Andrew Schulz and Akaash Singh reveal an elaborate prank on comedian Michael Blaustein, where a fake audition at Stand Up New York led to a silent bombing designed to simulate audience apathy. Despite Blaustein's high energy, the unresponsive crowd forced him to joke about his venue before a drunk patron exposed the deception, allowing the comedian to recover without lingering doubt. This segment contrasts the prank with industry camaraderie while explicitly excluding self-described "social justice warriors" from their Patreon community. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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High Stakes New York Audition00:11:01
What's up everybody?
Welcome to the Patreon episode of Flagrant 2 No Easy Book.
It's analysis by Assholes Water Cooler Commentary for your sports needs.
I'm Andrew Schultz.
I'm here Akash sing Alex Media.
Okay.
Three of us in the building.
Yo, we did, I was doing a web series with some people and they asked me to do a prank show.
And I was supposed to do...
The idea is still funny to me.
Instead of pranking like four people per episode, I was going to prank one guy for like four weeks straight.
Multiple times.
And the first prank, and we didn't make it past this because it was too painful.
But the first prank, it was a comic friend of ours.
I don't want to say his name.
Oh, well, Michael Blaustein.
Okay.
This is our homie.
And he's funny.
He knows about the prank.
Yeah.
So it's okay.
We haven't released it, but we have it online.
We tell him he's auditioning for this comedy club.
And I tell the audience before he goes up.
Wait, wait, wait.
Build this tension.
Okay.
Okay.
So keep in mind, Michael Blaustein's been grinding in New York, funny comic, and he's been grinding in New York trying to get into the clubs.
Now, getting into the comedy clubs in New York City is very difficult because there's so many people that want to be comics.
And when you actually work the clubs, you can make a living.
That can be the difference between you having a job and you quitting and being professional comic.
So getting an audition at a comedy club has guys paranoid for fucking weeks perfecting their set and getting it right and making sure it's right.
And literally, it could be terrifying experience because it could change your fucking life getting past in these clubs.
And it's just for your peers to say, hey, I'm at this club is like.
It's a level up.
It's a level up.
So Akash gets Michael a fake audition at one of the premier comedy clubs in New York City, Stand Up New York.
Okay.
Now, keep in mind, the comedy clubs go up and down in their terms of their popularity.
This is its peak.
It was hot, hot.
I mean, hot.
It's always the seller that's number one, but it was right number two.
And it was coming.
Oh, it was coming.
Exciting.
You wanted to be there.
It was a good hang.
Good vibes.
Good vibes.
Akash gets Michael a audition at Stand Up New York.
And you know what?
He doesn't even say, hey, Mike, I got you an audition.
He has the booker of Stand Up New York reach out directly to Blaustein to audition.
So that means Mike really believes that it's real.
And he doesn't even have the, hey, I got you a vouch.
It's good.
No, Hey, we've heard good stuff about you.
Really want to audition you at the club.
So he goes, Blaustein is shitting his pants.
He's so nervous.
He really wants to break into the clubs.
He hadn't had as much success breaking into the clubs.
He had been on punked at this point, so it's like, this is my time.
I got it.
It's about to go down.
Just to do this.
This is the one.
He goes, now, prior to him being on stage, Akash.
It is a packed house.
Hot.
I'm hosting, and I'm in a zone hosting.
You don't normally like...
Hosting is hard, man.
The audience is cold.
You just go up there.
They don't know you.
You can't really do jokes.
You're burning the fucking house down.
Let's go.
It's fire.
Now, crowd is fired.
Prior to Mike going on, prior to Mike going on, I have the booker pull Mike outside and just like, quote, give him the rules of the audition, but he's really just buying time.
Akash is on stage.
I'm on stage hosting in between comics.
Greer Barnes, New York of Legend, just got off stage.
Fucking destroys, obviously.
Crowd is hype.
Keep this in mind.
Your biggest nightmare in all of comedy for an audition is following Greer Barnes.
Greer Barnes, Godfrey, maybe a couple others.
Proud Barnes.
You don't want to follow this.
You don't want to follow because what they do to the audience, okay, is so destructive that, and they're not only so destructive, they're so lovable that the audience, even after they get off, is like, why didn't we have more of him?
Why don't you bring him back?
We don't want to hear anything you have to say.
Yes.
So Michael is already nervous about his audition, finds out that he's following one of the hardest follows in the whole city, okay?
Shitting his fucking pants.
His comedy career is depending on this.
Gets pulled outside by the booker, right?
To give the rules.
He's like, fuck, what if my jokes don't go along with some of the rules?
There aren't no fucking rules.
You just go up there, but he's just giving him the rules, right?
Aka's on stage, quiets all audiences.
Hey, next comic going up.
We're pranking him.
Don't give him a single laugh the entire time he's on stage.
I also say, don't boo.
Don't boo.
Complete silence.
Apathy.
Just as if, hey, that's cute.
I don't, I don't care.
It's fun.
Because a boo, boo, you have a ring.
You dig in, you fight, whatever.
So this, and I've never had an audience this compliant.
There's always some drunk asshole ruining everything.
The entire audience was on board.
It's like they knew it was supposed to happen.
We had a GoPro.
We have cameras.
I have this.
I have not released it.
I'm dying to watch this.
I've been benching it.
We're going to release it in the Patreon.
We're going to put this on.
We're going to have Blau on.
We got to have Blau on.
And we're going to watch it with him on the page.
Because it's hard.
Here was our rationale at the time.
If you see this guy bombing, even when you see him after, even if he's funny, you're going to be like, yeah, yeah.
So we needed for him to pop off first for everybody who knows he's funny, and then we could release him.
Now, go back.
