Friday, July 12, 2013

Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Club

Karen and I popped into the Yuk Yuk’s on Elgin Street in downtown Ottawa on Thursday the 11’th … our main goal was to see Angelo Tsarouchas, the headliner this week and next. Karen has met Angelo and wanted to see his act. Of course, we got a bonus of two other acts that were very good too.


fuji f770exr  400iso  f/4.7  1/10

MCing was John Cullen.


fuji f770exr  1600iso  f/5.8  1/60

His act was pretty good, although he did spend a lot of time trying to worm info out of a group of pretty young women that were a wedding party with bride, bride’s maids and friends. They were feeling frisky as the wedding was only two days away on Saturday.

He came up again just before Angelo and this time he really rocked the joint. Lots of belly laughs. Very good second act for him.

In between John and Angelo was Mike Harrison.

He seemed very shy, spending a lot of time tucking himself into the curtains at the back of the very small stage. I had a lot of trouble capturing images of him as he was constantly obscured by curtains. But this next one is pretty good.

Mike told a lot of funny stories and was very self-deprecating, playing off his braying laugh and his nerdy looks and history. He did very well with the ladies and had us laughing rather a lot. A good act for sure.

And finally, it was Angelo’s time. He is an imposing dude, easily dominating the stage and likely intimidating the front row quite a bit. He also moves around the stage much more than the other guys, indicating a deep comfort with performing live.

His act was long and very funny. I enjoyed his mix of funny anecdotes and true life stories. A well crafted way of expressing his life in an amusing way.

All told, I highly recommend this trio. Go check them out. The price is very low for the quality of the entertainment (less than 30 bucks for 2.) You won’t regret it.


A note on the photography: I normally shoot quite prolifically and only post the sharp images. But by the time I had the camera set up for the lighting, it was showing a single red bar, indicating imminent death. I was able to shoot only 7 images in total of these three and you are seeing 6 of them. So you get what you get :-)

The F770 handed the lighting well, and I could have managed a much better performance with an opportunity to shoot until I had the perfect balance of ISO and exposure, but that was not to be. I did not bother filming anything with so little power available.

And to think that I almost walked out of the house with the GX1 … what a dick move leaving it at home Smile