Here's a Curt Fletcher joke:
"I had a pretty traumatic experience when I was younger. I walked in on my grandparents having sex."
Crowd groans in horror.
"Yeah, my grandmother had been dead for six months."
Fletcher's act has come a long way since he realized his talent for humor growing up.
"I was really shy actually," local comedian Fletcher said of his childhood in Iowa. "My best friend was the class clown. I'd always tell him stuff to say, 'cause I was too shy to say it."
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Fletcher, 2003 winner of the Great Southwest Laugh Off, will give a free comedy show Friday at 7 p.m. at the Peace and Justice Center at 202 Harvard S.E.
"I won by half a point," he said of the Laugh Off. "There was a guy from Amarillo. He had one arm, and he's Mexican. He was really good, but I beat him. A one-armed guy in the contest - give him a hand!"
Stephen Hunt, a Peace and Justice Center volunteer and budding comedian, organized the event. Hunt, along with comedian Matt Peterson, will open for Fletcher.
There is a $5 suggested donation.
Around 2000, Hunt became interested in humor and health, so he studied both and later started a class called aerobic laughter at SEED Graduate Institute.
"The body, physiologically, gets the same reactions from reactive laughter when you laugh at a joke, or - what I call proactive laughter - when you laugh just for the hell of it," Hunt said. "Some of those effects increase metabolism, boost endorphins, increase pain relief. There are tons of healthy benefits from laughter."
Fletcher attributes his deadpan humor to his six uncles and said he prefers writing one-liners to long stories.
The grandparents joke isn't a true story, by the way.
"When I was three or four, my mom said I always watched comedians with her," Fletcher said. "I didn't get the jokes or anything, but it always made her laugh, and I thought it was funny, so I wanted to be a comedian. She had six brothers and they were funny."
Fletcher and Hunt met at Laffs Comedy Club.
"I became friends with Curtis there, and at that time he was starting to do comedy," Hunt said. "He was also the cook, and I covered for him so he could go on the road. I hate cooking. I wanted to be a comic, and he became my comic mentor."
Fletcher helped train Hunt to be a professional comic so Hunt could open for him, because a featured comic at Laffs always needs an opener.
"Did you know children laugh 500 to 700 times a day?" Hunt said. "As adults, on the average, people laugh 15 to 17 times a day. I laugh hundreds of times a day, so someone out there's not laughing at all."
