The 11th Annual First Person Arts Festival, running Nov. 8-17 at venues across the city, features a number of national and local comedians performing special spoken-word acts. First Person Arts is known for supporting memoir and documentary work by individuals at all levels of experience, from accomplished artists to everyday people.
Out Philadelphia comedian Alejandro Morales is performing as part of “Comedy Confessions of Corey Cohen.”
“The format of it is a bunch of standup comics go up and do a set of comedy and [Cohen] has a late-night host situation there,where you sit on a couch afterwards and he asks you questions,” Morales said about the show.
Morales will be joined by acts like South Philly storyteller Hillary Rea and Dave Hill, a national comedian and author of “Tasteful Nudes.”
“I saw him at the Tin Angel last year and he was hilarious,” Morales said of Hill. “He dropped soda on his laptop. I couldn’t tell whether he did it on purpose or not, but it was really funny.”
Morales, who can be seen at Laughs on Fairmount at Urban Saloon every Monday, and on Tuesdays hosting Kinky Quizzo at the Venture Inn, said his jokes and stories adhere closely to his real-life experiences and that he usually doesn’t need to exaggerate for effect.
“I do a handful of dating jokes, like one where I met a guy at Tavern and Googled his phone number that night and found his Rentboy profile with all these naked pictures and stuff,” he said. “So stuff like that I don’t need to exaggerate because it’s funny on its face.”
So, did you go out with him?
“No,” he said. “What’s really funny about that is I was still going to date him because I was like, well, free hooker. But then he texted me one day and was like, ‘How old are you again?’ And I said 30, and I never heard from him again.”
Damn!
“It took a lot of nerve,” Morales said. “This guy’s undercarriage is on the Internet but he wouldn’t date me because I was five years older than him.”
Also corralling comedic talent for First Person Arts is “RISK!” the popular storytelling show, which will feature headliners Janeane Garofalo and Kevin Allison.
Allison, who is famous for his work on MTV’s popular sketch comedy show “The State,” said that while the show features performers known for stand-up comedy, it is a storytelling show, to which comedians often have a hard time adapting.
“I was a member of the sketch comedy group The State in the 1990s so I have a great deal of friends — Margaret Cho, Sarah Silverman, Marc Maron — going way back,” Allison said. “I kind of veered away from the comedy scene for many years and when I did start performing again, it was as a storyteller, which is a very different thing than what most stand-ups are used to doing. It’s subtly different to get up and tell a 10-minute story than it is to do joke, joke, joke on a seam. Some comedians struggle with it. They need some coaching. Everyone who does the show gets some coaching from me beforehand. But some need a little bit more than others because they are so reliant on hearing laughter. Stories are more like real life in that there’s bound to be plenty of laughter and there are bound to be many times when other emotions come into play.”
Allison, who is openly gay, said he started “RISK!” as something to channel his creative energy when he found himself suddenly without a troupe to perform with.
“When I was in The State, we were doing sketch comedy and it was very broad and very silly,” he said. “I loved it but when The State broke up, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had always been the black sheep in the group. I was the only gay member, so I spent less time socially with the group and I had my own quirky way of expressing myself. So when we broke up, everyone broke into cliques and, since I was the floater, I was kind of on my own. I thought, Well, I’ll do sketch comedy as one. So I started getting up on stage solo and telling stories but as very broad, crazy, kooky colorful sketch-comedy characters. It was these disparate sides of my personality that were kind of aching to get out: the side of me that is really kind and good-hearted versus the side of myself that is completely debauched and raunchy versus the side of me that is very thoughtful and wants to pull things apart. It was kind of hard to express that kind of stuff in different kooky characters. What was happening more and more over the course of my time when I was doing solo shows as characters was, I was trying to be more authentic but not getting through.”
In 2008, Allison amassed those characters into a solo show called “F-Up,” centering on each character’s failings; the show itself, however, failed to connect with audiences.
“I did it out in San Francisco and [comedian and The State alum] Michael Ian Black was there. Afterwards, I was depressed because the show didn’t go over very well. I asked him what he thought and he said, ‘I feel like the audience wanted you to just drop the act and start speaking as yourself.’ I said that just felt so risky and he said, ‘Exactly! The risky stuff is the stuff worth doing,’” Allison said. “I’ve always had that fear that if I get up on stage and I start talking about myself, there are people that are going to think I’m too gay and too Midwestern and too polite and too strangely filthy or bizarre. But what I found was when you do get up on stage and start speaking as yourself, when people feel that you are being authentic, they will let you go anywhere.”
Allison said that storytelling audiences are far more polite and interested in what the artist has to say than anything performers will experience in a traditional comedy show.
“We always try to be clear that ‘RISK!’ is a storytelling show,” he said. “Here in New York City, storytelling is like folk-singing was in the 1960s. Everyone is doing it. You can be almost anyone and do it. If you are being authentic, the audience immediately adjusts their expectations. They open up and become more supportive. It’s not the place where you are going to find that energy where people are going to be heckled. I don’t know why, but in stand-up comedy, there’s this understanding that the audience is allowed to yell at the performer. I don’t know how it started, but it is very much the reality. That does not happen with storytelling shows. They just get it. ‘RISK!’ has always been: What are you afraid to talk about because society or your family or your school or your church have always told you, ‘Don’t talk about that?’ It has been a place where people can just let it out. It doesn’t have to be perfectly memorized or perfectly written. It’s a much more raw kind of show.”
The 11th Annual First Person Arts Festival runs Nov. 8-17. For a full listing of events, venues and performers, visit www.firstpersonarts.org/first-person-festival.