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Times may be grim, but metro Detroit is having the last laugh. Live comedy is thriving, and our homegrown comics are making names for themselves.
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Marc Warzecha
> For Marc Warzecha, Detroit politics is the gift that keeps on giving.
The Dearborn Heights native, 32, wrote and directed Kwame a River: The Chronicles of Detroit’s Hip-Hop Mayor. The show ran for seven months at Andiamo Novi and was such a hit that it spawned a sequel, Kwame a River 2: The Wrath of Conyers.
“When I was working in the comedy scene in Detroit, I always thought local material played better than anything else,” says Warzecha, who now lives in Los Angeles. “There’s no place for [Detroiters] to see comedy or satire about their city. I wrote the show for Detroiters; it wouldn’t make any sense to anybody else.”
Warzecha began his comedy career in high school with a public-access sketch-comedy program in Dearborn Heights with Tommy LeRoy, who now co-owns Go Comedy! in Ferndale. In 1997, Warzecha got hired as an actor at Second City in Detroit, and then as a director. Later, he acted, wrote, and directed for Second City in Las Vegas and Chicago.
Today, Warzecha is working with other Second City alums on a pilot for Comedy Central and producing a documentary on improv comedy that includes interviews with Fred Willard, Valerie Harper, and actors from Whose Line Is It Anyway? (Look for a Detroit premiere at Go Comedy! early this year.)
Warzecha returns regularly to the Detroit area to work and see his family. He clearly keeps his finger on the local pulse. The material that gets the biggest laughs at Kwame 2, he says, isn’t the political satire, but the spoofs of local commercials like those for the Bernstein Law Firm and of local figures like Geoffrey Fieger.
“I think that the comedy scene right now has a couple of bright spots, and the bright spots are very bright,” Warzecha says of his hometown. “I hope we can continue to expand beyond those. I think there’s a lot of talent in Detroit and a lot of opportunity for growth.”
Mike Green
> For Mike Green, the road to being the hot new thing on the comedy scene took a couple of decades to traverse.
Green, 44, got his start 23 years ago at open-mike night at Ridley’s Comedy Castle. Today, he performs at clubs around the country and is the subject of a new documentary, Be Funny. He won Michigan’s Funniest Person contest and the New York Comedy Expo in 2007, and was recently chosen to perform at the global gaming conference in Las Vegas, beating out dozens of others comedians.
“I do a lot of observational stuff, which is the wave of comedy right now — a lot of ‘Remember when you were a kid...’ stuff,” Green says. “I’m hilarious, really.”
Green still performs at Ridley’s club, and calls the longtime comedy manager “one of the best there is.
“And he’s funny,” Green says. “He can watch a brand-new comedian, stand in the back of the room and watch him like he’s watching comedy for the first time.”
Green performs nationally as well as locally, including appearances in Las Vegas and Atlantic City at the Tropicana a couple of times a year. He also performed during the Jerry Lewis telethon in 2006.
“I do just about any club that’ll book me,” Green says. “This is all I do. I’ve been making a living at it for the past 15 years.”
Green hopes that his performance at the gaming conference in Las Vegas, which draws casino per-sonnel from around the world, will build on his win of the Michigan’s Funniest Person Contest (which he describes as a comedy Survivor) and lead to a booked New Year.
“I have a great short set; I can do a lot of jokes in a few minutes,” Green says. “On stage, I’m really funny.”
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