At Wednesday night’s competition at Comedy Attic’s Bloomington Comedy Festival the audience voted four of eight candidates on to the next round of competition.
Two of the four were women, which means some of the crowd might have taken to heart a message from club owner Jared Thompson, which was passed along by emcee Brad Wilhelm in a previous week of the competition: “You’re allowed to vote for more than one woman.”
Advancing to the next round will be: Kaitlyn Blansett, Dan Paswell, Jonas Schrodt and Shanda Sung.
A few of the jokes told on Wednesday traded overtly on the topic of diversity. Paswell set up a joke about his neighbors by observing that Bloomington was diverse city, even if the crowd inside the club might not be. His neighbors, he said, included some lesbian bee keepers, a guy with a flag that said “Don’t tread on me!” and “a family of four…deer.”
The joke worked in part because deer are so much a fact of life inside the Bloomington city limits that a controversial cull of the herd was implemented a few years ago.
Other local humor included a joke from Stephanie Lochbihler, who was not in the competition—she performed while the votes were being tallied. “My boyfriend told me he wanted to dress sexy for me for Halloween, and he asked what he should be. I said he should dress as the I-69 construction so he could last a lot longer than expected.”
Another four comics will be selected on each of the next two Wednesdays, for a total of 12 who’ll advance to the third round. The 11 weeks of competition started with 40 contestants in the third week of June. In each of the first four weeks, six out of 10 candidates were voted through to the next round. The finals take place on Aug. 28.
Here are the four who advanced Wednesday as they appeared in previous rounds:
