On Wednesday, April 15, at 8:04 p.m., Nashville broke a world record.
Not a record for the most luxury condos shaped like guitars, or the most heart attacks during a post-season hockey game. Nothing to do with Jack White, Pekka Rinne or Karl Dean. No. Last week at The East Room, a scrappy group of local comics bulldozed right through the world record for longest stand-up comedy show with multiple comedians, previously held by The Laugh Factory in Los Angeles.
"I'm so excited to announce that with 80 hours and two minutes, you guys have set a new Guinness World Record," Guinness adjudicator Michael Empric declared as a jam-packed East Room erupted into cheers, carrying co-host D.J. Buckley on their shoulders with the commemorative plaque raised high above his head.
Conceived by Buckley, who had left the show's East Nashville venue only once since Sunday morning, and brought into fruition by the efforts of Buckley, Chad Riden, Mary Jay Berger and dozens of volunteers and comics, the Broken Record Comedy Show isn't just "the greatest, dumbest thing [they've] ever done," but the most ambitious project the local comedy community ever has, and perhaps ever will, take on.
The show would ultimately run uninterrupted from 12:04 p.m. on April 12 until 4:20 a.m. on April 20 and feature dozens of comedians, including drop-in appearances by Hannibal Buress, Rory Scovel, Killer Beaz, Ahmed Ahmed and Nate Bargatze. But the real heroes are the comics whom most people have never heard of. At 6:42 a.m. on Tuesday, Narado Moore was woken from a deep sleep on a couch in the balcony of The East Room to perform for an hour and 20 minutes, filling time due to dropouts in the early hours of the morning. Volunteers and comics destroyed their sleep schedules to ensure that the minimum of 10 audience members were always present, lest a technicality dash their record attempt.
And a 10-person audience wasn't the only requirement the show had to meet. There could be no more than one person onstage at a time, MCs could only provide factual information (no jokes), no comedian could perform more than once every four hours, and every set had to be 15 minutes or longer. This world-record thing is apparently no laughing matter.
Even with the record officially broken, the organizers decided to soldier on for as long as they had the venue booked.
"I don't ever want to stop this," Riden said during his set, after the official ruling was conferred. "I want to do this again next year and break the record by one second."
I wouldn't call his bluff.
