Thank you for the hundreds of emails you’ve sent us supporting our decision to, sadly, cancel this year’s Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival. We tried to find a new date in March but one of our three venues, the Old Town Playhouse, is completely booked — and so are a number of our comedians.

I am going to share with you a letter from City Hall. It was sent out last January and it confirmed the agreement that the comedy festival and the beer fest would be held on separate weekends in 2012. We agreed with the TC Convention & Visitors Bureau and many of you that this is what’s best for the local economy — to spread out these events that bring tourists here with their tourist dollars so that the community is the winner.

This agreement was necessary because of last year, when the beer fest announced, just two months before our festival, that they were moving their event from the Resort in Acme, MI, to exactly one bock away from the second Comedy Festival in downtown Traverse City. We made it clear that we could not do the comedy fest on the same days in the same location as a beer fest for two reasons:

1. It made no sense to schedule two festivals downtown on the same weekend when there are so many weekends in the “dead” of winter up here that could use some help to improve the local economy AND our year-round quality of life in Traverse City.

2. We did not want to deal with all of the problems that might come along with a few thousand people who have been drinking in downtown TC. It was not what we promised our performers and it is not what we wanted our audience, visitors to TC, to experience. (And, as it turned out, we did have to deal with numerous incidents involving people who told us they had been drinking at the beer festival.)

The beer fest rejected our request that they pick a different downtown date or remain out in Acme at the Resort. We considered canceling, but agreed to go forward sharing the date as long as everyone agreed things would be different in 2012. So the City of Traverse City called a meeting in January (one month before last year’s dual fest weekend), and we sat down with the beer fest reps, the Visitors Bureau, the downtown merchants association, City officials, and other community leaders to work something out.

It was a great meeting, cordial and productive. An understanding was reached — we would hold the comedy fest and they would hold the beer fest on the same weekend in 2011, but there would be different dates in 2012 for the two events. Later that afternoon, the City official who organized the meeting, Bryan Crough, sent us all the following letter to confirm what had been agreed upon:

From: Bryan Crough, Community Development Director, City of TC
Date: Tue,  Jan 11, 2011 at 4:05 PM
Subject: February 2012 and event coordination in general

To: Deb Lake, Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival/TC Film Festival
Colleen Paveglio, Downtown TC Association
Sam Porter, Microbrew Fest
Diane Baribeau, City Opera House
Tim Hinkley, National Cherry Festival
Brad Van Dommelen, TC Convention & Visitors Bureau

Cc: Ben Bifoss, City Manager, City of TC

Folks,

Thanks for meeting today. I think we all agreed it was beneficial and obviously we realized the value of communication and coordination! We have February 2012 worked out!  From my notes I have this: (if incorrect please let me know immediately)

2012
February 3-4 – Microbrew and Music Fest
February 9-12 -Traverse City Comedy Festival
February 17-19 – Winter Wow!Fest
February 26 – March 3 – Second Annual Traverse City Restaurant Week

Wow!  Now we need to fill up March and April! …We are so fortunate to have a community with so much going on that we have coordination problems, folks!  Any other City would die to have two of our fabulous February events during one year!!!

Thanks for meeting – call or email me if I have left something out!

Bryan J. Crough
Community Development Director
City of Traverse City
400 Boardman Avenue – 2nd Floor
Traverse City, MI  49684

No one called Mr. Crough back to tell him he had it wrong. That’s because he had it right. In fact, no one from the beer fest followed up with Mr. Crough until nearly TEN MONTHS later, when, just a few weeks ago, the beer fest unilaterally announced they were going to go ahead and hold their fest on the weekend reserved for Comedy Festival — after we had already booked our venues and a number of our comedians. This upset nearly everyone who was at the January meeting — City officials, the downtown association, tourism leaders — because we all had operated for almost an entire year under the assumption that everything had been worked out. It also prompted this terse letter to the beer fest from Mr. Crough on behalf of the City of Traverse City:

