Rage Across America Tour: Postamble

"Our fellow citizens had fallen into line, adapted themselves, as people say, to the situation, because there was no way of doing otherwise. Naturally they retained the attitudes of sadness and suffering, but they had ceased to feel their sting. Indeed, to some...this precisely was the most disheartening thing: that the habit of despair is worse than despair itself."

- Albert Camus, The Plague

Well, that was a not-insignificant chunk of my life and career.

One of the major obstacles I've had to any kind of successful branding is my predilection for genre-hopping -- up next for me (and I'll hold off on the official announcement for a few more weeks) is my take on some squeaky-clean children's fantasy, and the audience I've built over the past few months is unlikely to follow me to it.

It's been a few years since I really dug into straight-up political satire, and it'll probably be a few more years before I plumb that well again -- until I, y'know, have something more to say on the subject. Of the genres I play with, it's by far the most exhausting. It requires the cultivation of a sharp tongue and a cynical outlook, and while I absolutely believe in the moral importance of rage -- its darker sister, as Camus well knows, is despair -- it's difficult to sustain that level of anger. Particularly for someone as introverted as me.

Like most of my projects, the end-product wasn't so much a goal as a by-product of an existing process. This was my attempt to compile some of my most successful short pieces in one place -- not an attempt to sit down and write a political show, but to recognize that a huge proportion of my comedy writing is political. I remain bewildered by the fact that the material that has consistently killed it with spoken-word crowds (one of the pieces placed me in MN Story Slam Finals) was so challenging to sell outside of that demographic.

So what's different? Two things leap out at me:

1) the environment. Most of these sets were developed in front of late-night crowds -- pubs 'n' clubs -- where the audience was generally young, knocking back a few drinks, and looking to have a good time. That's a different experience from the more formal one of reserving a ticket and sitting down in a darkened theatre.

Most notably, many of the audiences I performed for seemed to be actively looking to have a bad time, staring daggers and seething hostility before I opened my mouth. Which, I mean, I can handle audience hostility, but it raises the question: why were they there in the first place?

Actually, this I think I get -- I get the impulse to seek out entertainment to hate-watch. I was an avid listener to Air America back in the day -- I would drive, scream, swear, and pound the steering wheel. That rush of adrenalin that anger brings can feel fantastic, and I'm indebted to the radio network for birthing many of the stories in the show.

So, hey, if I was serving that function for the audience, I'm happy to take my place in the circle of rage. the ciiiiiiiircle of raaaaaage

2) but the bigger factor, I suspect, is packaging. It's one thing to be out for a night of entertainment, and to have some guy appear in front of you cracking political jokes, many of which happen to libertarian. It's another thing entirely to grit your teeth and buy a ticket to see a libertarian comic.

Not only is that a tougher sell, but that marketing re-contextualizes all of the individual jokes. Didactic or not, the stories become so when the title implies a message. Which, y'know, I'm disinclined to shy away from, but dem's the breaks.

But, yeah, I'm wiped -- more so than I usually am at the end of a tour -- and it's largely because I once again utterly failed to properly market this thing. One question I get asked a lot on the road is "Don't you get tired of the material?" ...and my answer is usually no, I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it. I do, however, grow exceedingly tired of the wildly erratic crowds. Any performer will tell you that, while a large crowd buoys you, a thin one just sucks the energy out of you -- you have to work that much harder to keep the room alive. And for several stretches of this particular tour, I was working very, very hard.

It spreads, too, to other aspects of the experience. If you've got a hit show, then everybody's your best friend. If your material is struggling, no one will look twice at you. I had one defining experience, with another political comic whom I thought I was getting along quite well with. During one post-show drinking session, I made some crack, and he did a double-take, stating "I thought the libertarian thing was ironic." Er, no, I responded -- and he then looked away, avoiding me for the rest of the week.

But, y'know? This is all bruised-ego shit, and my ego has proven to be not unlike Prometheus' liver in its ability to continually regenerate itself. The exhaustion will pass, the psychic wounds will heal, and the frustrations will fade. So what will I remember?

