Oh, my.

This was rough. In any way you care to think of it.

The crowd. The setting. The talent. The material.

A friend of mine, who aspires to be a professional comedian, was to perform at a hotel in Norwalk. His impression was that the winner of an eight-comic competition would get a gig at the Ontario Improv, a fairly serious venue. “I want that,” he said. “I won’t kid you.”

But that was hours before he was to perform. In a setting that proved to be quite literally cold, and far more unsettling than amusing.

OK, the scene: An empty room inside a curious freeway-side hotel. (Why is it there? Who stays there?) A sort of U-shaped bar at one end of the room, and a small, foot-high “stage” at the other. Between the bar and the stage are spread a smattering of tables with four chairs at each table. Stage right sit the sound guys whose job it apparently is to play bad music loudly before the show and make sure nearly every performer can’t quite be heard. Admission is $10. The room is extraordinarily cold; the front door has been left open, and cold air was to pour in all night into the dimly lit interior.

The crowd: Eclectically down-market. There were down-market anglos, down-market Latinos and down-market blacks. Down-market young folks and middle-agers. Even a woman with 19 grandchildren (by her own declaration) sitting front and center.  Folks with tats and bad haircuts. Women too young to have the muffin tops they lugged into the room. Guys with plenty of paunch. With one or two exceptions, a stunningly unattractive crowd.

They demonstrated their low-end taste by their reaction to the comics. The cruder the humor, the more likely they were to react. One youngish guy made great capital out of a lengthy description of his visit to a toilet, in a mall, set aside for handicapped people. If anything came close to “killing” all night, that was it. Though I must credit him for a bit that had some merit (but was awkwardly delivered) centering on how he love to lie, that America is a country of liars and, thus, he was “morally opposed to divorce because in a divorce at least one person is being truthful.” He suggested that the greatest of all liars were married couples. There was something there … but he lacked the polish to make it really work, and he knew he got more laughs with his potty humor.

The schedule: It was supposed to go off at 8 p.m. It began at more like 9. So everyone could pay too much money for cold drinks in a room that felt like the North Pole on Christmas morning. Up first was the absolutely wretched master of ceremonies, apparently an aspiring comic in his own right, whose relentless inability to generate humor was matched only by his insistence on trying. He routinely killed any interest or enthusiasm in the room with his unfunny and usually inaudible ramblings between sets, during which the audience broke into distracted conversation that threatened to drown out the acts that followed. The show (finally) opened with a couple of “professionals” … who were no better than the amateurs to follow. One guy did a bit about his Cuban father that was vaguely amusing. Another did a set that revolved around riding the bus. This was the guy who insulted a woman up front for not laughing at him. It was to get worse.

The competition: Eight guys, though I now recall nine performing. Most of them in their 30s, I’d guess. Two grandfathers, one in his 40s, the other in his 60s. Each was to get 8-10 minutes to impress the audience. Bar-order tickets were distributed to the audience, meant to be used as ballots to vote for the top three comics. It immediately became clear that any guy who had brought a lot of his friends to the show stood the best chance of winning. Whether or not he deserved it. Names apparently were drawn at random to determine the order the eight guys appeared. My friend wanted to go “somewhere in the middle.” He did not want to go first. He was pulled at No. 7. Of what was supposed to have been eight guys but I believe actually was nine. (Unless one of those guys was a “pro” slipped in.)

So, the “main” part of the show began. A guy who spent a lot of time talking about his dance moves and how they resembled sex. Hmm. A young guy who was drunk (or worse) mumbling about his sexual conquests while literally everyone in the room had to be wondering “Who would hook up with you?” A fortysomething guy with shoulder-length hair who went by one name (let’s call him Kong) and twice suggested it was funny as could be that people think he’s white when he’s actually from Mexico. His best stuff was about catching guys checking him out as they passed him on the freeway. See, cuz they think he’s a woman. Yeah. Stop, you’re killing me. He appeared to be drunk as well, and was met with painful grimaces from everyone who wasn’t a friend of his, and they were howling from their one table.

