Funny Bone celebrates 1st anniversary with Kruzan

Comedy, charity and Mayor Mark Kruzan will come together at the Funny Bone Bloomington Comedy Club today for its one-year anniversary show.

The mayor will welcome attendees before the weekend’s feature act, Josh Arnold, takes the stage to warm up the crowd for headliner Drew Hastings.

Daniel Lopez, communications director for the mayor, said Kruzan also welcomed the Funny Bone’s first customers at the club’s opening last September.

“It’s a local business,” Lopez said, “so it’s kind of a celebration.”

All of the proceeds from Thursday’s show will go to Wings of Mercy, a charity that provides free air transportation to terminally ill patients who do not have the funds to travel home. Owner Jared Thompson said he hopes to raise $5,000 for the charity that brought his mother home to Michigan.

Kruzan’s appearance will be limited to today’s show, and Arnold and Hastings will perform the week’s regular five-show series through Saturday. While Lopez said Kruzan is fairly funny, the professional comedians will take the stage once he’s done.

Arnold said his material will include a lot of observational humor about relationships, pop culture and his everyday life.

“I tend to go off of personal experiences,” he said. “I’m not necessarily political or throwing around non-sequitur one-liners.”

Though he said that he does have a few one-liners in his routine, these are usually random thoughts, such as “You think somewhere out in the ocean, there’s a dolphin getting a tattoo of a sorority girl, like jumping over the moon or something?”

He also mentioned one Halloween, when his mother sent him out to buy more candy and straight pins to fix his niece’s costume – and then didn’t understand why a grown man might not want to be seen buying those things together on Halloween.

Hastings last performed for Bloomington audiences in 2008 at the Buskirk-Chumley
Theater’s “Bloomington Stand Up!” to raise awareness about homelessness. This will be his first appearance at the Funny Bone, but Thompson said Hastings has been on the radar for a long time.

“I don’t think anyone else we’ve booked appeals more to south-central Indiana than Drew Hastings,” Thompson said of “The Bob & Tom Show” favorite, who usually plays in larger theaters, rather than a smaller club such as the Funny Bone. “We fully expect Friday and Saturday’s 8 p.m. shows to sell out.”

For those who saw Hasting’s performance at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, he said not to expect the same routine.

“My show is always in transition,” Hastings said, adding that he expects a more varied and possibly younger crowd at the Funny Bone. “I don’t necessarily want to be right. I just want to sometimes point things out,” he said. “There’s just no common sense anymore.”

Hastings said his show isn’t for the faint of heart or easily offended, especially as “college students tend to be very insulated,” and usually in a very liberal environment, such as Bloomington.

“The entire premise of a joke or humor is irreverence,” he said. “I make sure I democratically shred everybody.”

Looking back at the past year, Thompson said he’s enjoyed opening the Funny Bone and is looking forward to many more years there.

“I don’t think there’s any question I’ve had fun,” he said. “No other year in the history of this club will be as emotional and difficult, but still fun.”