For as long as she can remember, the stand-up comic Carolyn Bergier has had a recurring nightmare where she’s onstage, partly nude. It’s scary, and then she wakes up. The difference this time is that she is naked — and this is no dream. It’s real life, or at least as close as you can get in a Bushwick, Brooklyn, basement. Last month, Bergier, the kind of person who changes in the locker room as quickly and discreetly as possible, walked onstage with no clothes on, looked out at a sold-out crowd of 75 people, a red neon sign behind them showing two rabbits having sex, and realized she had made a big mistake: She forgot to take the hair tie off her wrist. What an oversight! As she approached the microphone, an epiphany hit. She tossed the hair tie to the side and quipped, “I knew I was overdressed for the occasion.” Big laugh. Public speaking is in polls as among our greatest fears. Stand-up must be worse. But “ ”? This monthly showcase represents the Everest of anxiety. “This is the most vulnerable you can be,” Bergier, 38, told me over Zoom later. “That’s what drew me in.” Mixing stand-up and naked flesh is hardly new. Lenny Bruce worked strip clubs. Tig Notaro told jokes topless, which is ’s brand. An East Village hit, “ alternates athletic pole dancing and stand-up sets, always with a different musical theme. (It’s
Rihanna over Memorial Day weekend.) And there’s also a slightly obscure
New York City tradition of totally naked stand-up that has included comics like Eric André and Mike Lawrence (who performed on “The Naked
comedy Showcase” at the Pit more than a decade ago). , the 33-year-old producer and host of “The Naked Comedy Show,” has been performing comedy sans clothing since he attended New York University. The second time he performed nude, the woman he lost his virginity to showed up. He bombed. “Bombing is embarrassing, but bombing naked is the worst thing that can happen,” he told me at a coffee shop near Union Square, speaking like someone who is long past such hang-ups. Onstage, Procida displays warmth and sensitivity, which I would guess are useful qualities when wearing a penis ring (he also calls it “genital jewelry”). After the pandemic, realizing there were no regular naked shows in New York, he saw an opportunity. For a good night of clothed comedy in Brooklyn, it can be tough to draw a crowd. Starting last September, his first “Naked Comedy Show” sold out 10 days in advance. Now he stages two a night every month and most have sold out. (The next one is on .) He hopes to raise that to three a month, maybe adding a naked roast battle (though he worries that the rough and ruthless tone of those events might not work for the body-positive crowd). He books veteran comics, the kind who have done sets on late-night and perform most nights in the city. Their material tends not to be that different from that of their regular gigs. Procida said he looked for diversity, not just of race, gender and sexual orientation, but also body type. (“It’s nice to not have five ripped comics on one bill.”) His main criteria: Are they funny? Also, obviously, willing. Roughly two out of three comics turn him down. Agreeing and then getting cold feet is not uncommon. Part of the show’s success, and what makes it different from previous versions, is that it takes place at a space belonging to , a sex-positive organization that has built a sizable mailing list hosting sex parties. Some of the audience members are regulars, including nudists. Before a recent show, I talked with people who had recently attended nude game nights, nude karate and nude
boxing. “These people are starved for events where they can take their clothes off for two hours,” Procida said. It’s why he has made the first two rows clothing optional, which provides new avenues for crowd work. On the night I attended, he chatted amiably with a life coach in his birthday suit. The most surprising aspect of “The Naked Comedy Show” might be how asexual it is. The audience is meticulously polite, quick to laugh. The jokes were less bawdy than what you might find at the Comedy Cellar. There’s even an incongruous innocence to some of the sets. As the Off Broadway shows “Naked Boys Singing!” and “Puppetry of the Penis” proved, pairing nudity with a bit of wholesomeness can be funny and commercially successful. “Let me put it this way,” Procida said about the lack of eroticism or sexuality. “If you’re in the audience and turned on by someone doing suicide jokes while naked, that’s your issue.” The first time the comic , 27, performed there, he took Viagra before going onstage. It didn’t work. Too scared. Over Zoom, he told me he calls this situation “battle penis” and compared the intensity of naked stand-up to Michelangelo’s statue of David: The endowment did not match up to his martial reputation battling giants. “I think it’s good to be humiliated as a comedian,” Viagas said. “You need to put your ego aside.” Even though his manager warned him against it, Viagas returned a second time, on the night I attended, and began a joke by asking: “Anyone here work in an office? Anyone work from my office?” No response. “Good,” he said, a look of genuine relief on his face. Later, he told a joke that rested on a self-deprecating punchline. It died. “Usually when I say this, you can’t see my penis,” he said, winning the crowd back. The men on the bill generally talked more about being naked than the
Women did. But one comic clearly went furthest incorporating his body into a bit. stopped his set, pretending to forget a joke, then bent over and grabbed a small square of paper from under his foreskin. He spent some time unfolding it before reading the joke off the page. The crowd roared and cringed. Carolyn Bergier, who started thinking about performing nude six years ago, after getting a divorce and dying her hair pink, surprised herself with her lack of nerves. “It was fun, not some big transformative thing,” she said before offering praise for the crowd. “I feel like they’re disarmed if you’re naked,” she said, contrasting it with a show at a Manhattan club. “Last night at Stand Up NY, the audience felt tense, but there, everyone’s guard is down because we’re naked.” Her biggest worry turned out to be footwear. Should one wear shoes and socks at “The Naked Comedy Show”? It can’t be the cleanest floor. She decided on bare feet. “I’ll feel like a dweeb in socks,” she said, adding that this mattered more than the nudity — “That was the more stressful thing.” That said, she still has not told her mother, who advised her not to do it years ago when she had expressed interest then. Her plan is to tell her in the most unexpected way — in this column. (Hi, Mom!) “I was hoping the article would come out before Mother’s Day,” she told me, disappointed. Does she think her mother will be upset? “I think so, but she’ll get over it,” Bergier said, looking as blasé and confident as she did tossing that hair tie. “It’s fine.”