“I knew this contest was my best opportunity to get some semblance of recognition here,” Charlie Roettger said Wednesday at Acme Comedy Co. in Minneapolis.
Before he even cracked his first joke, he had already won the award for best hair thanks to his long, curly, strawberry-blonde locks. By the end of the night, Roettger had also been named the winner of Acme’s 33rd annual Funniest Person in the Twin Cities Contest.
“Acme felt like this titan,” he said minutes after being crowned winner. “I used my star when I first moved here, and was totally unprepared.” (First-timers at Acme can place a star next to their name at signup, guaranteeing them a slot during the venue’s weekly open mic.)
The Acme contest is a major event at the club every summer, giving names like Chad Daniels (one of last night’s judges), Pete Lee (also a judge, and headliner at Acme all this week), and Mary Mack (not there last night, but still great!) their starts. This year, 100+ amateur comedians (and people who are just doing their best, bless their hearts) battled it out through multiple rounds of competition, before narrowing the field down to the final five.
Roettger, a 25-year-old currently living in St. Paul, works a day job as an office administrator for an occupational therapy clinic. He’s been hitting the Twin Cities open mic comedy scene for around three years, frequenting places like Sisyphus Brewing Co. and Gambit Brewing Co.
Last night, the upstart comic was given the unenviable task of performing first during the contest finale, in front of a nearly sold-out crowd and a panel of judges (including yours truly). While many young performers might consider the “bullet spot” a stroke of bad luck, Roettger actually found it to be the opposite.
“Oddly enough, it calmed me down,” he explains. “I resigned myself to the fact that I was going first and was going to get buried. I figured I was going to warm up the show and be the sacrificial lamb, so at that point I just wanted to have the best set I could in front of my friends and family who had never seen me perform.”
Roettger popped right out of the gate, joking that he looks like “a person who could go missing.” For the next two and a half minutes, he managed to burn through jokes about his dad getting DUIs, his mom hating him (which is apparently not true; she jumped out of her seat when he was named the contest winner), and how testosterone and estrogen are having a battle for gender supremacy inside of his body.
“It’s time for god to decide. Again,” he quipped.
Now $1,000 richer, Roettger says he hopes to start performing comedy on the road, effectively pissing away his winnings in the process.
“I want to work around the Midwest and go through the stage of my career where I do a bunch of shows for two weeks, then come back with less money than I started with,” he says. “This $1,000 can be the money that I lose.”