From: Bryan Crough
Date: Tuesday, November 01, 2011 10:01 AM
To: Sam Porter [Microbrew Festival]
Cc: Ben Bifoss, Colleen Paveglio, Benjamin Marentette
Subject: February 2012 schedule

Sam,
Below is a copy of an email I sent out, on behalf of the City of Traverse City, after a meeting I called on behalf of the City, to address concerns about the February, 2011 overlap of events in our community.  While we did not have formal agreements on this, we did have my email suggesting agreement by all parties, with notice if something was incorrect that I be notified immediately. I did not receive any word that this summary was incorrect. While the City Commission did not have a role in this planning, I have been advised to alert you that we as a City expected this to be the schedule for February, 2012. I have been made aware of your plans to NOT proceed with the Microbrew Fest on February 3-4, 2012 but rather to continue to conflict with the Comedy Festival, which was the entire reason for the meeting last January. If you proceed with plans to seek City approvals for your event during the Comedy Festival, I will need to alert City staff and the City Commission of your agreement in January of last year, AND of the on-going concerns expressed by the Comedy Festival.
I appreciate that things change over time, but I feel like a lot of time was wasted last year in working through a calendar that was acceptable to all.
Please call me if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Bryan Crough, Executive Director
Downtown Development Authority

After looking in vain for another weekend that could work for the 2012 comedy fest, we decided to take the year off to regroup and look for a different weekend for 2013.

We absolutely dreaded having to write you these letters. Jeff Garlin and I volunteer our time and energy to do the comedy fest only because we love TC and want to help the local economy (as I’m sure you know, we accept no pay to do any of this). It has been our experience that here up north, people strive to work things out whenever possible and that everyone does what they can to get along and work toward what is best for the common good of the community. We are stunned that this did not happen in this case. And we will wonder for quite some time why otherwise good people couldn’t find a simple solution to this problem.

One thing’s for sure: local businesses up here struggle mightily to get through the lean winter months. When we started the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival, we thought it would infuse some much-needed cash into the local economy. And it did. We’ve encouraged and inspired others here in TC to come up with events and gatherings throughout the year that bring people to TC and, as a result, millions of dollars have come into our area during a time of economic depression in the state of Michigan. Jeff and I will try to find a way to work this out for 2013. We are sorry it came to this for 2012.

Oh, and by the way, we like beer, almost as much as we love barreling down the water slide at the Great Wolf Lodge wearing the latest fashions from The Captains Quarters.

Michael Moore and Jeff Garlin

One would think that with our nine months of winter when tourist activity is at a minimum in TC, it might be a good idea to spread out downtown festivals rather than to jam them onto the same weekends. Isn’t that what would be best for the local economy — to create events on different weekends in the winter, not on the same ones? Even in the summer, how would the community respond if we decided to hold the film festival the same week as the Cherry Festival? Kind of counterproductive, don’t you think?

So after the beer fest announced late in 2010 that they were going to hold their event downtown (originally it was held at the Grand Traverse Resort), and on the same weekend we had reserved for the second Comedy Fest, the City helped us get together with other area festivals to come to an agreement on a 2012 schedule that would allow each festival to have its own weekend in our third year. We thought that the issue was resolved. Porterhouse later insisted they were going to hold their beer fest on the same weekend as ours anyway.

The result of doing the events on the same weekend in our second year was that a number of shows were interrupted by drunks who had been to the beer fest and decided to visit the Comedy Fest for some yucks. Unfortunately, no one told them that the audience was there to see the famous comedians we brought in, and not them in their happily inebriated state. We didn’t have to deal with this in our first year, when we were a stand-alone event. In our second year, anticipating problems, we had paid security, but we didn’t have enough to deal with the disruptions — and we will not ask our volunteers to act as bouncers.

We chose not to deal with this again in 2012, and asked the beer fest to please not cram their fest onto the same weekend. The Comedy Fest is a non-profit, community-based and community-run project of the Traverse City Film Festival. Our only mission in putting on the Comedy Fest is to improve the quality of life in TC and help the local economy.

