“A man walks into a bar...” Sixteen years ago, sporting a
farm-fresh degree in creative writing from East Michigan University and
cherishing a notion of a career doing stand-up, Geoffrey Fallon came to Boston.
He’d been doing stand-up comedy in Florida clubs since before he was legal, and
Boston was considered a mecca for comics. “Everyone in Boston comedy seemed to
end up with a TV show, or at least a job at Saturday Night Live or
with Second City,” he says. (Who knew Boston was such a funny town?) Today,
Fallon has gained a rep as a mini-celeb, an expert sommelier and mixologist who
uses his sense of humor and quipster skills to take the snootiness out of the
wine business. And he plans to keep his hand in comedy writing with entries on
banQ’s blog, www.banqblog.blogspot.com.
You came to Boston planning a career in comedy? I
planned to do the club circuit at night and get a day job to pay the bills.
Since I’d already had something published, I was a shoo-in for a job in
publishing.... No dice. My “best” job was working in a switchboard boiler room
taking messages for off-duty doctors. When some friends decided to drive to New
Jersey to see a girl, I got in the car with them — mid-shift — and never went
back to work.
So how did you go from stand-up
to sommelier? I hated my “day” job, and the club thing started to
wear thin. The backstage of the comedy clubs, the managers — the whole business
is not great. Plus, as an amateur, I never made any money. So I took a job at
Milano’s as a waiter. In the middle of my first shift, I started to cry. Four
hours later, I’d become a bartender. I stayed there for five years.
How did you learn about wine? By accident. I
planned to move to New York. Just because.... Somehow, I ended up going to
Europe for a few months on a Eurail pass. And while I was in Europe,
introspecting about my life, I started noticing things, like wine and food. I
never went to New York, came back to Boston, got a job at Pho Republique as a
bartender. Got fired at four one afternoon. My first stop was at Les Zygomates
to drink and feel sorry for myself. The owner/sommelier at the time, Lorenzo
Savona, took pity on me and offered me a job. He let me finish my drink and
then started teaching me about wine. He gave me a stack of books to read on
terroir and pH and the sort of stuff I’d never been interested in
before, and I was off on a new track.
Does comedy help sell wine? I use comedy on a
daily basis. When somebody says, “Table 14 wants to talk to the sommelier,” I
go over and sit down at the table with them. It usually cracks them up. I try
to make the wine thing not such a big deal. Listen, 90 percent of the wine
conversation is bull. Someone tells you that they taste apples in the wine, and
funny, you start to taste the apples. Or, you taste a New Zealand sauvignon,
and everyone tells you it tastes like gooseberries. Who knows what gooseberries
taste like? Only a few weeks ago did I actually go and buy some gooseberries.
And you know what? New Zealand sauvignon blanc does taste like gooseberries.
What’s the best “man walks into a bar...” joke you know? Hmm.
Hopefully something really funny happens and the punch line is, “And he buys a
$400 bottle of wine.” I’ve been having the itch to do comedy again. What do you
think about a whole book of wine jokes?