I'll remember the fact that, after nearly every show I've done for the past couple of months, I've had at least one person pull me aside to try to express their shared rage, their loneliness, their frustrated idealism. I had one guy grab me firmly by the hand, look me in the eye with somewhat alarming intensity, and say "Most people aren't going to get what you're doing here. But it's important." And putting aside for the moment my usual cynicism (i.e. how important can it possibly be if most people aren't getting it?) -- I can't pretend I wasn't a little moved.

I've now been doing political comedy long enough to get the fact that politics in popular culture are cyclical. Right now, libertarianism -- particularly in the liberal arts world -- is an object of scorn. But that doesn't mean that all the impassioned libertarians go away. We're still here, even if there doesn't seem to be a place for us in the zeitgeist right now. And if I can provide a space for us to step back, point at the soul-crushing, hellishly absurd nightmare that our economic and electoral system has become, and laugh -- then that's something I can feel proud of on my deathbed.

I'll do one more compilation of online writing next week, just so it's all in one place. Before I go, I couldn't resist sharing this: a word cloud I put together from all of my First Amendment Box responses. If you want a cross-section of the country's collective unconscious, this is my contribution.

Rage Across America Tour: September!

"The Gambler's Fallacy...is the belief that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in repeated independent trials of some random process then these deviations are likely to be evened out by opposite deviations in the future...[it] implicitly involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process and therefore involves a denial of the exchangeability of outcomes of the random process."

I've been thinking about the Gambler's Fallacy a lot on this tour, as my audience numbers have been wildly yo-yo-ing up and down from city to city. (Not that attendance is a random process -- there's some pretty clearly evident variance in cause and effect -- but the emotional results can certainly feel that way, and the Fallacy's more about a psychological phenomenon than a mathematical one, anyway.)

tl;dr: you can't make predictions based on what you feel like the universe owes you.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
FOUNDED: 1833
POPULATION: 2,695,598
HIERARCHY: metropolis
MOTTO: Urbs in Horto
VENUE: Youth Company Chicago

I find myself doing a more ambitious tour every couple of years. By the end of each one, I'm exhausted and frustrated enough that I swear not to do so again, but then a few years pass and the itch of wanderlust returns. In this case, my primary motive (perhaps appropriately for a libertarian show) was financial.

To say that I regard myself as a somewhat private person may seem absurd, coming from a blogger who got engaged onstage, but there are many aspects of my life that I try to keep guarded from just how crass I know show business can get. In this case, the anxious/euphoric/stressful cloud over my head that I haven't been mentioning for the past couple of months is that I'm getting married -- in, Jesus, a few weeks here now.

A longer tour seemed like an opportunity for me to generate some badly-needed cash to help finance the shindig. Unfortunately, my unbroken track record for failing to predict how successful one of my shows is going to be seems to be spot-on -- while I have turned a tidy profit (and I'm deeply amused by the notion that such irreverent material is contributing to a very reverent event, which seems like an apt metaphor for the whole relationship, really), it's fallen pretty far short of the economic neighborhood I was aiming for.

The other complicating factor is the fact that traveling to raise money for the wedding means that I haven't been physically present for much of the actual wedding planning. I have the most phenomenal fiancee on the planet who's never been anything but supportive, but I've definitely been able to hear the stress in her voice, and our shared frustration at my inability to shoulder some key bits of the workload has been wearing.

---

The inverse of the Gambler's Fallacy is the notion of streaks of good and bad luck, and though they're mathematically problematic I've never been able to help being swayed by them. In this case, I found a number of troubling signs collecting around my approach to the Chicago Fringe:

- the complete lack of any press response, despite an unusually high level of marketing aggression on my part.

- the cancellation by my billeter shortly before I arrived in town. I want to emphasize that this is no way the responsibility of the Festival's housing coordinator, who went above and beyond the call of duty, offering her own living space to be shared by myself and another artist.

- the parking situation, which I anticipated would be problematic but has grown exponentially more so since my last time working in town (in 2011). After several hours of searching, I couldn't find any space nearby for my car that wouldn't set me back several hundreds of dollars that I hadn't budgeted for, and circumstances would require me to move it several times. This, in addition to basic day-to-day costs of being in a city the size of Chicago, was placing me in some pretty dire financial straits.

- early on, I also had an episode of night terrors that cost the artist I was sharing a room with to lose a precious night's sleep. I've been plagued by a number of parasomnias, loud screaming and sleepwalking among them, but they've never been a problem while touring -- until now. Mortified, and since I am apparently incapable of moderating my behavior while unconscious, I quarantined myself to sleeping on the patio, to prevent future soporific episodes from plaguing anyone else.

- I'd say that the final stroke, however, came when I ended up canceling my opening night due to lack of turnout. It's my second such cancellation this tour -- but the first one was a one-night deal, due to some pretty mitigating circumstances. Canceling an opening night in a major city is a very, very bad sign.

I found myself playing through the upcoming two weeks in my head. I was exhausted, and hadn't had an uninterrupted night's sleep in over a week. I was hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate that I was now clearly not going to earn back. What was the best-case scenario? That a handful of other artists would take pity on me, show up to offer their support, and I'd give them a free show? I had just that last little bit of pride left, that stated that it would be preferable to give myself a penile frenulectomy with an icicle.

A mid-Festival cancellation is rare, but not unheard of. Even considering it brought an extraordinary amount of guilt and shame -- it is, after all, a slot that could potentially have gone to another struggling artist, and it creates just that much more work for the Festival organizers who are already spread terribly, terribly thin. The third -- and, in my view, the greatest factor -- is the betrayal of the audience.

And, in a sense, it's that third factor that convinced me. What audience? What audience was there to betray? This ain't my first rodeo. I know when it's time to call the patient. I sat down with the housing coordinator, explained my situation; contacted the director, and swung by my venue to pick up my properties; told Siri to take me home, and with that, I pulled the plug.

---

The trip home was not without its stresses, including faulty brakes and several lightning storms, because Loki apparently can't resist the urge to sign his work. Partway to my destination, I received a text from my fiancee, telling me (to my astonishment) that I was expected. One of the downsides of being in love with a detective is that it's impossible to surprise her. A few hours later, I let myself in her front door. There was a box of wedding invitations on the dining room table, and my groomsmen's jackets were laid out on chairs surrounding it.

I was coming out of a lot of shame and frustration and anger. I knew I had a lot more in front of me, as I worked through the consequences of my decision. I've made a lot of shitty choices in the past couple of months. But in that moment, for better or worse, I knew that this one was the right one. I was where I needed to be.

SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA
FOUNDED: 1854
POPULATION: 285,068
HIERARCHY: city
NICKNAME: Pig's Eye
VENUE: Amsterdam Bar and Hall

You never want to end with a matinee. It's one of those unspoken bits of production wisdom: you always want to have a matinee, for the audience that can't make your evening show, but it's not going to have your strongest turnout. And you want to end strong.

Booking a Saint Paul show was all about trying to end strong. There was already an element of risk here, since Fringe remounts traditionally have to struggle to find audience, and this show had already struggled in Minneapolis: but I knew that I wanted to close out somewhere close to home. I knew the venue -- I'd hosted a burlesque show here last year -- and it had the added resonance of being less than a mile from the state capitol. I booked it eagerly.

I did everything I could think of to make this one special. I made it a fundraiser, donating half of the door to FairVote Minnesota, an organization devoted to electoral reform -- and they were kind enough to send several volunteers with T-shirts and a mailing list. I invited two other libertarian comics to perform with me on the bill. I officially announced the release of the sketch comedy album I've been secretly working on for the past several months (available now on Amazon! And iTunes!). I didn't know how many people were going to show up, but by God there was going to be a party for those who did.

Turnout was, unsurprisingly, small -- not embarrassingly so, greater than my fears but short of my ambitions. Most importantly, it was just short of that critical mass that every comedian desires -- the number of bodies that generate the collective response of a crowd, rather than the response of a collection of individuals.

See, but this was actually one of the most interesting aspects of the show. My marketing blitzkrieg had resulted in several disparate groups -- there were Fringers, there were libertarians, and there were electoral reformers -- and the overall result was that you could hear ripples of laughter from individual pockets of the room: one joke would hit one demographic, another another. The performance felt, at times, almost like a textbook study of targeted jokes. And a death knell to the notion of universal comedy.

Which, really, may have been, if not the strongest, then by far the most appropriate note to end this tour on.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

I think that I may actually be dumber now than I was when I started.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

"I believe passionately in the right of individuals to recuse themselves from coercive acts of the state. Specifically, I believe in the 13th Amendments of the (SERIOUSLY ENDANGERED) United States Constitution, and that it enjoins the federal government or any state or local government from obliging involuntary servitude in any form - civilian and/or military - whatsoever. LEGALIZE THE U.S. CONSTITUTION!"

"I hate men. I pretty much think they're all pedophiles and idiots. And warmongers and controlling sociopaths. (Well, most.)"

"AN-CAP *voluntaryist/abolitionist +Voting is immoral & the lesser of two evils imposes aggression by proxy."

"I had to urinate SO BAD that my bladder was walled against my feces, only the strength of my anus can save me now"

"I don't think much I don't say; so, I'll say this: fuck Kanzer and Bieber - Thought"

"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
My term of endearment:
C-U-N-T"

(I just want to indicate that my transcription cannot capture the loving calligraphic detail, as well as the illustrations and flourishes, with which that last poem was written. And I can't imagine a better note to end this entry on. I'll plan on penning an overall reflection sometime next week: otherwise, thanks for reading!)

Rage Across America Tour: August!

August turned out to be a month of some very bizarre and unexpected extremes. Fortunately, I'm an extremist.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

FOUNDED: 1867

POPULATION: 382,578

HIERARCHY: large city

MOTTO: En avant!

VENUE: U of M Rarig Center Arena

By all accounts, this was another record-breaking year for the Minnesota Fringe: audience numbers continue to grow, a number of new and upcoming companies did surprisingly well, and I heartily congratulate the new administration on their hard work to bring this about. As for me, I had the worst audience response and turnout that a show I've produced in the Festival has had since 2005. My audiences in both Kansas City and Indianapolis outstripped my hometown attendance by an order of magnitude. What happened?

One trend that I noticed was an upsurge in the suburban audience -- I saw several audience reviews talking about making the trip into the city, etc. I know this is a grail that the staff has been chasing for some time, and I believe that it's ultimately good for the long-term health of the Festival. One of the bizarre short-term effects is a major spike in the overall conservatism of the audience -- I saw some of the most audience-friendly comics being sternly lectured about the vulgarity or non-traditionalism in their shows. And, uh, I am on the opposite end of the spectrum from audience-friendly.

At just about every show, I'd walk onstage to see a large number of older patrons glowering at me humorlessly. And I was torn between my typical mental response of "I'm so grateful that you've come out to hear what I have to say!" and "Oh, man, you are really not going to have a good time for the next hour."

(This did give me the surreal experience of being pulled aside by people in LA and KC saying "You really need to step up the raunch, dude, seriously" and being pulled aside by people in my normally progressive hometown saying "You really need to dial back the raunch, dude, seriously.")

But I think that having a handful of audience members stumble in from outside of my target demographic -- that's a smaller issue. The larger one is, where the hell was my core audience? I'm coming off of a string of well-attended and well-received storytelling shows: the audience that met them with warmth and enthusiasm was nowhere to be seen.

The most obvious notion is that they were leery of the content. I'm hesitant to accept this, because I've done quite well producing political comedy before. But that was during the Bush administration, when being a libertarian was cool and weird and sexy. Under a Democratic administration, it's a dirty word. I spoke a while back with an older libertarian comic who confided in me that he just couldn't get any traction with that material in the Clinton years, and for the first time I think I'm starting to understand what he meant.

(I must have understood this on some level, since I largely quit political blogging once Obama was elected. There just wouldn't be any more fun to be had: we must regard our leader with great solemnity, now.)

I did a show a few years ago with another storyteller who advised me to cut the phrase "libertarian activist" from my standard bio, concerned that audiences would associate me with the Tea Party. My immediate thought? That I had been a libertarian for years before this vaguely racist pack of anti-intellectual bumper-sticker-shouting paranoid hacks stumbled drunkenly onto the scene, and I would be damned if I would yield the title to them.

My experience this year to me suggests that my consent was never necessary, and that they've already won that battle in the public eye. Libertarian is a dirty word, and will be for the foreseeable future. We lost the war; and insofar as one of my goals with this show was to humanize the philosophy, my inability to get an audience in the door to hear the material made that a resounding failure.

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA

FOUNDED: 1821

POPULATION: 820,445

HIERARCHY: large city

NICKNAME: Circle City

VENUE: ComedySportz Indianapolis

ME: Hey there! I'm doing a political comedy show over at ComedySportz.

