A couple times recently I’ve dropped by this place even though there is essentially no margin in it for me. The owner is not overly fond of my shit, and he begrudges the success of some of my funniest friends, so it was an obvious choice to limit that tension in my life.

Why beg someone to be part of a show where they ain’t supporting what you have and work out a whole lot of passive aggression on you to boot? (Actually, I think my camel’s back/straw thang was not over comedy, it was the owner advising and criticizing my relationship unbidden. Fuck with me all you want, if you must, but leave those closest to me out of your nasty shit, OK?)

But, every now and again, as a once fertile ground for innovative comedy that now feels a bit like scorched earth, there’s a show worth seeing. Tonight had a mix of a great joke writer, who happens to write Conan O’Brien’s monologue, an old team from back in Boston comedy’s heyday in the ’80s, and this guy, Louis CK, who is fucking amazing on two of my highest values — (1) Seeming on stage like someone who’s just shitting around, telling stories and talking in a personal, sharing kind of way, you know, like, human, and (2) getting away with the most horrible shit a person could say. The unwritten value is, of course, he’s fucking funny. Not wry, smiley funny, but spit-take beer in your nose funny.

Louis opened with stuff about rape. Almost no one can make rape a funny topic. He did it. The fucked in the head comics were laughing, but so were the paying customers.

The only downside to the night for me was the club owner, who didn’t respond three separate times when I nodded and said “hi.” Gotta love a guy who is so practiced in passive aggression that he can pretty much cue the “can’t make eye contact” walk by perfectly several times in a row.

But, what fucking irked the shit out of me was when Louis was late, and the owner was desperately looking to kill some time, he bitched directly over my head, literally, since he was interrupting a conversation with a friend of mine, and was looking for someone to put up for five minutes. Gee, douchebag, you don’t have to put me on stage, but you also don’t have to be an insensitive prick either and pretend I’m not there.

The thing is I probably would have done fine had I gone up. But, either way, it was moot, since the headliner arrived right before these guys jumped on stage and did pretty damn well.

I just can’t help but wonder whether the owner making me feel invisible and unworthy could have been avoided. I guess the brightside is, by my moving west his unfunny, dickheaded self will become the rosey shit defined by nostalgia.