THURSDAY
Hotline Comedy
Thursday, August 1 at 2A, 7:30 pm: FREE
Drake sung all about hotline bling, but if that wasn’t quite your thing, now you have the chance to get some hotline comedy at this weekly show hosted by Kendall Payne and Allison O’Conor—sorry that last part didn’t rhyme. It’s free, it’s stand-up, it’s at a reasonable hour; what more do you want? To start August off, they’ve assembled Randall Otis, Rebecca O’Neal, Lili Michelle, Diego Lopez, and Mariah Oxley to fill your ears with the dulcet tone of jokes. And if you don’t make it this week, you can come next week, or the week after. Weekly comedy shows happen impressively often!
FRIDAY
Reeks of Desperation
Friday, August 2 at The PIT Loft, 7 pm: $12
As the old adage goes, dating in New York is hard. Sure, it’s hard everywhere, but they say it’s particularly hard here so for everyone’s sake, I’m going to believe it. Performer Madeline Weber knows this well, so well in fact she’s going to Edinburgh to tell the world about it at their notable annual Fringe Festival. But before she does that, she’s giving all the people who can’t afford (or just don’t have time to take) a trip across the pond a taste of what’s in store when she brings her show Reeks of Desperation to the PIT Loft this Friday. The show combines comedy, storytelling, and original illustrations to explore the eternal, relatable struggles of singledom.
SATURDAY
The Heresy Machine
August 2-4 at HERE Arts Center, 8:30 pm: $20
You might’ve heard of the Turing Test, which measures a robot’s ability to compute in the way a human would think. It was named for Alan Turing, a mathematician and World War II codebreaker who was also a gay man condemned by British laws criminalizing homosexuality—he ultimately got a royal pardon, but not until decades after he died. Now, performance collectives Section 175 and Unattended Baggage are presenting a “queer cyborg love story” about Turing and his creations that utilizes technology as much as it does theatrical performances, such as predictive text and computer-generated choreography and music.
SUNDAY
Next Slide Please
Sunday, August 4 at Pine Box Rock Shop, 9 pm: FREE
We all know PowerPoints. Maybe you made one as a youth in school, and you used the Papyrus font to make a bunch of slides about Egypt where the text zoomed around wildly all the time. Or maybe you made one for a work meeting that had plain fonts and some bar graphs or something. Either way, you can see a particularly unique crop of PowerPoints at Reed Kavner’s presentation-centric comedy show, Next Slide Please. At Bushwick’s Pine Box Rock Shop for the low price of free, you can see a group of comedians present PowerPoints on truly whatever they want, so expect the unexpected. This time, the show features Eva Victor, Tony Zaret, Lana Schwartz, Olivia Craighead, and Max Wittert.