Nina Ghiselli (G for the stage) and OJ Patterson are the two Bay Area natives and comedians seasoned by their hometowns ready to fix that with a spirited chronology of “the scene” of Bay Area comedy, spanning decades, characters, venues and, above all, the superior taste in humor that living here creates. Having grown up in Alameda and “all over” respectively, and worked as comics for years (though Patterson now calls himself retired and lives in LA), they realized no one else was going to write the book about their world. What was floated as a pandemic project fertilized across months of archival research, interviews and lived experience (oh, and writing) into “Bay Area Stand-Up Comedy: A Humorous History,” which, G writes in her introduction, is “a book that broadly explores Bay Area comedy in words and pictures.” And broadly speaking, San Francisco is a vanguard.
