Author: Michael Witthaus

Comedy Coop comes to Kettlehead

Like the classic rock song, Joe Fenti has learned to roll with the changes. In 2019 he got his bachelor’s degree and started a consulting job that had him at client sites when he wasn’t in airports. Six months later he was living in Zoom world, as the world shut down, and, he said recently, “we were just trying to figure out what does our workday even look like?”

So he made it funny on social media, creating a fictitious company called Fenti Fried Chicken to skewer corporate life, its Patagonia-vested bros, and guys like Brandon the Intern who responds to demands for Excel reports with, “Sure thing, is Excel the green one?”

It was a pivot from Fenti’s college days, when he thought memes were the best path to comedy success.

“I noticed that the joke wasn’t about something, the joke just became what the joke is. It would be a reference to something that no one had ever heard of but if you got it you knew what it was,” he said. “Humor evolves.”

Fenti’s quick-hit reels built his profile, as did his takes on other topics. His pitch-perfect “Yes, Chef!” impression of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White got 12 million hits. As the world opened back up, though, he moved from content creation to stand-up comedy. Three years later he’s doing it full time and preparing his first national tour.

His online disposition is still on display, but he’s not trying to translate his TikTok and Instagram humor for a crowd.

“The jokes you can make on stage can be a little more fleshed out, you can build … a story; on the internet you have to be very relatable very fast,” he said. “To work it has to be, ‘Who would I send this to?’ or ‘Who is someone I think of when I see this video?’ With stand-up, I can … bring you into my life rather than trying to make stuff for everyone.”

He’ll still touch on life in the business world.

“Return to office or hybrid work culture, there’s always something for me to riff on because I did experience that,” he said. “But now it’s more like, ‘Here are things that have happened to me … things I’m noticing about being a 28-year-old guy now living with my girlfriend for the first time.”

With hundreds of clips, his online life does pop up. He’ll talk about being recognized as a web celebrity, noting that men often can’t say why his face is familiar. “I’m a stand-up comic,” he’ll explain, only to hear in reply that’s not it, nor is his content. So he’ll say something like, maybe you know me from my job as an actor — in court-ordered training videos.

Building on his stand-up success, Fenti began booking shows under the name Comedy Coop, chosen to reflect his Fenti Fried Chicken social media handle. He’ll be at Kettlehead Brewing in Nashua on May 22, celebrating the opening of Za Dude Pizza there, along with Boston Comedy Fest winner Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy.

Fenti promises a well-balanced showcase.

“I try to book a lot of different comedians so you’re not getting five Joe Fentis,” he said. “You’re getting someone who does one-liners, someone who does storytelling, someone who likes joking about parenthood or teaching or whatever. I’m trying to give a whole show.”

Fenti’s own comedy is inspired by absurdists like Steven Wright and Mitch Hedberg. He has a recurring series of videos with him in sunglasses delivering his own jokes in Hedberg’s style that are hilarious. “If I’m ever in a room, and I don’t want people to talk to me, I pretend to be an elephant,” he says with the late comic’s deadpan delivery.

“I just love comics who do things that are a little weird and a little different,” Fenti continued, citing Demitri Martin and Bo Burnham as other guiding lights.

“People who can tell a story so smoothly and bring weird life moments to the stage,” he said. “I look to Mitch in so many ways. How he perceived the world, like an escalator is never broken, they just become stairs, that’s such a funny way to look at it [and] I try to bring that to a lot of the jokes I write now, and put them into my style. Which is still evolving; I’ve only been doing comedy almost three years. There’s always room to try new things and see what works.”

Joe Fenti w/ Liam McGurk, Troy Burditt, Ryan Ellington and El Kennedy
When: Thursday, May 22, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Kettlehead Brewing Co., 97 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Joe Fenti. Courtesy photo.