So, when we heard just recently that the beer fest was planning to repeat what they did last year and piggyback off our event — despite the agreement that had been reached — we told them that if the beer fest was scheduled on Comedy Festival weekend, we would bow out. And earlier this week, Porterhouse decided that the beer fest does in fact need to be on the second weekend in February — not just in 2012, but every year in the future.

We had already moved from our preferred date of the third weekend in February to accommodate the Winter WOW Fest. We can’t hold it in January as we are in Sundance making deals to bring next summer’s films to TC.

So, sadly, we are suspending the Comedy Fest this year. This is not what we wanted to do. But we aren’t going to compete with people drinking a lot of beer. One of the reasons comedians like to come to our festival is because it is a refreshing change from the clubs they play and the drunks they have to deal with most everywhere else.

We will decide later next year if we’ll be bringing it back in 2013. We appreciate any feedback you can give us.

We thank the City and the DDA for doing their best to help resolve this problem and for their efforts to coordinate the scheduling of festivals onto their own weekends. We feel most sad for the Comedy Fest fans who will miss out on all the great comedians we had planned to being to Traverse City this year.

At least we’ll all still be able to drink beer, and that can’t be so bad.

Yours,
Michael Moore

Like Geronimo and John Brown, Michael has been a claymore in the side of the establishment. He’s received death threats from unbalanced Fox News personalities. He’s been misunderstood, maligned and attacked by those who don’t get why targeting congressional districts with crosshairs is a bad strategy.

And, like any good Rebel, Michael has his foil. Hunter S. Thompson had Richard M. Nixon and Michael Moore has George W. Bush. And Glenn Beck. And Rush Limbaugh. And Mel Gibson. Okay, Michael has foils. But all the good ones do. Holding a mirror up to a society is an ugly job and, regardless of intent, enemies are made. But Friday night at the Old Town Playhouse, Michael was playing in front of the home crowd. In front of the people who have his back. There would be no misunderstandings on this night. And the only death threats would be made by Michael himself.

He rolled up to a packed Playhouse on a scooter, the kind used by both the seriously disabled and those of us who just don’t want to walk down the aisles at the grocery store. With a one-man show curiously titled “Dancing With The Stars”, this seemed an appropriate way to kick things off.

Holding a copy of the right-wing The New York Post, Michael declared from its pages that the American dream is now dead. Buried somewhere around page 3 of the Rupert Murdoch-owned paper, a story of such magnitude was only given two short paragraphs. Comparing it to a serial killer announcing whom they have killed in their own newspaper, right from the start he had us laughing while pointing out the inane hypocrisies of those holding the strings. This is, after all, a comedy festival.

With the title of the evening’s performance still a mystery, Michael got into what drives his critics’ frothy anger by pointing out that simply saying America is #1 doesn’t make it a truth. Unless of course you are talking about incarceration numbers, oil consumption and deaths from eating disorders.

For the two or three of you who don’t know, Michael was against the invasion of Iraq. But, he proposed ways to get America back to #1 through a different set of invasions. Invasions where we sneak into foreign countries when they aren’t looking, steal their best ideas and bring them home. Like Finland’s innovative educational policies that have turned around poor student performances. Japan’s bullet trains made the list as did Canada’s antiquated but highly effective electoral process that involves marking an X next to a candidate, a simple solution to eradicating those pesky chads.

But, after hosting an entertaining game show that showed off a Canadian member of the audience’s knowledge of our country, Michael sat down and told us how a bag of Ruffles changed the world. As a young high school student on a short walk to the vending machine to satisfy a case of the munchies, something caught his eye.

An Elks Lodge was holding a contest to see who could write the best essay on Abraham Lincoln. This came as a surprise to him as his father had just turned down an offer to join after reading “Caucasians Only” on a 1970 application for membership. Seeing the hypocrisy in a racist organization asking Michigan’s youth to write about the Great Emancipator, the young Michael penned an essay pointing this out.

And the next thing he knew, he won the contest, had Walter Cronkite calling him to be on the nightly news and, in the coming months, saw a law come into existence banning racist practices in private organizations around the country. All over an urge for a bag of potato chips. The lesson was simple: small actions can make big waves.

