Chris booked us the third weekend Friday night show operating at 100 percent capacity at the Comedy Cellar, which we hadn’t been to since before the pandemic began. Just as I remembered, we were all crammed super close together in the basement of the venue, with just enough room between seats to… well, rub shoulders against the stranger next to you. And while most of the time, that’s an annoying thing in New York with its teeny tiny venues and barely enough space for petite people like me to get around, it actually felt refreshing and nice. We can actually BE close together again! The only different part of the operations was that the Comedy Cellar required us to show our actual vaccination cards when showing our IDs. They’re making sure we’re not lying and that everyone will be safe. I’m on board with that.

As always, there’s a lineup of comedians each set, and of course, pretty much all of them commented on the city re-opening fully and COVID in general. One of the funniest lines I heard was when one of them lamented how dumb we are as a country, as the best example of how dumb we are is that we cannot seem to count all the way to 20; we need to be told to sing the song “Happy Birthday” twice. For whatever reason, I never really thought about that until that second, and I could not stop laughing. I remember all the times I was on company all-hands meetings at my last company, and our CEO and CPO would say constantly each time, “20 seconds! Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ twice, people! It’s not too hard!”

I guess we really are that dumb, aren’t we?