Chris Harmon was still en route to the stage, but the audience was already hooting and clapping and yelling his name. Harmon—a huge man—wore giant blue jeans, work boots, and no shirt, and he’d slathered talcum powder over his pendulous bare breasts. He boomed onto the stage, took the mic, and took charge. “I’m gonna tell you what really sucks, man,” he said, pacing. “What really sucks is being locked up.” He paused and faced the audience, a sea of men in white T-shirts and gray sweats. “Well, for me, being locked up and being fat are two sucks together.” He spontaneously broke into a little circular dance, his butt crack peeking out of his pants, his belly jiggling. The crowd roared, and Harmon launched into a string of fat jokes. “I’m so fat, I’m on both sides of my family. I’m so fat that when I piss, I piss on my balls. I’m so fat . . . ” He left the stage to roars of laughter, biting into an apple that had mysteriously appeared from somewhere in the folds of his own flesh.

Harmon’s standup gig in the fluorescent-lit auditorium of Brockbridge Correctional Facility was his first, and, as they say in the business, he killed. Some of the 200-odd members of his audience, his fellow inmates at the minimum-security prison, were on their feet by the end of his performance, and the room rocked with laughter. Harmon was one of six or seven inmates—with criminal convictions ranging from auto theft to drug distribution to assault—to perform in a no-holds-barred, uncensored comedy show unlike anything to have graced the confines of a Maryland prison.

The show was the culmination of a four-week comedy workshop, the first of its kind at Brockbridge. The workshop grew out of a series of writing courses organized by Lucy Bucknell, a senior lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University who has run writing workshops for ex-offenders for years. In late 2009, she began holding them inside Brockbridge. “I think [the comedy workshop] really formed naturally out of readings at Brockbridge in the past,” she says, “out of the performance style of some of the readers.” When Bucknell began looking for someone to teach a comedy workshop, Fernando Quijano III, vice president of the Maryland Writers’ Association and a volunteer writing teacher at Brockbridge, suggested Marc Unger.

Unger has headlined some of the top clubs in the country, with appearances on Comedy Central and several one-man shows under his belt. He says he’s played some strange venues, from bowling alleys to miniature golf courses. But this was his first time teaching—or taking the stage—in prison. “There’s almost this idea that it’s gonna be like in the movies,” he says. “Where there’s gonna be like the Central Casting Hispanic guy, the older grizzled white guy, like Shawshank Redemption, you know. It’s more stark when you’re up close, when you hear the sounds of the buzzers when doors are opening and closing.” Unger—with the help of Quijano—taught the workshop on a volunteer basis once a week, for two hours each time. “I would say honestly this was the best group of pure raw talent that I ever taught, hands down,” he says. “You can’t teach inflection. You can develop it, you can get better at it, but you have to have a natural ear for it.”

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