Mind, it’s pushing 10 p.m. by now, and everyone is sitting in ski parkas and mittens, and there is a sense that everyone would leave if they didn’t feel obliged to hang around and turn in their ballots so that their son/brother/pal could get the Ontario Improv gig.

Another momentum-killer was the intermission declared after the fourth comic’s gig. A chunk of the crowd disappeared, and the rest seemed to get even more distracted, when I wasn’t sure that was possible.

The last four guys had little or no chance. The crowd was losing its buzz but was just as low-brow as when it wandered into the room. Plus, the organizer now seemed intent on speeding up the pace, cutting short second-half gigs after the first-half guys were allowed to drone on to painful deaths on stage.

The second half began with a youngish guy in a sort of faux Mohawk haircut who bounded up on the stage and was manic throughout, perhaps attempting to inject some energy into a dead room. He was bad, as well. Inarticulate and rambling whose closing thing — a rap-like (in theory ironic) paean to “fat chicks” — was largely indecipherable.

Then came our friend, who was arguably the most polished performer of the night. He wore a gray suit and a fedora, influenced by the Steve Martin suggestion that a comic “should dress better than his crowd.” In part, because if they heckle you and you don’t have a great comeback at hand you can always insult the way they have dressed. Our guy clearly had rehearsed his hand and body movements, and understood the dynamics of pacing. His problem was the crowd.

All night, but especially after the intermission, the audience gave the comics about 30 seconds to engage them, and if they didn’t, they just began talking among themselves. And our friend was coming at them with 1) a highbrow set with 2) non-blue material. He was doing a bit about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (president of Iran) that just sailed over everyone’s head. As he talked about Ahmadinejad, he pronounced his name incorrectly each time –  with comic intent. But this was an audience that didn’t know Ahmadinejad from Ahmad Rashad. He did a bit about priests being allowed to marry and suggested they would have really bad pickup lines. Such as, “Hi, I’m Father Flanagan, but you can call me ‘Daddy.”’ Material with intrinsic value but just ill-suited to the venue.

After our friend came a guy who had some polish but was ultra-blue, and then a kid who had some interesting insights about gang life — but died on stage because absolutely no one was listening by then.

The best of the night was a guy in his 60s, and we have to give some credit to the crowd for (apparently) figuring this out, since we later heard he “won” the competition. Assuming the vote wasn’t rigged.  He had a borscht-belt feel and a clear understanding of timing and phrasing. He wore a baseball cap and jeans and talked about how hard it is being old, and how no one likes old people, and about how badly old people drive, yeah, he admits it, and had a good visual bit when he took off his cap to reveal a bald pate, turned his back to the audience, reached above his head to grasp what we knew to be a steering wheel and said, “Does this look familiar?” He mocked the audience by suggesting he is spending Social Security money right this minute than none of them will ever see. But the crowd liked him, and seemed amused that this little old guy with the faintly New York feel to him was up there trying.

It was a set with a “take my wife” … pause, pause … “please” feel to it. A senior citizen who apparently will get a chance to be a rising star.

On the whole, it was a long, painful event. Like reading this entry three or four times in a row, except that you would need to make sure you are surrounded by drunken yahoos and are shivering. It caused me to reflect on who goes to comedy shows, and just how far up the ladder of comedy competence you have to go before you can be fairly certain of a night that delivers more laughs than painful silences.

At the moment, I’m thinking “Improv level, at the minimum.”

I would like to compliment all those guys (not a woman among them) who got on stage knowing there was a good chance they would “die” … but I can’t really manage that. Because their material was so wretched and so relentlessly scatological.

My friend walked us to our car, and we went over his performance. Another friend of his was just behind us. Our comic friend asked this other guy what he should change, next time. Said the other guy: “Get a smarter audience.”