White River Amphitheater Oddball Comedy Fest

For our 5th anniversary I bought a pair of tickets to The Oddball Comedy Festival. It was at White River Amphitheater in Auburn, Washington and I must say that although the show was great, I've decided that the venue is the worst in the state.

It being a celebration of 5 years with my wife, I had hoped to have a seamless evening of entertainment but WRA was doing everything in their power to fuck that up. As is the case with most venues, beer and wine could be purchased anywhere, but liquor had a designated area. I have fairly recently developed an allergy to beer and wine, which at first was incredibly sad, but that's not the point. Because of these allergies, liquor is my only option if I want to loosen up before the show; this means whatever shit-show of a crowd exists in the designated area, I get to deal with them.

Firstly, to get into the liquor area you needed a wrist band. A line had seemingly developed outside of the 'spirits lounge' to get the wrist band. Only there were zero signs explaining the rules, so it was total pandemonium outside of this building. To figure out the drill you just had to hear people around you discussing what they had learned. The people handing out the wrist bands were about as helpful as Scotch tape on a submarine hull which was is annoying in itself.

Secondly, once we sat in a 10 minute line to acquire our wrist bands, we soon found out that there were dozens of people handing out the wrist bands and that even though you show your ID to get one, you still must show your ID at the door to this building AND when you buy your beverages. Besides wanting to handout ugly wrist bands, what's the point? And again, no signs anywhere explaining what to do. In my head the head cheese of this malfunction of an event looked exactly like 80's WWF wrestler, Lou Albano and he surely had a stain on his shirt somewhere.

Every single line for drinks was 20+ minutes and it wasn't even that busy. Some places took cards, some only took cash. Again there were no signs, so more than once did I see people get to the front of a 20 minute line only to find out this particular booth was cash only and they only had plastic. Oh and as I understand it, two of the ATM machines ran out of money.

They were hosting 8 nationally touring headliners, but I began to wonder if they knew that.

Once we got our $14 margaritas (that were actually large and delicious), we realized we could not leave the building with liquor. We proceeded to expedite our delicious beverages into our bellies, then making our way out to the food area where we sat in line again for another 20+ minutes. At this point we had spent a majority of our time at this festival standing in line. But eventually we had our drinks consumed, our food consumed and fresh beverages for the beginning of the show.

I splurged a little on these tickets both because it was our anniversary and because comedy is a unique form of entertainment where outdoor spaces are not always that great so I wanted to be relatively close. The good news is that from the point where we walked to and from our seats, the event was FLAWLESS. Even short lines for the men's room which is always a major plus.

The comedians were great. I mean, I would've been shocked if it went any differently because the festival consisted of eight headlining comics. The Roast Master himself, Jeff Ross was the host of the show with his newly bald headedness and as expected he delivered. It was awesome to him at work in person. You always see him ripping people on TV but the timing and skill is beautiful in person. We saw Demitri Martin who once had a decently funny show on Comedy Central that got canceled a while back. His style of setup, punch, setup, punch is always pretty funny but can get old if not done well enough. He did great! I may have laughed the hardest during his set.

Hannibal Burress, Whitney Cummings and Chris Hardwick all came in with a solid 15-20 minute set and the last part of the show was two 30 minute sets from Sarah Silverman and Aziz Ansari. Sarah took her set into the crowd and even found herself cuddled up with a 60 something year old lady who somehow found her way to the front row of this huge show. Aziz did what Aziz does and got excited and insightful; People ate that shit up as expected. Then with a great 1 hour set, I finally got to see Louis CK. All of the comics we saw were comedians I would likely pay to see by themselves, but Louis was on my bucket list.

I've now seen the likes of Kevin Hart in a small club, we've been 5th row to a Dane Cook arena show and now I got to see one of the greatest comedians of this generation. Besides football, I think comedy is my favorite genre of entertainment, so the night was magical inside that amphitheater.

Eventually the show had to end though. Our good seats gave us a great opportunity to exit quickly and we made it to our car relatively fast. Then it happened... Nothing. The parking lot was literally at a standstill for 30-40 minutes before I decided that vehicular manslaughter was a feasible option. A lot of people were in line to leave but a lot of people were just milling around their cars waiting for the crowds to disperse. All of the sudden I saw some people creating their own exit path behind us. It was a clear path and could've been easily manged by one half-wit with a flash light. Instead people went all apocolypse and made their own rules... Long story still pretty long, White River Amphitheater was an absolute disappointment.

There wasn't enough people serving food and drinks but the jerk offs in blue shirts with walkie-talkies with the volume at full blast during the show were everywhere doing next to nothing. Among the hundreds of cars there were zero people directing traffic.  And as we sat in the chaos for an hour I pictured the venue head honcho 'Lou Albano' doing coke in the tour bus with an AV guy from Stage B. I was so surprised at how shitty things were being run that I even considered that maybe I was just in a bad mood, but when Hannibal Burress made it a point to mention how incompetent the venue staff was, I knew I was not tripping.

All in all, the show was phenomenal. I just have zero desire to ever go back to White River Amphitheater unless I get a helicopter ride in. So while I laughed my ass off for a solid few hours, the venue clearly is not concerned with training anyone. Since openly complaining about this on Facebook I see I'm not the only one with this disdain for White River but also that there is a decent shuttle option to get in and out swiftly. But forgetting the fact that these options exist, I can't stand any company that will take my money but won't have the decency to pretend they give a shit that I'm there.

Overall it was a great evening with my beautiful wife and we just have another story to discuss during our anniversary next year when we're celebrating somewhere else. To five years.