Stand-up Comedians Shaun Eli, Laurie Kilmartin and Al Lubel at the Marathon Center for the Performing Arts
Friday April 11, 2025 7 PM
Marathon Center for the Performing Arts
122 Hourglass Drive
Stowe, VT 05672
(802) 760-4634
Tickets
Al Lubel became a lawyer to please his mother and a year later became a standup comedian in order to displease her.
Getting stage time is hard for a new comic so Al, unannounced, would suddenly stand up in the middle of restaurants while people were in the middle of eating dinner and do his five minutes. As Al says, “And I almost always got big laughs because, looking back on it, I think they were scared that I was insane.”
Al began getting work at comedy clubs and within a year won the $100,000 Comedy Grand Prize on television’s Star Search. Doing the Tonight Show was a childhood fantasy so he auditioned and luckily became one of the last comics to appear with Johnny Carson. He then went on to make a bunch of appearances on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and the Late Show with David Letterman.
In 1992, Al was the subject of A Standup Life, directed by Peter Lydon for the BBC. A documentary about American standup comedy, it features Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Hope, Mort Sahl and Joan Rivers.
Al’s solo show, Mentally Al, won the Amused Moose Award Judges Prize as the best one person show in the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Two years later he was nominated for best performer of a one person show by the Barry Awards at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2016, Al was Marc Maron’s guest on WTF and a year later moved to London where he did standup for three years in the UK and Europe.
A new documentary about Al directed by Joshua Edelman, Mentally Al, is being distributed by Comedy Dynamics and can be seen on Amazon Prime and YouTube.
But Al does admit to missing the practice of law. “I’d like to have just one more trial, something serious like a murder trial because right before I give closing argument and my client’s fate hinges on every word I say I want to see his face when I turn to him and whisper, I’m a comedian!”
Laurie Kilmartin is a stand up comedian and an Emmy-nominated, WGA award-winning comedy writer. She was a staff writer for all 11 years of CONAN on TBS, and has performed standup on CONAN, Late Late Show w/James Corden, and Comedy Central. She was a Top 10 finalist on season 9 of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and has been a guest on Marc Maron’s WTF 3 times. She is the author of Dead People Suck, a comedic memoir about grief, and Shitty Mom- NY Times best-selling comedy about parenting. Her special 45 Jokes About My Dead Dad, was named Vulture ‘s Top Ten Comedy Specials of 2016. In 2022, she was a guest in the “Comedy” episode of Hillary Clinton’s 2022 Apple TV series Gutsy. Her new special “Cis Woke Grief Slut,” taped at Hollywood’s El Portal Theater, is available on all platforms.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Laurie became interested in trying standup after seeing one too male comics talk about women. Even in San Francisco, the early 90s lineups were stacked with men lazily stereotyping approximately half the people in the audience. Laurie distinctly remembers sitting through a comedy showcase, thinking, “I don’t like shopping, and I don’t go to the bathroom in pairs.” Her need to try standup came from an intense desire to tell her own story, instead of hearing it being told to her by a dude.
After a successful first time onstage, Laurie moved back in with her parents, bought a Chevy Blazer and started driving to gigs over the West. By the time she donated the Blazer to KCRW, there were over 500,000 miles on the odometer. She has worked one nighters, comedy clubs, casinos and wars. In fact, she performed for troops in both Iraq wars, including a New Year’s Eve show at one of Saddam Hussein’s occupied palaces. After ten years of basing herself inNorCal, she relocated to New York City in 1999. In 2003, she added TV writing to her resume, with her first staff job on Comedy Central’s Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. She moved onto “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” tried her hand at daytime on “The Bonnie Hunt Show” before being hired as a monologue writer on “CONAN,” for its entire 11 year run on TBS.
In 2006, she became a mom, and in 2009, a single mom. In 2014, she famously (or infamously) live-tweeted jokes her father’s hospice passing from lung cancer, and in 2020, she did the same after her mother was hospitalized with COVID. From these literal cremated ashes came her comedy special and second book (“45 Jokes About My Dead Dad” and “Dead People Suck”), and the 3rd titular element of her 2024 comedy special, “Cis Woke Grief Slut.”
Shaun Eli has rightfully been called one of America’s smartest comics. Whether it’s a story about dining with a vegetarian or successfully fighting a parking ticket, master storyteller Shaun Eli shows you that there’s hilarity in the ordinary if you approach life with a comedic warp. Job interviews? Serving on a NYC criminal jury? How about the Ten Commandments? For just about anything he’s experienced he has a hilarious story at the ready. Shaun has been profiled in The New York Times.
With a sense of humor that’s both cheerful and universal Shaun has headlined shows on five continents. His jokes have been quoted everywhere from the New York Post to Forbes to Readers Digest to Healthcare Finance News. In both Reform Judaism magazine and the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the subject of the cover story. He’s been featured on CareerBuilder.com and CNN, in local papers like the Scarsdale Inquirer and the Asbury Park Press and in the college papers the Yale Daily News and the Daily Pennsylvanian. Even in The Journal of Irreproducible Results, a scientific humor magazine. Yes, there is one. And his group The Ivy League of Comedysm was the subject of a front-page story in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
More than just smart, funny and clever, Shaun is determined to express his opinion passionately, not surprising for someone who wrote his first satirical essay at age ten. When profiled in Fortune magazine “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno quoted one of Shaun’s jokes, citing it as an example of the type of “smart comedy” he’s happy to include in his opening monologue. Jay and other late-night hosts have used Shaun’s topical material in their monologues for more than a decade.
Drawing on his vast wealth of clean, clever material Shaun quickly became one of New York’s brightest, funniest, most in-demand stand-up comedians. When he takes the stage other comedians stop and watch.
Outside the world of comedy Shaun was a world-class athlete in two obscure sports (rowing and dragon-boat racing), worked as a lifeguard instructor and is an instrument-rated pilot. He is also an award-winning economic forecaster who once sold his car to a hitchhiker.
Shaun is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. You can watch his videos and read some of his writings, including satirical political essays and hundreds of jokes he’s written for late-night television, on his web site BrainChampagne.com where his slogan “Brain Champagne: Clever Comedy for Smart Mindssm ” rings true.
