JB Smoove, TJ Miller, Charlie Murphy & more. He is also a contributing writer for the fitness satire website, The Overheard Press.

Story

There’s a bar in Clayton, Indiana, about 40 minutes outside of Indianapolis, called Doss Ranch. It’s owned and operated by my aunt and uncle on my mom’s side. A few years ago at a family gathering my aunt suggested I come do a show there. I’ve got a lot of family in the area that would surely come to see me plus she said she’d promote it to everyone that she could. On top of that, she told me I could keep 100% of the ticket sales, she was just excited to have me come do the show. So, we set a date and a few months later I flew from NY to Indianapolis to headline Doss Ranch. I was staying with my cousin in Indianapolis and on the day of the show we got in his van and drove past several cornfields, churches and liquor stores before arriving at this simple, no-frills establishment full of simple, no-frills patrons. The Doss Ranch regulars were working-class locals who came here to put away a few bud lights while passing thick thunderstorm clouds of nicotine vapor through their lungs. There was a small stage in the corner of the place that usually hosted karaoke or local country music acts. On stage stood a lifesize cardboard cutout of some nascar driver and the entire place was carpeted, which is odd for a bar. Even the stage was carpeted. The lighting provided by small overhead bulbs and a litany of neon signs on the walls cast a mood that can best be described as “after hours at the DMV”. I’d arrived early and as we got closer to showtime a lot more people started showing up. Mostly family members and their friends. They were people who’d driven from Indianapolis just like I had and probably wouldn’t find themselves at the ranch under normal circumstances. By the time the show started the place was packed and it was fantastic. I’d found a local comic to open for me with a quick 12 minute set. He seemed fairly green but they were patient with him and he did ok. Then I went up and did the best hour of stand up comedy I’ve ever done still to this day. My setlist was 4 or 5 years in the making, so everything was honed to perfection. It also included 10-15 minutes of the easy, lowest common denominator, sex, drugs and alcohol-themed material I specialized in as a young comic. That stuff helped to get the room on my side before attempting headier bits, which they were also on board with. It felt so good to present all this material at once and for it to all be so effective. And to do it in front of a huge group of my extended family made it even more meaningful. After the show my aunt handed me $700 cash as payment and I was on top of the world. I’d just crushed a headlining set and earned the spoils. I flew back to NY the next day as validated as I could ever be. Then a year later, I went back to the ranch. It seemed like an obvious thing to do. I mean the first time around was such an amazing experience. The only problem was that I hadn’t written a whole new hour in that year since the first show at Doss Ranch. No problem though. The solution was that I wouldn’t do an hour. I decided to bring two other comics with me from New York. One was my friend Frank Favia. Frank’s act is mostly about being a nice guy who strikes out with the ladies. He’s very likable and self-deprecating. The other comic I brought was Thomas Dixson. We’d started together in Raleigh, NC and had both moved to New York since. Before Thomas took the gig he’d informed me that he hadn’t done stand up in over a month. That’s an epoch of a hiatus in stand up time but I didn’t care. I knew Thomas would hold his own because he’s one of the most naturally gifted comics I’ve ever met. I also booked another local Indianapolis-based comic to host the show. I figured he’d do 15 minutes up top. Then Frank and Thomas could do 20 minutes each and I’d do a mostly new 30 minutes to close it out. From the jump, things were different this time around. The Wednesday before the show I came down with a cold that was getting worse by the day. Come Friday, when we all met at the airport to fly to Indy, I had been sapped of all my energy. I was just hoping I could make it through the gig on pure adrenaline. It wasn’t ideal but I assured myself that if the crowd was as supportive as they’d been a year prior, everything would be fine. We got to the venue at 7:20 and the show was supposed to start at 8. Just like the first time, the bar was full of locals drinking their bud lights, periodically disappearing behind giant vape clouds. It got to be 7:50 and there were about half as many people in the room as there had been the year before. 8:00 came and the cavalry of friends and family never showed. My aunt felt bad about the turnout and suggested we delay the start just a little because surely more people were on their way. A few more trickled in and we finally kicked it off at 8:30. Our host took the stage and did his 15 minutes. The audience response was tepid. Frank went up and did his 20 minutes. The room was beginning to loosen up but they never fully yielded to Frank’s affable charm. He was getting laughs but there was a tightness in the air that refused to dissolve as he cruised through his material. Then Thomas, a black guy, went on stage for the first time in over a month, in front of this rural, drunk, all-white room and opened with this: “So… I’m aware of the fact that, in this town, my skin is kinda like an away jersey” It crushed. His being the only black person in the room, and possibly the area code, was on everybody’s mind and he exploited that tension masterfully. Within 5 minutes he had them all under his spell and could do no wrong. The tightness Frank had endured was long gone. However, thanks to our late start, the crowd had been drinking now for about 90 minutes and it was starting to show. They were getting rowdy and Thomas’s spontaneous, high-energy set was throwing fuel on the fire. He started doing crowd work, setting a dangerous precedent that it’s okay for the audience to become a part of the show. By the end of his 20 minutes people were sending shots to him up on stage and he was taking each one to thunderous applause. They had become an unruly drunken mob. To be clear, I don’t blame Thomas for this one bit. He was doing what he had to do to survive up there and he absolutely destroyed. These people would’ve voted him into office. He left the stage and Doss Ranch was on fire. I wasn’t sure how I was going to follow him. I knew I needed to be loose and in-the-moment but my head was in a fog from the cold I’d been battling. I didn’t feel quick on my feet. I didn’t feel sharp. I didn’t feel funny. I decided that if any opportunity to riff popped into my head, I’d just go with it. I had a feeling, after watching Thomas, that the more I went off script, the better. These were not my people and I was not their comic. In the year since my first appearance at the ranch my style had become smarter and more subtle. It required a lot more reading between the lines. These were blue collar, salt-of-the-earth folks and here I was with my quippy observations about working in an office or a bit about how if I lived in the middle east I could probably be peer-pressured into joining ISIS. Honestly the set was a blur. For 25 minutes I alternated between doing material that was met with half-hearted chuckles from an audience that couldn’t relate to me and attempting crowd work with a room so drunk they would interrupt one another while trying to respond to me. What made it even more surreal was that they were all regulars so they knew each other. At one point a guy in the back yelled something indecipherable and someone across the room scolded him by name, “Shut up, Gilmore!” It was a mess. I walked off the stage defeated. My aunt handed me about $450 dollars this time, not nearly enough to cover the cost of the three round-trip flights we all took to get there. I was prepared to break even but this was a huge loss. We hung out at the ranch and drank for a couple hours after the show. Thomas was swarmed by newly minted fans who wanted to take a pictures with him and buy him drinks. I receded into the shadows happy to put the whole experience behind me and Frank went out to the parking lot with Gilmore to smoke weed in his truck. Those are the highs and lows of Doss Ranch.