By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
This story maybe should have been posted a month ago for Mother’s Day.
After all comedian Mark Philipp’s mom makes a dramatic appearance at the end of his new YouTube video, “That’s enough,” which captures a set at Grumpy Dave’s in downtown Bowling Green.
Well, make that his late mother. His mother, Philipp explains in the routine did show up at a few of his gigs while she was still alive. She heckled him to the point that she was asked to leave. As she was dying, she collaborated with him come up with a bit that keeps her as part of the show.
Philipp had a troubled relationship with his parents, both now gone. His father, a heroin addict, never saw him perform.
Of course, Philipp seems to have a troubled relationship with himself, which he is not afraid to discuss, in vivid detail in his routine.
Like the weird vibe between him and bitches, female dogs that is. His talking about a friend’s pet seemingly coming on to him is cringe inducing, and that’s OK with Philipp. He wants people to be uncomfortable. That’s kind of his comic comfort zone. “I will only joke about things like that if they make me a little uncomfortable,” he said.
He wrings humor from all manner of subjects. How he discovered his talent for baseball at an anti-abortion protest. His mother’s incessant smoking. How a woman’s fetish left him with a scar. Why as a kid he ate cereal with a fork. The absurdity of attempts to ban certain books and drag shows from libraries.
Philipp said he’s been working on this material for about a year and a half, mostly in friends’ houses, in their basements, at shows in garages. “The kind of thing I do is an acquired taste,” he explained. “Not every venue is happy to have me.” The intimacy of those small shows helps him gauge the impact of the material and finetuned.
However, when Philipp went on stage with the video crew present, he wanted a sense of immediacy and improvisation. He brought in violinist Joe “Awesome” Aasim. They had not heard Philipp’s material before, so they were reacting spontaneously with musical commentary. Aasim sets the tone at the beginning with an acerbic reference to Samuel Barber’s lament “Adagio for Strings.”
“That keeps me on my toes,” Philipp said. “There’s a little element of danger and excitement not knowing where something is going.”
Philipp started out in creative writing, short stories and poems. “What’s fascinating about comedy is that it follows a lot of the same rules,” Philipp said. “For some reason it’s perceived as if it doesn’t.” But just like fiction and poetry “it’s about building and releasing tension.”
He’ll tell an emotional story and “bring the audience into the same dark emotional place where we’re all going to end up. ….” No matter how dark he’ll bring back a sense of hope by breaking the tension with something funny. “It might not be a punchline. It might just be something that brings back the levity and drags us right back out of the pit. That’s where I find the balance. I like to feel the physical tension in the room, and then when I feel it’s reached its breaking point, that’s when I when I drop back into the comedic parts. That breaks the tension.”
Philipp deals bluntly with his battles with addiction. He was doing stand up before he got sober. The culture of the comedy scene where he got paid in drinks not money helped foster his addiction.
“The shame and embarrassment of being that open and honest is palpable and horrendous. Maybe it’s getting too raw, a little too weird,” he said. “But my loved ones, my friends, my girlfriend, my therapist make it clear that if I wasn’t doing that, I’d be doing something much more unhealthy.”
He still writes in other forms but “ it doesn’t have that immediate discomfort that I’m looking for,” Philipp said.
“I have ridiculous stage fright, borderline panic attacks, every time I go on stage. That’s half the appeal for me. I only really learned how to enjoy performing after I got sober. I’m sure it’s filling some kind of psychological gap.”
This is his fourth “album,” and he feels the best. Though it’s recorded and available on YouTube, he said. “I’m not going to dump this material.” He is, however, already “in the throes of writing my next hour… I don’t ever feel comfortable stopping and being comfortable with the piles I have.”