Okay, so the audience is set up, walks back in the room, give it up for Michael Blaustein.
He goes up.
Now, keep in mind, Blaustein has a lot of energy.
Oh, he's.
Did he do the act out with the dragon?
Yes.
Oh, my God.
I mean, this guy, it's Dane Cook level energy.
Dane Cook in his prime uses probably, I'm not bullshitting you, a little less energy than Michael Blausteon.
He had an act out.
Full crouch on the ground.
Where he goes full crouch on the ground and pretends to be a dragon.
He's talking about like you're taking shit in India, swaying back and forth with a tail and a voice.
He uses one hand to be a tail that's moving back and forth.
And he goes, I don't want to tell me what you want.
Right now, keep in mind, that's not his opening joke.
No.
That's his closing joke.
So by the time he gets to dragon, he's been bombing for four minutes.
Oh, I feel so sad for four straight minutes.
I haven't even been bombing.
And after bombing for four straight minutes, he's still, because remember, this is an audition that changed his life.
He's squatting.
Why don't you do what I tell you?
The beauty of it being an audition is you can't yell at the audience.
Because now that's the auditioning.
You can't fuck up the whole show.
That's why I plotted it diabolically beautifully.
Where it's like, yo, you cannot, if you make it a regular set and he's there, he'd be like, oh, fuck y'all.
Something like dick.
If it's the audition, you can't.
Guys.
Guys, you drove him out of New York.
Guys.
Yeah, he moved to LA.
He had to move.
He hopped on that dragon and flew the fuck over.
So what happens?
So he goes up.
He says, thank you.
Good night.
He's ready.
He's hype.
He's hype.
He's fucking.
Oh, that's true.
No, we already got him bombing.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So then after he bombs his fucking.
There's a moment during the bomb.
He has a bit that he used to do where he talks about how people always say where they're from.
Like that's supposed to impress you before a fight.
Like, I'm from New York, motherfucker.
I'm from blah, blah, blah.
And he's bombing in like two, three minutes in.
And he tries to, sometimes he'll try to like bring the audience into it more and empower them.
So he's like, I'm from New York.
I'm from Detroit.
I'm from Stand Up New York, motherfucker.
And then nothing happens.
Complete silence.
He goes, I'm from Stand Up, New York, motherfucker.
Wow.
Oh my god.
Oh my god.
Every time I watch that, wow, dog, it's the most handsomely funny shit I've ever seen in my life.
Wow.
Yo, we gotta play this.
We gotta play this.
It's still got on my hard drive.
I'm pretty sure.
I might be able to find it here if I get the internet's working.
Son, then after the audition, he bombs.
So he gets off stage.
It's no, nothing.
I mean, like, nothing.
Then we, there's a camera like trained on him outside, and the booker's just like, hey, man, what happened?
And then Blow starts like dropping credits.
He's like, I don't know, man.
Like, I just, I just got off a cross-country flight.
I was just performing in California, like, trying to tell him, hey, I'm not, ain't shit.
I do things.
And then as he's trying to explain himself, a drunk guy comes out and he's like, hey, man, sorry, they told us not to laugh.
But that, so then Blow's like, what?
What the fuck are you talking about?
And then he's like, the guy on stage, the host, told us not to laugh.
And then I went out there and then I told him it was a prank.
And then the whole crowd came out afterward and applauded and told him he was really funny and it was hard not to laugh and all that shit.
But like, it actually worked out for the best because that would have eaten away at him for fucking weeks.
Wow.
I would have fucking screamed.
I would have fucking screamed if I saw him say that shit into a voice and then just go, wow.
Son, that fucking breath.
Oh, my God.
Because you don't know the desperation of bombing.
It's quicksand.
You're reaching for anything.
So I know that.
Let's try to bring them in.
Maybe they'll get him to give a fuck at all.
I'm from Stand Up, New York, motherfucker.
He's just trying to connect.
Usually he'll do it based on like some crowd work that he did earlier.
So he's like, where are you guys from?
You're from Cincinnati.
And he's got that in his pocket.
And then later on, he does a joke.
I'm from New York.
I'm from Brooklyn.
I'm from Queen.
I'm from Cincinnati, motherfucker.
That's what it usually is, right?
But he didn't know where anybody was from.
So he just said the name of the comedy club where nobody's from.
That's from the comedy club.
As if somebody was in the comedy club and be like, that's where I was born and raised and stand up in the yard.
Camera Height and Crowd Work00:01:40
You haven't seen this video, Joe?
No.
No.
You gotta see that.
Son, we used to prank him all the time, bro.
We had a...
I sort of went with the movies.
Oh, yeah.
The movie shit we played.
We used to also shout out.
This is from Smokey Suarez, a hood comic.
He did this with kids.
We was bombing, but Black used to videotape himself.
It's so funny.
We shamed him for this, and then you built a legacy off of it.
He used to tape all of his sets.
That's so funny.
He used to film all of his sets.
No, but we all used to do that.
He'd been doing it.
He never missed.
I did that.
I did that for a bit.
For a bit, for sure.
But he's the guy I remember always brought in a camcorder.
And when he was bombing, we would try to find different ways to hop into the camera and go, you dying right now.
But we wouldn't hop in, right?
What we would do is, I think I've told this story on this, but we would do is the camera was on a table.
Okay.
The table was a bar height table, one of those like bar tables, you know?
High table.
A high table, right?
So, and then he had a little tripod on the high table.
So, what we would do is we would bend down and crawl underneath the table, right?
I'm going to do the act out to the camera so you guys can see, but we would ball down underneath the table.
So, like, this is table height, right?
And we just walk up and then we go underneath and go, You bombers!
Yo, what's up?
This is Akash.
That was a preview of our Patreon episode.
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