So desperate was I to visit Joe Rogan’s new Comedy Mothership Club in Austin, Texas that when I had one week off before starting a new job, I packed up my family, including two young children, hauled their heavy car seats and various accoutrements, and flew to can-barely-stand-to-be-outside-for-a-moment Austin, Texas in late June. After days of chasing two kids around and thinking that surely the earth was ending soon in this godforsaken heat, I took refuge in the Comedy Mothership three nights in a row: Tuesday-Thursday.

Little Boy: Bottom of the Barrel:

The first night a Tuesday, three friends joined us for the Bottom of the Barrel show in the smaller room, Little Boy. Going in, I wasn’t the most excited for this show. I felt obligated to go because I wanted the complete Mothership experience, which required going to shows in both the little room and the big room room. I adore Brian Simpson, who I think of as one of the best comics working today, but I wasn’t pumped about the concept of improvised standup comedy. Improv comedy almost universally sucks. I wanted the prepared material, the carefully crafted jokes, the real standup, the stuff I live for.

How good could this improvised show really be?

The answer is really, really great. I will go so far as to say that Bottom of the Barrel is the most groundbreaking comedy show that currently exists. The show is everything that a true comedy nerd dreams about:

•Comics trying out brand new material

•True ephemeral shit only this comedy audience right here, right now will ever experience

• And, the king of them all— discovering new up and coming comics for the first time

If you aren’t familiar with Bottom of the Barrel, the concept is simple. Before the show begins, the host (who isn’t Brian Simpson by the way) solicits audience ideas on little pieces of paper, puts them in a big barrel, and each comic who comes on stage picks papers out of the barrel, doing material based on the suggestions until their time is up. (My suggestion was simply “farts” followed by my name on the piece of paper to identify myself so the paper read “Farts – Katelynn.” Door guy Jon Hoeft riffed, “I know this is “farts” and her name but wouldn’t it be great if it were “Farts Katelynn,” and then he acted out a farting superhero. My husband wrote in a question (questions are very common Bottom of the Barrel suggestions), “Is Claire a hot girl’s name?” Someone else in the audience wrote “Do an impression of Joe Rogan” and, as fate would have it, Rogan picked it at the end of the night.)

So, by definition, the show is different every night, comics are forced to try out new material, and the staleness you sometimes experience when you see a comic who is having an off night and feeling disconnected from the material she’s been doing for months is necessarily obliterated.

You can feel the joy radiating from the comics during the show. Everyone is forced into the present moment and actively thinking on stage. Indeed, Rogan has said on his podcast that he has developed plenty of new premises from Bottom of the Barrel.

Oh, and the audience member who provides the best suggestion wins a bugasalt weapon.

Cool things that happened at our Bottom of the Barrel Show:

•Joe Rogan confessed that he once diarrhead in his shower, something he had never shared with an audience before.

•Duncan Trussel picked out “worst scar” and talked about having testicular cancer and getting a testicle removed.

•Tony Hinchcliffe asked our friend how much money he makes, he refused to respond, and Tony went over his time by at least ten minutes to continue roasting him, asking questions such as “I make 2.4 million. You think anyone in this audience cares about your 250K salary?” And saying “I am so close to calling you the f word right now.” When he got off stage, Hinchcliffe yelled “F YOU, our friend’s name” before leaving. Needless to say, our friend won the bugasalt. Seeing your friend get roasted by the king of insult comedy for 20 minutes is a truly singular experience and it can only happen at the Mothership.

As amazing as these experiences were, the coolest experience of all was watching new comics, mixed in with the famous guys, pulling papers out of the barrel. The Bottom of the Barrel show is stacked with new talent, door guys, those who were just recently passed, and young comics. And every single one of them was excellent, seriously.

I thought the door guys would be comics you had to sit through to see the famous ones and nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to see the next generation of talent, this show is the place in America to do it. The Mothership is cultivating new talent like no other venue in the country. If you miss out on the door guys, you miss out on the thing that makes the mothership special. It’s the #1 thing the Comedy Mothership brings to the table in the comedy world; not their headliners and not Joe Rogan, as funny as he is.

Door guys I saw:

CJ Landry – cold open. He did a traditional five minutes of standup and it was the tightest five I have seen in a while.

John Hoeft: Charisma for days, he has it.

Casey Rocket: Brilliant. Undeniably bound for fame. Someone really famous is going to see him at the mothership, take him on tour as an opener, and he will break. This is the guy.

If anyone with power at the Mothership were ever to read my silly little blog, the #1 message I would want them to take from this post is MORE DOOR GUYS on more shows.

