"Fitz of Laughter"

I just got back from seeing Kevin Burke's stand-up comedy show, "Fitz of Laughter," at Fitzgeralds downtown. I had free tickets. (Have I ever mentioned here how much I like getting free stuff? I have? Oh, sorry.) You can read reviews here and here.

This really is old-school Vegas kind of material: a mix of comedy and a little magic, preceded by a warm-up comic doing impersonations.

Is Burke the funniest guy ever to stand behind a mike? No. He never had me in prolonged, uncontrollable spasms the way that Chris Rock, Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Louis CK, and a few others have been able to do.

But on the other hand, he's enormously likable. He's one of those rare people that is just kind of intrinsically funny in everything he says and does. He has a great rapport with the small audience--enough that I even acted as one of the three audience dummies on stage for him when he asked me to, something that I would ordinarily resist mightily. When I cracked a little joke that made the audience laugh, he mock-bellowed, "Don't you EVER be funnier than me!"

It's hard for me to imagine that anybody could walk away thinking that this was the best show ever, but it's just as hard to imagine that anybody could walk away without having had a genuinely good time.