Justin: Minnesota’s best comedy festival proved stand-up is as outrageous as ever

Those convinced that political incorrectness has been stomped out didn’t spend any time this past weekend checking out the local comedy scene.

While veteran pot-stirrers Kathy Griffin and Jim Jefferies performed at major venues in downtown Minneapolis, the 10,000 Laughs Comedy Festival was hosting a new generation of comics that were just as edgy as those who have come before them.

The festival, now in its 12th year, has become one of the nation’s best opportunities to gauge the future of comedy with its mix of familiar stars, club headliners and fresh new talent who can’t yet afford to give up their day jobs.

The majority of the 40-plus comics I sampled over three nights specialized in jokes you couldn’t tell at the office — or even on the lucrative college circuit.

No one exemplified the fest’s irreverent nature better than Geoffrey Asmus, a Woodbury native who blew up on social media after moving to New York. Asmus, sporting a Twins sweatshirt, gleefully pushed the envelope with a laugh that sounded like a vicious sneeze.

He riffed on child pornography, mass shootings and racism in his family, despite the fact that his parents were in the audience.

“I know it’s a little early for an abortion joke,” he told the audience during his sold-out show Friday at the Parkway Theater. “But you’ve got to get to them in the first trimester.”

There were only a few dozen people at Lace Larrabee’s Saturday gig at Sisyphus Brewing, but that didn’t deter her from delivering an equally edgy set, providing graphic and sometimes grotesque details about backstage behavior at “America’s Got Talent” and beauty pageants.

Much of her hilarious act had to do with the perils of turning 40, but she delivered her raunchy material with the spirit of a mischievous teen.

Larrabee is based in Atlanta, a city that provided many of the standouts at this year’s gathering.

Katherine Blanford, Larrabee’s podcast partner, kicked off her Saturday show at the Southern Theater by declaring that she had decided to become a dirtier comic. She made good on her promise when an audience member mentioned that the local amusement park was called Valleyfair.

“That sounds like a place I would send my kid if I wanted him to be molested,” Blanford said during a set that also included a long anecdote about visiting a strip club.

Gabbie Watts was one of the boldest visitors from the Big Peach. During her set at Comedy Corner Underground, she got down on the floor and humped the stool. During another performance that took place well after midnight, she started weeping in the middle of a joke about gay penguins.

Good Cop/Rad Cop, a Tenacious D-like duo that’s also from Atlanta, ripped through songs that would make “Weird Al” Yankovic blush. Their number, “Human Toilet Band,” was even more gross than you would imagine. Georgia’s Wellington Ojukwu provided so much good cheer that it was easy to overlook the savage nature of his material about senior citizens.

Denver also was well represented.

That city’s Tanya Sabrina opened her show with one of the fest’s most clever lines: “Since we can’t use plastic straws anymore, I’m just choking turtles with my bare hands.”

Few topics were off limits. Indiana comic Lucas Waterfill, who has cerebral palsy, scored during a Southern Theater appearance by grousing about how the “almost crippled” keep taking his “handicapped parking” spots. He sympathized with those who signed up for orgies on Epstein Island and drew Stephen Hawking.

Benji Nate, who stands 4 feet 11, used her time onstage to deliver a string of pedophilia jokes.

“I just got off my shift as bait on ‘To Catch a Predator,’” the Philadelphia-based comic said.

For some, crossing the line didn’t always pay off.

Colton Dowling and Dylan Carlino, hosts of the “Some of This Is Bad” podcast, had the mostly gay audience at Comedy Corner Underground crowd in stitches Thursday with their X-rated banter on mean twinks, chastity devices and Grindr etiquette.

But straight comics who ventured into similar territory were often met with silence; 9/11 material remained problematic.

Cy Amundson, a former Twin Cities comic who now resides in Cincinnati, contemplated bringing a fake gun to the Comedy Corner Underground stage before his podcast partner, Blake Wexler, talked him out of it. But that decision didn’t stop the pair from joking about Adolf Hitler and the attempts to assassinate Donald Trump during their raucous set.

The festival also featured better-known names like Pete Holmes, Rory Scovel and David Cross, but I skipped them so I could focus on up-and-coming talent. I don’t regret that decision for a minute.