Stand-up Comedians Shaun Eli, Al Lubel and Maureen Langan at the Fête Music Hall

Friday October 20, 2023  8 PM
Fête Music Hall
103 Dike St.
Providence, RI 02909
(401) 383-1112
Tickets


Comedian Al Lubel headshot

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!”

Maureen Langan headshot

Maureen Langan stars on this season’s America’s Got Talent. She is an award-winning journalist turned standup comic and radio talk show host. Her quick wit and honest rants on life’s absurdities make her a hit at clubs, theaters, and festivals across the U.S, Canada, Europe and South Africa.

Whether lambasting celebrities, satirizing news, or joking about her father, a New York City sanitation worker, and her Irish immigrant mother, it’s her genuine connection with audiences that make her standout.

Maureen is a MAC Award-winner who has performed on Broadway with Rosie O’Donnell and has opened for Steven Wright, Dennis Miller, Joy Behar and Gladys Knight. She’s been featured on Gotham Live, HBO, Red Eye, Comics Unleashed, the Paramount Pictures film “Marci X,” and in national commercials.

Shaun Eli leaning and holding a microphone

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.

Shaun Eli on stage at Cape Town Comedy Club
Shaun Eli headlining at Cape Town Comedy Club