Monday night I got to see how a bad venue and a bad crowd can kill a good night of comedy. Tell Your Friends had all the makings of a great show, Eugene Mirman, Christian Finnegan, Liam McEneaney and Claudia Cogan, all very funny people, were scheduled to perform. So I was surprised when I arrived (late), and only 15 people were there. Not that there would’ve been room for any more. The downstairs of Lolita is long and narrow and everyone had to sit in a line along the wall. It was very awkward staging and that, paired with the size of the audience, made it a difficult show.

Tell Your Friends opened with a folk duo, A Brief View of the Hudson, and it set a mellow vibe for the rest of the night. It’s hard to get into a crazy laughing mood when you’ve just been chilled out, unless you like to laugh at folk singers, like I do. But if they are meant to be taken seriously, I think that they should play at the end.

Everyone who performed was funny–some more than others–but they kept being met with silence. I think Tell Your Friends suffers from what happens to a lot of shows in New York: lack of advertising and space. Mirman and Finnegan were doing bits that I have seen kill at other venues, but weren’t going over well here. That might be another reason that there weren’t many out-loud laughs; most of the material being performed wasn’t new. Even if it had never been on stage before, it had been posted on a blog (Cogan, McEneaney. . . I’m looking at you). But I’m probably the only one that noticed that.