Heard the one about sequestration?
“We had our sequester talk earlier in the week,” Shahryar Rizvi said 90 seconds into his stand-up set, a few hours after getting off work at the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration.
It was Thursday night — Sequester Eve — and Rizvi, a 32-year-old IT project planner who moonlights as a comedian, was at a Dupont Circle open-mike night, mining the increasing disquiet of his day job for laughs.
“Our head of our division sat us down and told us how many furlough days we’re going to have, what the plan is if it all goes down,” Rizvi said of the looming $85 billion in across-the-board federal budget cuts. “And I was so [ticked] that he did this. ‘Cause he did this during the meeting when we as a division were going to make our ‘Harlem Shake’ video.”
The small crowd in the Topaz Hotel’s basement bar, a few blocks from the White House, erupted in laughter. Rizvi paused a beat, then continued: “Nobody’s going to dance with a keyboard shirtless now.”
Turns out that there’s comedy gold in unpaid leave days and other mandatory cuts — even in federal Washington, where beleaguered bureaucrats, anxious government contractors and ripple-effect worriers are in dire need of a little levity.
“We all get it,” Rizvi said offstage. “You have to be able to make jokes and laugh about this situation we’re in.”
More than 300,000 federal workers live in the Washington region, but workplace humor isn’t particularly popular among comics based in a company town. Even Funniest Fed, the annual comedy competition for amateur and experienced stand-ups with agency or military day jobs, features far more material about standard tropes (race, sex, family dysfunction, airplane food) than jokes about official Washington.
“There just aren’t a lot of people here who mine that stuff,” said Naomi Johnson, the Funniest Fed organizer who works at the Department of Homeland Security. “The responses are bigger and better for standard comedy fare. It could be that people are usually so saturated and tired of the news that they just want a break from it.”
But with massive automatic budget cuts looming and angst levels rising around the area, Johnson wants to organize a comedy showcase to help her co-workers blow off sequester steam. She’d call it Furlough Funnies.
“People are feeling scapegoated and are just trying to get through this,” she said. “They’re exhausted and angry and resigned. They need an opportunity to get together outside of the office and laugh.”
Tyler Richardson, a Department of Veterans Affairs operations analyst and comedy-circuit regular, recently wrote a two-minute bit that uses Chinese bill collectors, a bad Obama impression and Steven Seagal throwing ninja stars to explain the sequester. (You have to hear it to get it.)
It’s been a hit, he said — even with a friend who “is afraid of what’s going to happen, because she’s a big worrier. But she said it was a good joke. She laughed. When people come to hear comedy, no matter what they’re dealing with, they just want to be entertained. They just want to laugh, even if it’s about something that affects them.”
Loading...
Comments