The Ball Pit Comedy Show!

Mar 11, 2010 by Talisa Chang

Forget trekking to the kid section at the Red Hook Ikea. Williamsburgers were given free access to their very own ball pit Tuesday night—The Ball Pit comedy show, hosted by New York comedians Morgan Venticinque and Chris Sifflet at Spike Hill on Bedford Avenue.

The show featured performances by the hosts, as well as up and coming comedians Ali Wong (San Francisco’s Comedian of the Year), Kumail Nanjiani (who frequently appears on Comedy Central), and Yannis Pappas (who appears on VH1 and Comedy Central), all of whom killed the night with jokes equally smart and crude, touching on the subjects people love most: sex, dating, porn, movies, video games, and New York trials and tribulations (but mostly sex).

Venticinque, 23, is an NYU Tisch grad who has been performing standup since 2006, and has performed at Spike Hill’s open mic nights for almost a year. He also hosts a monthly comedy show, Un Poco Comedia, in the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Sifflet, 22, who hails from San Jose, California, moved to New York when he was 18 and has been performing standup for six years. Most recently, he hosted an artist residency for the band Lowry at Spike Hill. Sifflet and Venticinque met at a comedy club a few years ago and instantly hit it off.

“Chris Sifflet is my mentor,” Venticinque said. “When I started, Chris sort of held my hand and brought me to all of the places I needed to go.”

Tonight was the duo’s first time officially hosting a show together.

“The main thing is to make a show that the people that come really like, and no matter where you have that show, they’ll want to come again,” Sifflet said. “The main thing is just to book really good comics.”

“I like to say that we have a very diverse show,” Venticinque added. “Not one of these comics will do poorly. There’s no way the show will be bad tonight.”

He was right—the night was filled with laughs, if not a little bit of friendly audience confrontation from almost all the comedians.

“I feel like we have a very diverse and aggressive show,” Sifflet. “Kumail is aggressive in a certain way—I haven’t seen him do a show where something hasn’t happened in the audience. Usually when people engage the audience, it’s in a mean way, but he engages people very positively. He’ll befriend them and also mock them, but at the end of it, you could see them having dinner together. Ali Wong is a very lean forward comedian. She’s very funny. She’s the smartest, funniest person I know. And Yannis is just out of his mind. He can talk and make things funny endlessly, and just kill it.”

“They’re just three comedians who don’t just make really good jokes, but they hit smart points,” he continued. “They’re just the best cerebral comics that I can think of.”

Sifflet and Venticinque see hosting shows as an opportunity to perform in an atmosphere of their own design, without the same pressures of performing at another person’s event or at a comedy club.

“I feel like the expectations for a show like this are different,” Venticinque said. “At a comedy club, it’s almost tougher because the audience is there specifically to laugh. [Here], you get to perform without the same anxiety of having to impress people, because it’s your own show. With this, the pressure is sort of lifted.”

“You get to be on a show that you want to be on, and you get to make the show that you want,” Sifflet added. “And, you have all of your friends. You get to hang out and have a lot of fun.”

Share