This weekend kicks off the Nevada City Film Festival’s annual Comedy Nights, April 12-14, at the historic Nevada Theatre in Nevada City with three nights of live comedy and film. Once part of the organization’s yearly independent film festival, NCFF Comedy Nights has grown to become its own signature event welcoming a who’s who of comedians including as Marc Maron, Tig Notaro, Maria Bamford, Beth Stelling, Brett Gelman, Eric Andre, Nick Kroll, Natasha Leggero, Kyle Kinane, John Early and Kate Berlant to name a few.
Friday night’s Herd Mentality: Local Stand-up Comedy Showdown showcases local and regional comedians performing “tight-fives” of their best material in a fast and furious format, with the audience deciding the winner to open up for Saturday’s headliners Irene Tu and Ian Lara. Both well-known comedians on the circuit, Tu and Lara have performed at Netflix Is A Joke comedy festival, on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon, HBO, Comedy Central, and opened for Taylor Tomlinson and Patton Oswalt, among others.
Wrapping up the weekend is a special 30th anniversary screening of the cult classic comedy Clerks, co-presented with The Onyx Downtown.
Considered a landmark in independent filmmaking, Clerks is Kevin Smith’s (Chasing Amy, Jay
and Silent Bob Strike Back, Mallrats) directorial debut and follows a day in the lives of two
convenience clerks named Dante and Randal as they annoy customers, discuss movies, and play
hockey on the store roof. With its quirky characters and clever, quotable dialogue, Clerks is the
ultimate clarion call for slackers everywhere to unite and, uh, do something we guess?
“Clerks remains a quintessential part of 90s independent cinema, and the start of the career of
one of the most well-rounded directors and writers of this era, Kevin Smith,” wrote The
Cinematic Reel. The Hollywood Reporter called it “a wonderfully screwy send-up of down-low Americana.”
Kevin Smith was a film school dropout and just 23-years old when he took Clerks to the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. He had written the screenplay while working at a New Jersey convenience store called The Quick Stop. He maxed out his credit cards, and for a meager budget of $27,000, filmed it after hours at his place of employment with some friends. Miramax purchased the film at Sundance and it went on to make $3.2 million dollars, kick start the low-budget comedy buddy film genre, and inspire generations of indie filmmakers.
