March Madness is nearly upon us and so too is the third annual installment of the Riverfront Times' comedy competition, Standup Throwdown.
Not familiar with how it works? Here's the Throwdown lowdown:
Aspiring comics enter the tournament by tweeting out a themed joke (more on that below). The comedians with the sixteen funniest tweets (as deemed by the RFT staff ) earn entry into the tournament and are placed into a bracket. RFT's online readers will then vote for their favorites among the sixteen tweets to cull the contestants to eight.
On Thursday, March 27, those "Elite 8" will go head-to-head in a live competition at Thursday Night Mic Night, the weekly standup set held upstairs at Fitz's Restaurant and Bottling Works in the Delmar Loop. With the help of the crowd, a panel of judges will decide who then moves on to the Final Four. As an added bonus, last year's Standup Throwdown champ, Jon Venegoni, will host the event. The four advancing comics will then perform at the Final Four event on April 1 at Blueberry Hill's Duck Room. As with preceding years, the overall winner will receive a small monetary award and the much larger prize of bragging rights that he/she is RFT's 2014 comic titleholder. The winner will also be awarded the feature spot in an upcoming Comedy in the Lou show at The Firebird.
Still interested? Here's how to enter: The intent of Standup Throwdown is to recognize and celebrate St. Louis' aspiring comedians, so the competition is open to anyone with experience performing at open-mic nights and comedy events. In recognition of St. Louis celebrating its 250th birthday this year, this year's tweet theme is "little known facts about St. Louis." All you need to do to enter the tourney is fire off a tweet before 5 p.m. this Monday (March 3) with a St. Louis factoid -- real or made up. Use the hashtag #stlfact in your tweet so we can easily find it, and please limit your submissions to no more than two tweets.
Additional requirements: 1. Don't enter the tournament if you will not be able to compete in the live competitions that last week of March and first week of April. 2. If you make it into the tournament, we'll need you to submit a short bio about yourself (200 word max) and a photo by Monday, March 10. These bios will run in the March 20-26 issue of the Riverfront Times.
Additional questions? E-mail us. (We judge humor here, not IQ.)
