By Greg Maxwell

End of the Punchline
A legendary comedy venue is history.

You could argue that New York has seen stranger live shows than Faceboyz Open Mic. You could point out that the actor who painted his penis purple didn’t keep the audience’s attention after the first few minutes. You could say that the woman who announced she would shoot an egg from her vagina walked off the stage because she lost it—inside her body. You might add that all those performance artists who delivered monologues in the buff couldn’t shock a town in which a revival of Oh Calcutta! ran for thirteen years.

But you’d be missing the point.

"This was never about having a freak show," says Rob Prichard, the proprietor of Surf Reality, the fifty-seat Lower East Side theater that has hosted Faceboyz Open Mic since 1995. "It was about having a place where people could develop."

It’s a Monday afternoon and I’m speaking to Prichard inside his loft, which, along with his theater on the other side of the wall, he must vacate in three days. "The landlord is doubling the rent," he explains. "And I can’t swing eight grand a month." To close the theater, Prichard has decided to present a 24-hour, non-stop marathon edition of Faceboyz Open Mic.

Sign up began Sunday night. Most performers looked like they’d been plucked from the rear car of the Brooklyn-bound L train: mid-20s, clad in old corduroys and mesh baseball caps, carrying spiral notebooks, appearing both earnest and bored.

At 8:30 p.m., Faceboy—the actor/comedian/poet/singer for whom the open mic is named—took the stage. "We have three rules. Number one: audience, no heckling the performers. Number two: performers, no heckling the audience. Number three: no fire." With that, the lights dimmed and the marathon began.

First up was Big Mike. I recognized Big Mike. He is known, in addition to his poetry, for his collection of pornographic Polaroids. He adds to his collection by taking pictures of female performers’ asses before the show. Years back, my ex-girlfriend danced burlesque for the Va Va Voom Room. In an old photo there is a man leering at her in the front row. It’s Big Mike.

I also recognized most of the performers. Perhaps that’s why I left after Big Mike. I started my career as a stand-up comedian at Faceboyz Open Mic back in 1997. The alternative comedy scene was receiving a ton of press at the time, and it seemed like every self-effacing comic under 25 thought he or she could be the next Todd Barry or Janeane Garofalo. I was one of them.

Every Sunday, fifty or sixty of us converged on Surf Reality. Most nights we were awful. And as the years went by, something odd started happening. A few of us moved on. A few quit. But most of the Surf Reality regulars kept at it, Sunday after Sunday. They became very adept at entertaining one another. What might not have worked in front of an audience of strangers was warmly applauded at Surf. These were shows by friends for friends. "This is church," comedian Lloyd Floyd once said.

But unlike church, the open mic would run until the early hours of the morning. It was then the clothes would come off. "It was a pretty sexually charged place," says Shauna Lane, a stand-up comedian who’s performed at New York Comedy Club and Carolines on Broadway.

But at Surf Reality, she was a sometimes-unclothed character she called "Sabrina the Performance Artist with a Dream." "It was so supportive," she said. "I could do whatever I wanted to. There’ll never be another place like it."

At just past midnight on Monday night, twenty-eight hours into the open mic, Faceboy again took the stage. The crowd from the night before had returned. The theater was packed, overheated and thick with the scent of sweat, beer, and smoke. People were hugging and crying. The last performance at Surf Reality was a group sing-a-long of an old summer-camp favorite. It was "All Together Now."