In between her mix of song, snark and scatological jokes, Sarah Silverman did a bit at the 9:30 Club on Sunday night where she let audience members ask her for advice, entertaining questions on everything from getting out of credit card debt to making it as a stand-up comic. If we learned one thing from this weekend’s impressive Bentzen Ball comedy festival, presented by Brightest Young Things and curated by fantastic stand-up Tig Notaro, it’s that no member of the audience is safe from today’s top comics. Notaro had an obliging 9:30 Club staffer hold up her mic stand for a good ten minutes. Sarah Silverman Program writer Chelsea Peretti handed out canned dialogue to three audience members and had them perform a skit with her. Three or four different comedians at one Studio Theatre show earlier in the weekend gave a drunken (and later, shoeless) heckler a hell of a time. And of course, no photographer was safe from ridicule.

But perhaps an even more important lesson to be taken from this weekend is that there is a whole lot of local comedy talent in the D.C. area. For those who don’t have dcstandup.com bookmarked, names like Eli Sairs, Seaton Smith, Hampton Yount and Andy Kline might not be familiar. But the 20 or so local comics who performed throughout the four-day festival shone just as brightly as the talent flown in from L.A., Portland, Chicago and New York. One can only hope that this festival repeats again next year.