Ward Hayden & the Outliers bring Springsteen tribute to Pembroke

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

When Pembroke City Limits scheduled its grand opening last year, owner Rob Azevedo had Ward Hayden & the Outliers booked to play, but the debut of the Suncook music bar and restaurant was delayed. Instead, the Boston country stalwarts performed in Azevedo’s barn, the place that gave him the idea to start his own club.

Hayden will finally make it to PCL on May 17, to do a trio show with bass player Greg Hall and guitarist Tyler Marshall. His latest project is two albums of Bruce Springsteen songs done in Outliers style. The first, Little By Little, arrived last month, and the next, Piece By Piece, is due for release in October.

Little By Little is a mix of familiar hits like “Dancing in the Dark” and “Cadillac Ranch” alongside deep cuts, such as the brooding “Youngstown” and “Two Faces.” One track, “Promised Land,” bubbled up after Azevedo gave Hayden a book on tape of Bruce’s autobiography when he complained about not having time to read his hard copy.

“It’s a driving song that Springsteen wrote before he even really knew how to drive, which — I think that is so cool when it comes to creative writing,” Hayden said by phone recently. The episode happened when his band lost a car and driver on its way west. “He has to learn how to drive, but he can’t shift … to be in that moment, and put that song together.”

One bit of inspiration came about when Hayden patiently endured a drunken fan’s attempt to tell him about two stripped down concerts Springsteen did in 1990. “He wasn’t giving up on trying to try to communicate with me, so I put my hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Tell me what you’re saying.’”

“Ward, you gotta hear the Christic shows,” came the reply. So he found them on YouTube. “I was blown away.”

For the same reason Springsteen’s Nebraska is revered by many as his best album, the music is spellbinding; it’s raw and revealing. But a story Springsteen told to introduce “My Father’s House,” about asking a therapist to help him understand why he drove around late at night looking at places he once lived and being told he was trying to make a bad thing right is what closed Hayden.

“The value of that song became clear to me at that point, I was so moved,” he said. “I don’t know if that song is going to be a single or anything, but I think it’s my favorite.” That and another song from Nebraska, “Reason to Believe,” will be on the Piece By Piece collection. The latter almost didn’t get recorded.

“I wanted to rock that song … but it just was not coming together in our very last day in the studio,” Hayden said. They got unstuck by reducing the backing track to Hall’s upright bass, a bit of strumming and tambourine. “All it really needed was a very steady and driving bass to tell the story. I was trying to bring it somewhere it didn’t need to go.”

The effort, its names drawn from “Racing in the Street,” came about for a strange but fitting reason. While Hayden and his band were driving to a show in the Midwest a couple of years ago, an interview came on the radio. A former rocker, a tick away from Nickelback, was attempting to jump-start a new country direction by urging people not to listen to The Boss.

“Everyone’s trying to find an angle and work it, it’s the nature of the entertainment business,” Hayden said. “But I felt he was trying to take away something that shouldn’t be taken away. Springsteen’s music has been such a huge part of so many people’s lives, myself included. I think there’s some things of value that should be sacred, or at least protected.”

What followed was “a project without an endgame,” he continued. The initial plan was to record two songs. “The first day we turned two into three … we ended up doing about a week more of recording a little later that month, and then we just didn’t stop. We chipped away, little by little, piece by piece, for about two years and ultimately ended up with 16 songs.”

Along with all the Boss’s songs, he wrote enough original material for a new album. His last was 2023’s introspective South Shore. On his website, Hayden said his Springsteen reinterpretation helped him “say some things that I’ve not been able to say myself yet in my own work.”

Asked to elaborate, he replied, “Some subjects … are hard to face … and not always easy to share. He had a challenging relationship with his father; the autobiography really laid that out. It was important to do a couple songs like ‘My Father’s House’ and ‘Walk Like a Man’ [that] really hit home. There are things I haven’t been able to dive into yet myself, but he did it so well.”

Ward Hayden & the Outliers (Trio)

When: Saturday, May 17, 6 p.m.
Where: Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook
More: wardhaydenandtheoutliers.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.