I am glad there is a door guy show on Monday nights and I deeply regret missing it. I’d pick that show over Kill Tony every week of the year. But there needs to be a door guy opening every single show at the Fat Man. The nights I went not a single door guy got to go up in the big room. To be fair, this isn’t always true. I have seen from the Mothership instagram that door guys do go up at the Fat Man sometimes. In fact, there seems to be a trend of having the newest door guy go up after the most famous guy. I saw on instagram that the Mothership put a brand new (I think days old) guy up after Chappelle, for instance. This is very in line with Rogan’s experience of Mitzi putting him up after the most famous, skilled comics to make him a better comic. And I love it. But it should happen more. As in every single Fat Man show.

Fat Man: Joe Rogan and Friends:

After Tuesday’s Bottom of the Barrel show, I spent the next two nights in the Fat Man at the Joe Rogan and Friends show.

When you spend one night at the Fat Man, you’ll leave thinking you have seen the sickest lineup you’ll ever see in one room on one night. I saw Duncan Trussell, Brian Simpson, Tony Hinchcliffe, Ron White, and Joe Rogan. All on the same stage on the same night and just feet away in a relatively small room? Are you kidding me?

The second night, it immediately seems stale.

With “and friends” shows, you get 5 comics who do 15-20 minutes and then Joe Rogan does 40-50 minutes at the end of the show, impressive stamina given that he does this twice a night for the early and late show, usually drops in at the bottom of the barrel show too, and does this several times a week. Seriously, this man is a work horse.

The two Fat Man shows I went to were nearly identical with the main difference being that Duncan Trussell was there the first night and then Derek Poston was there the second night with Rich Vos dropping in ahead of his run of weekend shows. (If a comic is headlining the Mothership Friday-Sunday, you can bet he’ll probably drop in on Thursday shows.)

Observations:

•Ron White has 15-20 good minutes but I don’t think he has much more than that. His sets were the most identical of any comic I saw. Brian Simpson at least shook up word choices. White didn’t appear at my Bottom of the Barrel show and looking at the Mothership’s instagram, it doesn’t seem like he really ever drops in on that show. I have to believe it’s because he doesn’t have the skill to do it.

•Joe Rogan is a really good comic. I know this is the most trite observation of all time but I think it is sometimes lost that standup comic is what Joe Rogan really is at the end of the day. He has the most popular podcast in the world, where he talks to all kinds of people (but you can always tell he is the happiest and most comfortable talking to other comics), he announces MMA fights, and he has loads of hobbies. But comic is the job encoded in his DNA. And his comedy is really good. I think the material he is doing nightly at the Mothership on the bodies exhibit is the finest of his career.

•Hinchcliffe repeated some material but crowd work and riffing is a core component of what he does and he does it well. I saw Hinchcliffe three nights in a row and never got sick of him. Don’t see him in a theatre. See him at the Mothership. See him in the small room.

The Mothership is not the best comedy club in the world

I don’t think the mothership does what the Store, the Cellar, or the Stand do for the very simple and boring reason that not enough comics live in Austin. The Comedy Store and the Cellar/Stand/NY comedy scene are so interesting because they are just comics doing their quotidian weeknight spots in the places where they live. You can go to the Comedy Cellar five nights in a row and see a totally different lineup with minimal repeats. Whereas, the Fat Man consists of the same five comics who live in Austin over and over again along with the weekend’s visiting headliner. It just doesn’t feel as vibrant as the Store and the NY comedy scenes.

But the Mothership does something more important and interesting — it cultivates the hell out of new talent better than any club in the country. These door guys are the future.

The next time I go to the Mothership, my #1 priority will be going to the crew and door guy show on Monday night. After that, I will stick solely to the Bottom of the Barrel show, which never gets old. I know I could attend every Bottom of the Barrel show at the Mothership all year long and never see the same set twice.

The true vibrance and magic in the Mothership is in the rising stars. #MOREDOORGUYS

Mothership FAQs that aren’t answered anywhere else on the internet:

If you arrive before the rest of your party, can you be seated early and have them join you later?

Hell to the no.

What is the seating process like?

You can absolutely get great seats if you show up early. I recommend 45 minutes early. The line to get in is not in front of the Comedy Mothership. It is on the sidewalk around the corner from the Mothership. You stand there, have your ticket from your email up, and your ID.

I can sneak my smart watch in and snap a pic, right?

NOPE. After your tickets are scanned, next you go to the front of the mothership and they put your cell phones and smart watches and watches that aren’t smart watches and you swear up and down that they are not smart watches into yondr bags. They look in every pocket in your purse and make sure you don’t have secret cameras or something. Security is tight. Every single night I was there, there was a cop in the lobby. They take this shit SERIOUS.

Will a comic really read my bottom of the barrel suggestion?

YES! They picked three from our group. Yours is likely to get picked. But you can guarantee yours will get picked if you give your suggestion to wait staff late. If you don’t put your piece of paper in the barrel initially, they give you the option of giving your piece of paper to the wait staff at any time during the show. When you do that, they just take your paper directly to the comic, skipping the barrel entirely. It’s a hack for guaranteeing your suggestion gets read.