The Desert Voice, Camp Arifjan (Kuwait) Base Newspaper, January 2005

story and photos by Spc. Brian Trapp

Hundreds of Soldiers braved the cold Thursday night to watch Comics On Duty.  Troops quickly filled the seats outside of Camp Arifjan’s Zone 1 PX, and more stood on the fringes of the crowd for nearly two hours to watch a handful of comics crack jokes about everything from the ban on alcohol to the messages in the portable toilets.  The crowd rolled with laughter and seemed glad to have the chance to forget where they were, relax and have a good time.

"It’s good to be here," said Warren B. Hall. "All comics say that, but it really is good to be here. The last place I was in was Fallujah; it is good to be here."

The comics regularly tour the Central Command Theater, and when they do, they live where Soldiers do, eat where the Soldiers do and go to the same bathrooms Soldiers do, all of which helps generate a lot of material for them.  They do all of this because they want to thank the Soldiers, said Richard Davis, the tour’s executive producer.  "I feel like [the military] are the super bowl champions, and we’re the water boys.  We just want to be a part of it and support it," said Gary Brightwell, one of the comics on the tour. 

Comics On Duty is not a comic troop; they’re just standup comedians. All of the comics are headliner acts with some television time. Although they’re not household names and probably wouldn’t be filling stadiums back in the states, they put on a great show for the troops.  Camp Arifjan was just one of the stops on the team’s nine-country, 31-day tour. In Kuwait, they were also scheduled to perform at Camp Victory and Ali Al Saleem.  Comics on Duty, affiliated with Armed Forces Entertainment, is a low-budget show compared to the bigger-ticket United Service Organization shows, Davis said.  "The cost of putting one of the big-name USO shows up in some 5-star hotel for a few nights is probably the same cost of our whole tour," he said. "We’re bunking in Doha and eating in the DFACs. No one is getting fame and fortune out of this."

The tour has performed for audiences ranging anywhere from 2,000 troops in Iraq to just 12 people, said Brightwell, who opened for Dennis Miller at MGM Grand’s big room in Las Vegas before he came out to perform for troops in parking lots and tents across Southwest Asia.  Stephen Thomas, one of the performers, said he wanted the troops to take away a little relaxation from the show. "It’s a couple hours of forgetting where they are and a little piece of home," Thomas said. 

During his act, Thomas brought up how when he was 18 he wanted to join the military, but because of a technical medical condition he wasn’t allowed to join. "The problem was, I’m a [sissy]," he said.  When he was telling his friends that he was going on tour to Afghanistan, they were asking him if he was afraid. "I told them no," Thomas said. "There’s no safer place than behind 6,000 dudes with guns. The second reason, I wasn’t [afraid] is because I saw the Al Qaeda training video . . . I mean my daughter can swing on the monkey bars upside down by her legs. Does that mean she could be their leader?"

Hall opened the show as the first act and got the crowd going, doubling some of the audience members over. He talked about things that everyone can relate to like, riding motorcycles, friends that do drugs, tattoos, getting into trouble with his girlfriend, pornography addictions, getting beaten by his mother with a toaster oven and attending a wedding at a nudist colony.

All of the comics did some bathroom humor, but it was literally about the bathrooms that they’ve seen and had to use.  They joked about everything from the plastic phone booth, to the port-a-potty wall message boards and the Barbie-Dream-House sized toilet paper in some camps.

Even with five comics, each had a unique style. "Everyone was completely different," said Staff Sgt. Travis Bowen, a maintenance squad leader with the 233rd Transportation Company. "They weren’t all up there doing the same thing.

Bowen came to the show because he didn’t have anything else to do and because of boredom, he said.  Bowen did walk away with a smile on his face and said the show was "hilarious."

After each comic’s set was over, they spent some time thanking the crowd for their service, which had the unfortunate effect of cooling off the crowd for the next performer.

"I want to say thank you," Hall said. "It’s funny, because a lot of people come up after the show and thank us, but I see it the other way around. If you didn’t do what you do, I couldn’t keep on doing this."

At the end of his time on stage, Connoly took time to let the Soldiers know how the comics feel about coming out to support the troops. "I appreciate the job you do. If I did what you guys do, with no alcohol and barely any women in this place, I would snap in a week," he said.

The thank you's did seem heartfelt, and the crowd felt it.  It’s strange when the troops say thank you, Bowen said.  "We’re over here just doing our job, and they remind us that we’re appreciated and have a purpose here."

The Comics On Duty program has been around for 13 years and has performed more than 1,500 shows worldwide. This is the 14th tour for the program and fifth to Southwest Asia. It was also the fourth time they performed at Camp Arifjan. The program actually started as a United States-based touring program, but it began touring overseas in 2001.