Along the way, Michael has pissed off a lot of people, people with something to hide. He’s done it with humor, poignancy and thoughtfulness. And a desire to see places like Flint, Michigan, and our country as a whole, get back to where they need to be. An inclusive society where everyone gets a fair shake, and we have a few laughs along the way.

Reiterating his retirement from filmmaking, something everyone in the audience hoped only temporary, Michael told us how over the past two years his status as a celebrity has slipped. It’s not that he is tired of making films. He’s just tired. He’s tired of being the only Rebel. Tired of being the biggest target for a right wing media that doesn’t hesitate to make death threats. Media personalities that refuse to acknowledge the repercussions these threats can have.

With his retirement, he told us, comes a big drop down the alphabet from A-list star . And he held in his hand physical proof that the Celebrity Universe, full of genuine stars like Kim Kardashian and that orange girl from Jersey Shore, had left him behind.

To go any further here would be to give too much away and I do apologize to those who didn’t see the show. Despite Michael’s insistence that he is done with filmmaking, perhaps a new career on Broadway awaits and I don’t want to be the one responsible for giving up the surprise ending.

Now, with his cameras collecting dust, the Glenn Becks of the world may think they have silenced this Rebel. But, and this should come as no surprise, they are wrong. Who knows what Mr Moore has up his sleeve. But great American Rebels don’t go quietly into the night.

Whatever that next step is though, it was obvious that the crowd at the Old Town Playhouse will be eager to take it with him. You see, this is Traverse City, and we have Michael Moore’s back.

• CSI: Flip Schultz
• CSI: Kyle Kinane
• CSI: Ted Alexandro and Joe DeRosa
• CSI: Mee-Ow
• CSI: Comedy SportZ

Roast Master Jeffrey Ross roasted Traverse City last night at the State Theatre. The grueling talent Ross said he’s using Traverse City as a warm-up for Donald Trump next month. “Isn’t that a good one? Roasting a billionaire during a recession.”

Ross, credited as the “meanest man in comedy” and New York Friar’s Club Roastmaster General was unapologetic as he slammed some of Traverse City’s finest youth while entertaining a packed house.

Opening for Ross, Sarah Tiana generated laughs talking about her Southern hometown, where they replaced sex education with daycare. Tiana, who has appeared in Comedy Central’s “Reno 911,” said camping is for getting wasted and asked the audience not to make fun of her Uncle Tom because Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben might get offended.

Traverse City is the friendliest city on the planet according to festival comics flying in from larger cities Los Angeles and New York. Comedian Joe Derosa, who performed last night at the State, said TC is so friendly, it’s almost like we’re hiding something.

“It really is a beautiful town you have here, man. It’s pristine; it’s clean, it feels like a village at Epcot Center. It’s not quite real. Everybody’s so nice; everybody says ‘Hi.’ It’s very polite, very kind, so what the f— are you guys hiding? I know something’s going on. What are you hiding? Do you eat people here? Nobody’s this nice when they’re not covering something up.”

DeRosa started out working open mic nights at the Laff House in Philadelphia, PA where he quickly proved himself as an upstanding stand-up comedian landing regular spotlights on Comedy Central. Today, DeRosa appears regularly on HBO’s “Bored to Death,” the Independent Film Channel’s “Z-Rock,” and Fox’s “Red Eye.”

Comedian Ted Alexandro said there’s so much love and kindness in Traverse City, “It’s disturbing.” Added the New York City native, “It’s really unsettling to see genuine joy. I don’t know how to process it.” Alexandro said someone asked him if he’d ever heard of the TC Comedy Arts Festival prior to coming to Traverse City. Responded the comedian, “I didn’t know Traverse City existed. For a place that seemingly has a festival every week, you do a really nice job of keeping it on the down low.”

Laughter erupted from the audience as Alexandro poked fun at the festive atmosphere of downtown Traverse City, “You have like eight festivals this week. Even things I misheard turned out to be a festival. Oh, Folk Festival, I thought you said ‘Fork Festival’ – Oh, no, we have that too. That’s in June, though, when the new forks come out. It’d be silly to have it now.”

