Brother can you spare a laugh? Weprin makes comedic debut
Posted on June 23, 2009 by Stephen Stirling in Comptroller
David Weprin performs stand-up at the Yippie Museum Monday. Photo by Stephen Stirling
It was a tough crowd.
Monday night the Yippie Museum in Manhattan played host to what was easily the most bizarre, uncomfortable, yet endearing fund-raising event of the political season.
In a bid to spice up his personal image, the typically straight-laced City Councilman David Weprin (D-Hollis) tried his hand at stand-up comedy, yukking it up for a brief five minutes as the marquee event at the Bleecker Street club.
But the Democratic comptroller candidate didn’t exactly have the setup of the century for his comedic debut.
The event was sparsely attended, and those who did come crowded the rear of the dank club. Professional comedians Vanessa Hollingshead and A. Whitney Brown opened the night by riffing on drugs and religion, which prompted little more than nervous laughter from the audience.
Hollingshead’s brief performance was punctuated when she joked that a woman in the front row (really, she was the front row) was anoerexic, quickly prompting her to stand up and walk out.
“David, good luck,” Hollingshead said. “I’ve only been doing this for 17 years and I’ve gotten nothing from these guys. I tried to warm them up for you but now I’m freezing.”
The evening wasn’t helped by a poetry slam taking place in the bottom floor of the club with a clearly superior sound system. Nor was it the aided by the Yippie Musuem’s regulars, who included a large man with wiry gray hair sitting in a La-Z-Boy who intermittently broke out of a sound sleep throughout the evening to heckle whomever was on stage.
Nonetheless, Weprin did his bit shortly before 8 p.m.
He opened with the following: “A few years ago I told my twins, who were 14 at the time, that I was running for comptroller. They said, ‘Daddy, are you running for controller of the house?’ I told them, ‘No, I’m running for an office I can actually win.’”
Zing.
A few other gems from the set:
“So, some people have called me unexciting. I’ve actually been called handsome, but that was by Gov. David Paterson.”
“We were initially charging $2,500 a ticket for this event. But when people found out that I was doing stand-up comedy we had to lower it to 25 bucks a person and all the beer you can drink.”
“All joking aside, I do think the job of comptroller is an exciting job. The only job more exciting is state comptroller … because he is the sole proprietor of the state pension fund and he doesn’t have to consult anybody, except maybe Hank Morris?”
The set of the night, however, went to Sheinkopf Communications rep Andrew Moesel, who broke up an uncomfortable start to the evening with a quick round of political humor. Moesel mused on his time as a reporter and the difference between that and how he looks at things differently as a flack.
“When I was a reporter, someone would tell me, ‘Hey, an old Jewish lady just got hit by a car,’ and I’d ask, ‘Is she dead?” They’d say ‘Yeah’ and I’d say, ‘Yes! A front page story,’” Moesel said. “Now, someone tells me, ‘Hey, an old Jewish lady just got hit by a car,’ and I ask, ‘Is she dead?” They say ‘Yeah’ and I say, ‘Damn! That’s another David Weprin supporter gone.’”
