Mayor Kruzan, friends show up for 1-year stand-up anniversary

As the town’s newest amateur comedian, Mayor Mark Kruzan put on a show Thursday as a special guest to celebrate the Funny Bone Bloomington Comedy Club’s one-year anniversary. Headliner Drew Hastings performed at it and four more shows at the club this past weekend.

Funny Bone donated the proceeds from Thursday’s show, totaling more than $2,700, to Wings of Mercy, an organization that provides free air travel to terminally-ill patients who need to be transported but cannot afford it.

Wings of Mercy Vice President Dan Horne  thanked Funny Bone owners Jared and Dayna Thompson for donating the evening’s proceeds to his charity.

“You see people with a need and you have a resource that meets that need, and there’s really nothing better than that,” he said.

The evening kicked off with a “Happy Anniversary” video with clips from comedians wishing the Funny Bone well, including Tammy Pescatelli, who performed earlier this month.

“Most 1-year-olds poop their pants,” she said on camera. “Thank God we’re past that.”

Once the video ended, Thursday’s host, Bloomington comedian Brad Wilhelm, warmed up the audience and told everyone that he adds sex appeal to the club.

“They said, ‘Brad, can you bring the sex?’” he said.

Then Kruzan took the stage to open for feature comedian Josh Arnold.

Kruzan joked about health care and Viagra, the word “emcee” being French for “time-waster” and how, while French Lick is the best town name in Indiana, “we’re not even going to talk about how Floyds Knob got its name.”

“Dear Twitter, I think they’re already turning on me. Keep SWAT on standby,” he said, pretending to type on his cell phone.

Many people might not know the mayor’s full name, Mark Richard Robert Kruzan – or Mark “Dick Bob” Kruzan, as he told the audience shortly before Arnold took the stage.

“Dick Bob – that reminds me of a game I played at a drunken Halloween party. I won’t play it again – I lost,” Arnold said, before moving on to “Don’t mess with Texas” signs.
“Relax, Texas, I’m just passing through. No other states have overtly defensive road signs.”

Arnold mentioned he wants to open a bar for gay Jamaicans called “Game on,” or “Gay, Mon,” in the spirit of National Coming Out Day.

“I didn’t know that existed until my dad called me and went, ‘Well?’”

Kruzan also presented the Thompsons with a plaque to congratulate them on the club’s first anniversary and to wish them a successful future.

For Hastings, Thursday’s show was only the first of five Funny Bone performances this past weekend. He discussed, among other things, the ever-popular issue of health.

“At this point in my life, ‘healthy’ is just a pre-cancerous condition,” Hastings said. “I gotta quit smoking – I get winded playing euchre.”

He also turned to the topic of his farm in southern Ohio.

“I don’t even know how I got a farm. My credit score is 6,” he said. “At night, a possum walking through a cornfield sounds exactly like three men with an axe, and I don’t know what kind of owl makes this noise: ‘You’re gonna die.’”

Hastings warned that it’s easy to get ripped off when buying livestock.

“I bought a herd of Black Angus hogs,” he said. “Miniature cattle, my ass.”