Until Monday

Jennifer Dziura is one of the most talented people I’ve worked with in the last year. Dziura is a comedian, model and popular humor blogger at her website Jenisfamous.com, the "home of grammatically correct comedy.” This multi-tasking Bushwick resident spends every Monday night at Pete’s Candy Store where she hosts the Williamsburg Spelling Bee and Monday Evening Stand-Up on alternating weeks. Dziura just turned 28 this week and I was lucky enough to do a special birthday e-interview with her.

How did you get involved with Pete's Candy Store?

In September of 2004, I saw a poster on Bedford Avenue for the first-ever Williamsburg Spelling Bee. I attended as a contestant. It turned out that spelling bee founder (and mariachi singer) bobbyblue needed a co-host who could pronounce all the spelling words, and the bar asked me to join.

Fifty spelling bees, a New York Times article, two TimeOut New York articles, and a Brooklyn Cable Access TV spot later, bobby (he likes his name in lowercase) and I are still running the bee and, in fact, just opened up our season finals on Nov. 27 with a version of Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack," rewritten to be about spelling.

After I'd been co-orchestrating the spelling bee for about a year, I got an email from the bar: the hosts of a poetry night had cancelled on short notice, and would I like to have the spot to run a show? I put together a comedy show in 48 hours. The bar owner stopped in, said he'd been skeptical about having comedy at Pete's but he had really liked the show, and I've been running Monday Evening Stand-Up at Pete's ever since.

The spelling bee and the comedy show are on alternate Mondays, so occasionally someone shows up for the wrong one. I've had spelling aficionados sit through an unexpected comedy show, and, more humorously, comics hoping to get booked for the comedy show confusedly sit through a spelling bee.

Describe a typical night at the Williamsburg Spelling Bee.

Contestants begin showing up at 7pm, getting drinks, mingling.... Anyone can sign up, it's free, and we take signups until 7:30. Occasionally, we have to cut off signups after we hit about 18 people, but usually it's not a problem and the bee begins with perhaps 14 or 16 contestants. Many of those contestants come with friends who aren't spelling, so that's a nice little crowd.

TimeOut New York kindly referred to us as a "cabaret-style" spelling bee, meaning that bobby and I banter, narrate, and flirt throughout the bee (despite our incompatible sexual orientations, but this is a love based on orthography, and orthography knows no gender!)

We begin by giving each contestant a number to wear (the numbers are written on paper plates, attached to strings, like necklaces) and asking him or her an icebreaker question, like "If you could be Madonna from any era, which Madonna would you be?" Then the contestant spells one word. Since it's a three-strikes-you're-out spelling bee, no one is out in round one! Isn't that nice?

In round two, contestants spell two words. In round three, contestants spell three words, and this is when most of the contestants strike out. The handful who are left go on to the final round, in which they spell words until they've got three out (so it could be one more word, or it could be a dozen). In the end, we count up each finalist's total number of words correct over the course of the bee, and award prizes, which usually consist of bar tab and food, and sometimes also include prizes from sponsors.

That's a spelling bee! The top three from each biweekly bee move on to the season finals, which happen about every six months. That bee, of course, is harder, and has bigger prizes.

What do you look for in the comics you book for Monday Evening Stand-Up?

Well, obviously, they have to be funny, but it's a specific kind of funny. Plenty of comics who do well in a Times Square comedy club do horribly in Williamsburg (and vice versa). The racist, sexist "humor" you get in a lot of clubs doesn't play well at all in Williamsburg, which is fine by me. Jokes that play on tired stereotypes about men and women ("You know what the problem with my wife is?") are also a bad idea. However, jokes that require an audience to know what a gerund is, or who wrote "The Sun Also Rises," tend to do just fine. Of course, the audience wants entertainment, not a Mensa test, and some of my favorite bits from other comics are quite silly -- a guy named Lucas Held has a bit about how cute it is when chipmunks get cancer. It involves at least one impression.

I usually book comics I've performed with, or else I book comics based on recommendations from other producers of underground comedy shows, or on well-written emails containing links to audio or video. Once, I booked a comic on the basis of having written a hilarious "open letter" for McSweeney's. The best way to get booked, though, is to come to the show, watch, laugh, get a good feel for the audience, and then introduce yourself and follow up with an email. I book the show about three months ahead of time.

I'm working right now on audio-recording the show for podcasting, which as far as I know is unique in New York underground comedy.

There's also free candy! I mean, the bar is called Pete's Candy Store, and there's no candy. Unless I bring the candy. Last time, we had Hershey Kisses that were cherry cordials, with sugary red goo inside. You know what I love about cherry cordials? They prescribe your mood right in the name of the candy. No other candies do that. You never go to Duane Reade and buy a bag of Pecan Orneries.

Any particularly memorable nights at either spelling or comedy?

At a comedy show last month, I was onstage talking about the word "incendiary," and how I had learned the metaphorical meaning of the word (inciting a riot) before the literal meaning (used to set things on fire), and was thereby confused when informed at LaGuardia airport that I couldn't bring "incendiaries" aboard -- what, I have to leave behind my Chomsky Reader? Turns out they meant I couldn't bring, you know ... dynamite. Anyway, I was talking about the word "incendiary" when a woman leaned in too close to a candle and caught her sandwich on fire.

To see upcoming dates for all of Jen's events, go to her MySpace page. To hear some of Jen's work, check out "Jennifer Dziura's Incomparably Humorous Podcast".

Photo Credit: Sandy Ackerman