As far as entertainment goes, this is an odd Island. Poets’ events, play readings, and music ensembles outweigh comedy nights by … oh, to make up a random figure, about 1,000 to one. There’s nothing wrong with poems, plays, or violin concertos, of course, but there are few health studies that issue the edict, “Dude, you gotta listen to more poems about dappled maple leaves and dragonflies on the wind.” Or “You need to raise your Buxtehude intake.”
Yet we know laughter is good for us. We’re hard-wired to laugh. More laughing might even lengthen our lives. But we hardly require medical research to drive the point home — a good belly laugh feels better than just about anything.
Well, someone on the Island agrees: Longtime Islander Elizabeth Rothwell, regional director of Scott Hotel Resort Management, has staged comedy nights in the Lighthouse Grill of the Harbor View Hotel for the past three winters. The evening brings in top performers from the Boston comedy circuit, an environ long renowned for its jokester talent. Guests can either purchase advance tickets ($25) for the show, or add on a three-course dinner ($55).
A word about dinner before we barrel ahead to the yuks portion of the program: Like anyone who’s lived here since wooly mammoths roamed the Island in the 1970s, I’ve dined at the Harbor View countless times. These days the kitchen is helmed by Executive Chef Caleb Lara, and last Friday night I inhaled one of the best dinners I’ve had in long-term memory.
We started with a salad of mixed greens including mache, kale, and arugula (and I swear you could hardly taste the kale), with apples, nuts, blue cheese, and a dressing I’d pay big bucks (if I had big bucks) to learn how to reproduce. After that, all my surrounding diners feasted on fried chicken and cornbread, and I expected to feel sorry for myself with a vegetarian “farmer’s plate,” which I’ve learned from experience is usually steamed veggies heaped on steamed veggies. But au contraire, my dish was a heavenly array of grilled veggies, piquant and ultra-crispy patties of some sort, swirls of yummy sauces, and all other manner of nectar and ambrosia. I urge even the most steak-happy carnivores among you to order the farmer’s plate next time you stop in at the Lighthouse Grill.
And now to the comedy: The first part of the evening was a warmup by “Handsome Dan” and his trivia package: Dan Cassidy, helped by his partner Johnny Showtime, co-owner of the Dockside Inn in Oak Bluffs. Trivia is one of those holistic games where everyone in the room whispers and shouts, and strangers strike up friendships with players at other tables as they demand to know the answers.
Next came the comics. As local kid turned comic Ryan Lehman began, “I’m standing on a stage in Edgartown in Martha’s Vineyard … I’ve made it! I’ve plateaued!” The first of the three Boston comics to strut his stuff was Justin Hoff, with a high-ratcheting style. He riffed on his lack of success finding chicks who’ll date him. He wondered why the first thing a woman asks is, “How did you get into my apartment?” He joked that his dad didn’t mind scaring him as a child, pointing out such scenarios as, “Don’t worry, you’ll never be abducted by aliens. Statistically it’ll be someone close to you, like a teacher.” Thanks, Dad.
Next up was Stacy Kendro, also possessed of high-volume energy. She spoke of opening for Joan Rivers and getting to hang with the grande dame of comedy. Once Ms. Rivers told her, “You can tell the married men — they look constipated.” Ms. Kendro performed a hilarious riff on mammograms — what’s not to love about them? — and her growing sense that as a divorcee, she’s in no rush to remarry. “There’s no show called ‘Husband Swap,’” she mused. Yet she’s also set a goal for herself to acquire “three ex-husbands before I drop.”
The headliner was the thoroughly entertaining Chris Zito, who, coming from the big metrop of Boston, finds the Island peculiarly quiet. “This is the only building with the lights on!” he said. Mr. Zito’s style is more wound-up than Lewis Black’s, if you can imagine such a thing. He compares today’s overprotective parenting with his mother’s, back in the day when her only words to him were: “There’s the door, [expletive], be home for lunch.” Mr. Zito is so genuinely funny and so keyed up for laughs that it occasionally surprised him when tables drifted off into private conversations. “All of a sudden I’m the substitute teacher!” he griped. He also told us, “You are up so far past your bedtime.”
Which, come to think of it, was absolutely true. It wasn’t an old audience (aside from me). This wasn’t your typical sea of gray-haired heads you’d find at the above-referenced violin concertos, but all the same, even these 30somethings and 40somethings, living a long while on this rock, have developed peculiar farmer’s hours. When my sidekick and I left the hotel, the car clock read 10:48 pm. Yikes! Two hours and forty-eight minutes past my own jump-into-bed-with-a-book time.
Don’t get me wrong: We laughed our patooties off up through Chris Zito’s last great zinger, but apologies to these wonderful comics for the occasional glazed eyes.