As a student of a university in New York City I often times get asked by my friends back in the UK if they could visit me. It's a pretty good deal; they get free accommodation and a way to by-pass any tourist traps and in return I get someone to talk to about British things and of course their good company.
The last friend who visited me had come to the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving with his rather obnoxious sounding extended family from New Jersey - who had supposedly in the wake of Hurricane Sandy finally found a new topic of discussion over the dinner table. As an aside - no matter how powerful the winds are, you're still talking about the weather, and it's still tedious. Needless to say my friend was excited to leave the garden state and quickly made his way down to New York.
Something I always seem to forget about my friend is perhaps something I shouldn't - that he's a vegetarian. After a few offers to go get a roast beef sandwich or "I know a great sushi place," I begin to sound a bit overeager to end my friend's dietary preference. Before this happens, however, I bite the bullet and start looking around for some vegetarian places in lower Manhattan.
For a whole week I didn't eat meat, and I have to say I felt better for it. As I sat on the sustainably sourced wooden bench in one of my new favorite restaurants (Red Bamboo on 6th Av and 4th), eating my vegan burger and sipping on organic beer, I remembered a comedian I saw the week before whose name is Simon Amstell. I remember myself, my carnivorous self, sitting in a leather theatre chair watching Amstell lightly mock his choice in becoming a vegan.
Treading the thin line between resembling and imitating the characters and writings of Woody Allen, Amstell lamented that his dietary choices are hard to maintain "if you're interested in the concept of joy." Perhaps this was true - but for the time being I was content in the knowledge I'd soon be eating meat again and could give up imitating vegetarianism.
There's always something intimate about a comedy gig, becoming the subject of someone else's memories, confessions, and wold out-look. How could it not be intimate? Far more than a mere performance, comedy has always struck me as something which attains much more of a human base connection between the audience and the man or woman on stage. This could not be more true of Simon Amstell in his recent performance of "Numb" at East Village's Theatre 80 on St. Marks. Laying bare the most personal details of his social and sexual blunders, inner struggles, and family relations, Amstell gently mocked our own conceptions of societal norms with profound understatement and all around subtlety. I left with the feeling that I had known him for years and with the knowledge that if I had, we would have gotten on just fine.
