Posted by On February 6th, 2025 I walked up the lane to the Old Courthouse for yet another evening of comedy. It’s not like the Old Courthouse is a comedy club or anything – it’s a restaurant/speakeasy that’s been carved out of a 200-year-old magistrates office and jailhouse – but the rare time that a live event comes to the OC it’s invariably a comedy show. And more often than not these comedy shows are headlined by Newfoundland’s hardest-working young-ish comedian, Mike Lynch (and his ever-popular alter ego Cecil O’Brien).
Now, I like comedy as much as the next guy (maybe even a little more) and I sure do like getting out of the house at night, and with the bar/venue a mere 378 steps from my back door you know I’m in. Especially when it comes to this Mike Lynch guy. And even more especially when it comes to Cecil O’Brien.
I was flying solo for this one* but the bar was thoughtful enough to seat me with Richard and Ross, two fellow Trivia Night regulars who were also flying solo. We three were at the very front table but fortunately a couple from Bay Roberts arrived just before the show started and took the pair of seats closest to the “stage”. Good thing too, as they became the main targets of two of the night’s comedians.
Of which there were four. Well, three plus the doorman/promoter. First up was Liam Small, a screamy-without-it-being-a-thing comedian who had impressed me at the last Mike & Cecil show, where he had served as the opening act. This time, not so much. His set had no flow whatsoever, and no wonder. After every bit he looked down at his wrist and went through the list of bits he had written on his hand. “Okay, okay…which one should I do now…um…all right, let’s try this one…” And then he would start another bit with a “Have you ever…” that was met with crickets (Harbour Grace audiences are a pretty quiet bunch), which would distract him into a failed attempt at forcing an audience reaction, followed by a, “Now where was I?” as he looked down at his wrist once more.
But he was good at something almost every comedian fails at: making me remember his name. Liam Small. Means “tiny helmet.”
Not so for the next guy (which may be good news for him), whom I know simply as “the guy who was on the door when I arrived”. Apparently he promotes comedy shows in Town and he books tours and stuff so he is clearly involved in the “scene”; it only makes sense that he tries his hand at comedy too. He started off with a joke that I thought half-hit pretty well, but he immediately followed it by saying “Hmm. I really shouldn’t have started with that joke,” and not in a joking way.
Like, I know this was the first stop on the tour, but do these guys have to take notes out loud, into the mic?
Overall I thought the guy’s material was quite good, but his delivery needs work. I have no idea what his name was but I’ll recognize him immediately if I ever see him again as he was a doppelgänger for my dear, late friend Bradm. sigh
After a short set the doorman-who-shan’t-be-named introduced the headliner-in-character, and Cecil O’Brien shuffled out from backstage with his signature stoop dressed in his Newfoundland Herald baseball cap and lumberjacket shirt and squinting over the just-the-bifocals half-glasses that he keeps perched on the tip of his nose.
Cecil arrived to a roar from the crowd and he kept the momentum going throughout his set, bringing the house down with every line. Sure, his material would surely go through some tweaking as the tour went on, but really, bringing Lynch’s perfectly over-the-top bayman cliché to a Conception Bay North crowd is like parading a family of moose through the parking lot of Coastal Outdoors.
That said, both times that the comedian slipped out-of-the-blue into a pretty great Trump impersonation the crowd latched on like barnacles on a shipwreck. With the 51st-state consciousness that was thick in the air Lynch could have definitely capitalized on this, but he seemed to purposely steer clear. Maybe the pickin’s were too easy?
Cecil’s set was followed by a very disappointing set by another comedian whose name fortunately escapes me***. This guy also had a cheat-sheet inked on his hand and it led to a random disjointed set that deflated the room. Halfway through his time he admitted in exasperation that he “just wasn’t reaching us in a way that [he] had hoped.” He really said that, and not in a joking sort of way. Not only that, he actually closed his set by repeating and reiterating the point. adding in a defeated tone that his spot sandwiched between Cecil and Mike was the hardest time slot of the night. “I mean, how do you follow Mike Lynch? For some reason everybody just loves the guy…”
Afterwards the host reappeared for another scroll through his wrist-list (“Okay, I have time for one bit here, now which one should I do? Hmmm…let’s see…” Hey Liam, weren’t you just sitting backstage for twenty-five minutes?) and after one more cricket-bit the star of the show was introduced as his real-life self, the very funny Mike Lynch.
And he killed it, as he always seems to. Though Mike was clearly testing and shaping his set in front of a nearly-hometown crowd he only had two reactions from the audience: laughs and big laughs. Even when the doorman/promotor/soundguy brought Mike’s momentum to a screeching halt near the end of his set by accidentally blasting dance music through the speakers, Lynch easily brought us back in and elicited the biggest roar of the night.
And though this was not the most uproarious night of comedy I’d experienced in the Old Courthouse, I’ll probably go again the next time. The place is, after all, just a short stroll from home****.
*When tickets went on sale m’lady did not yet know that she would be vacationing with her mother in the Caribbean when the date of the show arrived, but I only got one ticket anyway**. After joining me the last few times Mike Lynch came to the Old Courthouse she was done with him, for a while at least. There was just too much dickie-bird material for her comedic tastes.
**For the first two weeks the ticketing website had a glitch that added double the HST to every ticket, so they were tacking a 30% tax to every ticket instead of 15%. Of course I wasn’t having it. I wrote to the website and even walked up to the bar and talked to the manager about it in person, and yet the 30% charge persisted as ticket after ticket was gobbled up. When the “glitch” was finally fixed I was shocked and pleased to find that there were still three tickets left.
***I happened upon this guy on a recent internet scroll. His name is Paul Warford.
****I would normally refer to the distance between a bar and anywhere else as a “stagger” as opposed to a “stroll”, but this show happened to land amongst a bout of abstention that saw me get through the evening drinking just a single cup of Coca Cola. I was a little shocked when I was handed a bill at the end of the night for $4.50+tax. So with an 18% tip my fountain-pour came to $6 which, while definitely a cheap night out at a bar, seemed a little outrageous to me. Am I wrong about that?
Todd Man Out 