10,000 Laughs: The Best of the Boston Comedy Festival

Koch/High5
By TED DROZDOWSKI  |  September 18, 2007
3.5 3.5 Stars
inside_10,000-LAUGHS-THE-BE
With this year’s Boston Comedy Festival just around the corner (it begins on October 7 and runs through the 13th — see www.bostoncomedyfestival.com for details), Koch has put together this two-disc set of stand-up performances by 16 ready-for-prime-time players from last year’s fest. Recorded at the Cutler Majestic Theatre during the finals of the festival’s comedy contest, where 90 comics from across the country competed for national showcase slots (i.e., there are no household names here), the set highlights a number of performers — James P. Connolly, Dan Boulger, and Shane Mauss, to name three with local connections — who seem destined for more. The appealingly sardonic Connolly has a leg up, with his own XM radio show and a self-effacing jackass persona. Mauss’s satirical performance, part Borscht Belt shill, part edgy wise guy, took top honors. But Boulger has one of the album’s most darkly clever lines as he veers from skewering the work ethic, sexual mores, and politics. “People have to remember that there’s one big difference between Bush and Hitler,” he says. “Hitler wrote a book.”
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  Topics: CD Reviews , Adolf Hitler, Dan Boulger, Shane Mauss,  More more >
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