Nick Vatterott

In a robust North Side standup scene that doesn't lack for visionaries, the cry "Vatterott's up!" inspires this comic's jaded, dusty peers to flee front-room barstools and beeline for the back, where the 29-year-old impresario's unhinged, kaleidoscopic stories pour out at a breathless pace. "You ever ridden in a Greyhound bus?" he asks in one joke. "It's like riding in a moving alley. Everything in that bus is either a crack addict or a puddle." Vatterott's peers would roast him on a spit and eat his heart to steal his power if he weren't such a nice, unassuming guy to boot. - Chicago Magazine

On his cell phone’s voice mail message, stand-up comic Nick Vatterott says, “I’d like you to meet my manatee. His name is Hue.” We hear a muffled voice: “Look, that manatee got hit by a truck!” Then a crushed Vatterott exclaims, “No, my manatee! Oh, Hue…oh, the Hue manatee!”

The 29-year-old’s fearless inclination to be, as fellow comic Jeb Cadwell calls him, “confidently abstract,” has made him a favorite among peers. That, and the fact that he fiddles with bigger-picture stand-up structure, tying bits together by changing TV stations or traveling through time. It speaks to a larger resurgence of framed stand-up, seen recently in Mike Birbiglia’s narrative sets.

He’s finding success with a form we saw him deliver at Chicago Underground Comedy—though that form wasn’t readily apparent at first. He threw out a few zingers then ran around the stage while inexplicably chanting. Later he asked the audience if they were drinking beer, which elicited a mix of applause and whooping. “Shut up! I’m trying to tell jokes here!” he barked back. When he neared the end, Vatterott admitted he’d forgotten his next topic; so he consulted his set list, a novelty-sized poster that provided the delayed punch lines to his antics: “Recreate scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Ask audience a question, and chastise them for responding appropriately.”

Artistic mashing of the three comedy disciplines—improv, sketch and stand-up—has served Vatterott well. As his ChUC show illustrated, his stand-up is a mix of slipshod and sharp, à la improvisation. His sketch, which includes the memorable “Riverdance, but only from the waist up” scene, borrows too: Both Vatterott’s one-man show No Outlet and his itinerant, four-man Heavyweight group link the honed humor of stand-up with sketch’s through-lines.

Vatterott has wanted to blend it all ever since he arrived in Chicago six years ago from Missouri: While taking improv classes and attending stand-up open mikes in his free time, taping every show, he discovered that most comics stick to either the improv/sketch or stand-up world, leaving little room for crossover. “If someone likes comedy, wouldn’t they want to do it in as many ways as possible? I love them all. It’d be like picking a favorite kid.” For a while, he and recent Chicago success story TJ Miller were the only comics pursuing improv and stand-up simultaneously.

Today Vatterott works two distinct kinds of funny: He’s an understudy for the big-name Second City Touring Company, and he joins Klusterphuk for raucous midnight improv at iO. He also crops up all over the North Side stand-up bar circuit, while occasionally opening for out-of-towners at Zanies.

Yet his relationship with that Chicago institution (celebrating its 30th anniversary in November) didn’t get off on the best foot. He showcased a few times for Bert Haas, Zanies’ talent scout, but Haas admittedly didn’t “get” him. It wasn’t until Vatterott was arguably in his element—hosting a raw stand-up competition at Chemically Imbalanced Comedy’s 2006 Snubfest—that he clicked with Haas, who was seated at the judges’ table.

Vatterott’s club material has to be clear-cut: “People [at Zanies] like tangible things—jokes about holding the door open for people,” he says. He manages to put his own out-there spin on tired topics—a Greyhound bus ride becomes “like being in a moving alley”—but finds that some mainstream audiences get lost in his complexities.

“Recently, I’ve been trying to decide: If I was asked to do a Live at Gotham taping, would I want to do my seven tightest Zanies minutes or would I want to do the set-list thing?” he says. “The Zanies stuff is ‘more money for your bucks per second,’ but the set-list thing is more what I want to do. It sets me apart.”

Regardless of what he chooses, Vatterott’s already proven himself a stand-out stand-up. His commitment to comedy is unwavering, right down to his physical appearance: What ultimately got him to cut his shoulder-length hair (during an onstage bit) wasn’t his mother’s constant pleas. Instead, “I wanted to play more believable characters—to have my mailmen be more believable mailmen.”


Read more: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/comedy/27906/nick-of-all-trades#ixzz0z48OjSjp - Time Out Chicago