Six things we learned about comedy in Los Angeles at RIOT LA

"Roustabout" was either the most fully realized one-off talk show spoof or Kurt Braunohler's bid at a gonzo series that needs to happen. Either way, to borrow a theme from the show, it was bananas. Somewhere in between an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse and a Flaming Lips concert, "Roustabout" managed to string together flying fruit, half-naked male dancers and jolly old St. Dick (you can use your imagination) with sit-down interviews and lie detector tests from Joe Mande, Grace Helbig and Nick Thune. The staggered, premature reveals throughout the night of “the grandest finale” culminated in a heavy metal skeleton dance from Paul McGinnis Puppetry and a marching band that led the crowd through Downtown to the after-party.

P.S. Kurt Braunohler is one of our comedians to watch in 2014. Read more about him and some other funny people here.

Like the standard two-drink minimum at otherwise cheap stand-up shows, RIOT’s ticketing options came with a few caveats. You could gain access to the entire festival via pay-per-show tickets, which guaranteed admission, or a festival pass, which at the early bird price of $65 was an absolute steal. As a pass holder, we simply followed the fest’s suggestion to get in line at least 15 minutes before showtime and never had a problem getting in; however, that didn’t prevent a pervasive anxiety in line as people wondered if popular shows would fill up. Perhaps that’s why some of the weekend’s most high-profile events required a separate ticket. It’s an understandable move to cut down on the chaos, but for pass holders who wanted to see Comedy Bang! Bang! and the two KCRW storytelling showcases—three ticketed-only events—the total price of the weekend more than doubled.

When Jon Benjamin took the stage at the “Celebration of Failure” of his short-lived Comedy Central show, he and the show’s co-creator Leo Allen lambasted that the $30 event was, in fact, only worth $21. So show writer Nathan Fielder worked his way through the crowd to hand out envelopes stuffed with $9 as the Ghostbusters theme vamped in the background, only to then take back $2 when it was decided that the comedic value of the exchange had again bumped up the worth of a ticket. There was actual content here too: a screening of the show’s hilarious pilot presentation and a table read with Chris Parnell and Laura Krafft of a post-cancellation second season script. But all of that was upstaged when a homeless man managed to make his way to the front of the Downtown Independent. When the trench-coat-clad man began vigorously scratching his head in front of the crowd, Benjamin’s claim that this wasn’t a part of the show slowly began to penetrate. Cue some panicked staff, a generous bribe and a theater full of I’m-going-to-hell-for-this laughs at the man’s incomprehensible insistence that he doesn’t need money because he’s a sasquatch. Only in DTLA.