Alexandro said he was invited to Traverse City after Michael Moore saw him perform at Carnegie Hall as an opener for Louis CK. “You know just a typical Thursday. So, the old saying ‘How do you get to Traverse City? Through Carnegie Hall.’ It’s true.”

Attendees came from out of state to escape the dark, dreary cold of winter. Sam Rosby and Susan Bauer came from Chicago. Said Rosby, “It’s the Comedy Fest. It’s cold out and it’s fun in here.” The family comes up each year for the Film Festival, so when they learned of the Comedy Festival, they said they couldn’t wait, “It’s a good month for comedy.” Added Susan Bauer, “We love it up here.”

Cathi Rhynard attended Joe DeRosa and Ted Alexandro with family and could only make one event this festival because of her work schedule. She said the timing of the festival is ideal, “I think it’s a great idea to hold the festival in February as cold as it’s been.”

Comedy Sports comedians Jon Colby from Indiana, and Doug Neithercott of  Minnesota said they couldn’t wait to get back to Traverse City. “We all, as soon as we left, and begged to come back this year,” said Colby. Added Neithercott, “I’m so happy with the comedy festival that it was able to grow and proud to be a part of it.”

Pat Hirst said she came to laugh. Hirst, who is attending multiple events said, “I heard it was fun last year. I like Jeffery Ross. I’ve seen him on Comedy Central. And I like that it’s being held in February. There’s not much going on then. I’m sure the comedians don’t like it much; they’re all complaining about the cold, but it’s something to do in the winter.”

Talisha Taylor of Cadillac brought her boyfriend, a fan of Jeffrey Ross. Taylor said the festival is good for Traverse City, “It brings a lot of people here in the wintertime. TC is mostly known as a summer city, so this is great.”

Festival volunteer Christina White said she enjoyed volunteering at the Film Festival and wanted to try out comedy, “I think it’s a nice break from February. It’s a nice way to get the way through the winter. In the wintertime, it’s still alive; just like it is in the summer. Traverse City is now a hotspot any time of the year.”

The TC Comedy Arts Festival will wrap up with Coen Brothers features, O Brother, Where Art Thou, Fargo, Raising Arizona and the Big Lebowski.

Chicago native and LA transplant Kyle Kinane was an awesome opening act, a role he won’t be playing for long. Kyle may not be a household name yet but with his standout performance last night, word will spread quickly that this is one funny dude. Without giving too much away, Kyle had me doubling over with bits about Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits online fanclub, the even colder and more desolate than Traverse City locale of Winnipeg and how the apple-based salsa on offer to this year’s comedians was reason alone for him to make the trip up north.

Patton’s performance was legendary and is proof that the Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival is one of the country’s most exciting. With an act that touched on the wisdom gained from his newfound fatherhood, movie roles that weren’t meant to be and the glory of sweatpants, Patton brought his A game to our fair city with a performance that will have people talking well into the future.

Last night’s show was a lethal one-two punch of brute comedic force. Bring padding. You’ve been warned.

Tickets for tonight’s show are available on a standby basis.

“I wrote this when I got here” @flipschultz surprise opener for
@realjeffreyross

Sarah Tiana Opens for Jeffrey Ross and says that “every Ford truck comes with a bed”

Matthew Stafford made @sarahtiana an instant Lions fan – University of Georgia.
#comedytc

@realjeffreyross says nobody overdresses in traverse city. #comedytc #tccaf

@realjeffreyross is ROASTING Traverse city. Flew assistant coach to get here
#tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross is speed roasting the audience #tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross thanks for wearing your good shirt from fifth grade #tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross if Harry Potter punched himself in the face … For 35 years #tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross borrowing his roommate’s shoes … And gilligans wardrobe#tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross sad story. His Aunt Teak died. She was 104. her phone number was 12. #tccaf #comedytc

@realjeffreyross with Samanthat the piano playing farming (comedy fest) photographer #tccaf #comedytc