Sam Tallent loomed over the crowd sitting in creaky fold out chairs (the kind where the split-open cushions spill out asbestos) in the dimly lit garage room at Commonwealth Press and asked the thinly dispersed room of misfit people to use their imaginations.
“You’re a bunch of gay kids. Ok?,” he asked.
“Imagine that. You’re gay kids. Homosexual youths.”
Tallent swiped his hand down his face, as if to wipe clean a slate, before telling the crowd, “This is my impersonation of a youth minister at a pray-the-gay away camp. ‘Thanks for coming out! Wait, damn!'”
Visiting from Denver, Tallent was one of over 50 comedians who took the stage during the Burning Bridges Comedy Festival’s inaugural weekend. The two day event, which took place over the April 15 weekend, was spread out over venues in the Allentown, South Side and Downtown neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.
“Burning Bridges basically started as an excuse to have all of my friends come from around the country and tell me their jokes,” said John Dick Winters, the lead organizer for the event. Winters is one of the founders of Race to the Coffin Comedy, a group based out of Pittsburgh, and has been performing and booking stand up comedy for over four years now.
“It takes a long time to build a name in comedy, but these people are doing exactly what I’m doing – they’re going around their cities, they’re booking small tours and just grinding it out,” Winters said of the touring comedians on the festival. “They’re so funny and no one knows who they are.”
Winters has a monthly show at Club Cafe called “Comedy Roulette” and based the festival around it, including booking the festival’s headliner at the venue on the opening night of the weekend. Geoff Tate, the headliner, is a comedian based out of Cincinnati who has appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, is a regular opener for Doug Stanhope and is a frequent guest on Doug Benson’s podcast “Getting Doug With High”.
The Burning Bridges Comedy Festival is now the second festival catered specifically for comedy in the city. Pittsburgh Comedy Festival is now entering it’s third year, and Winters’ involvement in the event last year spurred him to organize a comedy festival himself.
“After participating in it and seeing how it worked I said to myself, ‘I think we can still do another one’. I think there’s plenty of room. I won’t step on any toes, and not only did we not step on their toes, but Pittsburgh Comedy Festival reached out and helped promote this one. They see it the same way I see it – Pittsburgh comedy is one big umbrella,” Winters said. “It really lit a fire under my ass.”
Burning Bridges was billed as a way to feature the talent of local comedians, in addition to the comics Winters brought in from around the country. Pittsburgh comics Alex Stypula and Shannon Norman both hosted their own shows at the Black Forge Coffee Shop in Allentown, and Ed Bailey and Day Bracey, hosts of the popular local podcast “Drinking Partners,” held a show at Work Hard Pittsburgh. Winters pointed out that the festival boasted over 30 comedians from Pittsburgh.
“The overwhelming support I got from the Pittsburgh comedy scene when I announced it – every comedian was stoked. The bummer with that is that I can’t put every Pittsburgh comedian on the festival. There are 60 or 70 people doing comedy pretty consistently,” Winters said. “That was bittersweet.”
Comedians were featured in a variety of manners over the weekend, ranging from the “Nearly Nude” show at Club Cafe, featuring comedians performing in their underwear, to a show at Black Forge where the Zone 3 precinct police force sat in the audience, and even a “Worst Tattoo Competition” at Commonwealth Press in South Side.
“Each comedian goes up and shows off their worst tattoo, and whoever wins gets tattooed on the stage during the show,” Winters said. Sam Tallent “won” the competition and received a tattoo of a crying baby while five other comedians performed on stage with the haunted whirr of a tattoo gun running in the background.
The crowds at the smaller venues rarely tipped over thirty people in attendance, though each show went off with unanimous support from those in attendance. Whether the festival was a monetary success or not was largely irrelevant to Winters and the local comedians. After all, it is an arts festival, and an inaugural one at that.
“Even if I do lose money, it is going to be so fun losing that money because every comedian coming into town is so funny and I have all my friends from Pittsburgh doing shows,” Winters said before the festival. “I’ll just be running around the whole weekend having the time of my life.”
(Warning: Video contains explicit language)