PATRON (peering at the card suspiciously): I saw this in the programme. I didn't know what to make of it.

ME: Then you should come and see the show! And still not know what to make of it!

The executive director of indyFringe is a real sweetheart, who pulled me aside partway through the Festival and asked, with some concern, how my experience had been going. A number of people had been asking her warily about the libertarian, she informed me.

See, I didn't need her to inform me of this, because part of the bizarre, translucent nature of Fringe fame means that I've been hearing a lot of this firsthand. Either I'm incredibly lucky this year or people are talking about my show constantly, because I've been overhearing conversations about it in every city I've been to.

There was one particularly insufferable couple in Indianapolis. As I stood outside doing my aggressively intensive vocal warm-ups, they peered in through the window and spent several minutes pointing at my audience, making fun of them, and laughing. I smiled, nodded, and agreed that whoever had brought this show to their town must be an idiot. I then waited until they left, slipped my flask back into my pocket, stepped inside, and proceeded to do a show in which that audience laughed at nearly every sentence out of my mouth for the next hour.

Indianapolis may have been wary, but you would never have guessed it from my audience turnout, which was consistently robust -- and once I guided them through their initial trepidation (which typically takes me about 5-10 minutes) they were hooting, cheering, and applauding. I had one group that came with the explicit intent of sabotaging my show through heckling: they quickly became among my most vocal supporters.

Indy has one of the strongest senses of community of any Fringe that I've toured to. This can be attributed, I suspect, to several factors. For one, it's much smaller -- there's only 64 shows -- which means audiences are seeing a larger percentage, and are consequently much more game to take chances on an unknown. For another, it's geographically tight-knit: just about everything takes place in a four-block radius. With copious buskers, you turn onto Mass Ave and you enter Fringe World.

I was dragging my heels into this one, dreading every performance; and I walked away from just about every performance feeling like my skin was singing. After an uncharacteristically negative hometown experience, Indy's adventurous audience restored my faith in the circuit.

"What we love about you," the ED said to me, "Is that every show you bring forces the audience to make a choice." I'll take it. On to Chicago.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

That I still have a lot to learn.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

- I want to control the weather

- Mandatory oral sex at all voting locations

- A chicken in every pot and pot in every pipe

- Health care - flat tax

- Snowman tax

RE NEXT FREE ELECTION:

1)  All Republicans are obsolete and irrelevant post Andrew Jackson;

2)  Hillary Clinton is too morally ambiguous and ego [illegible];

3)  another [illegible] free candidate after Obama, if we must, but a hyphenated name like -- Garcia-Schneider!

America is a land of illusion, full of pageantry and falsehoods. There are figureheads in the highest offices, producing theatre, hiding behind false ideals, letting the wizards behind the curtain do what they like. I sometimes feel like I'm watching a movie and I'm the only one who can tell Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. You can be free in America, but you have to have enough money to buy it.

War against pigs. Legalize meth. Ban the behind the ass under the balls angle in porn. Forget the Alamo. Lower the drinking age to 13. Ban anime, execute all anime scofflaws. Smoke weed. War against the mail-men. Set Mike Pence on fire and throw him down stairs. Don't comply. (BLACKS!) Eternal salvation or your money back! SUBGENIUS.com

If those fucking tea-baggers and crazed evangelicals got all the dumb shit the way they say they want it, they'd still probably not realize how fucking stupid they all are! Dumbass Libertarians are included in this mini-rant I wrote. Your ideas as a Libertarian are repulsive!

The Repubs are like bank robbers. You might not approve, but you can sort of understand. The Dems are more like the guy who takes a tennis racket and tries to chop down a lamppost because he thinks it's the Antichrist.

The electoral college should be disbanded and all governmental positions, federal, state and local AND all federal, state, and local policies should be voted on by the people of the US. Even tax changes!

Change the national anthem to Mm-Bop. Or something with a peppy tune. The internet gives too many idiots a forum to be...idiotic. And, apparently, I am too much of an idiot to deny them my attention.

People should be allowed to save unused votes and then use them all in the event a qualified candidate runs. Congress shall pass a balanced budget before any other bill and before being paid.

To the extent that we have taxes, men should pay more, as they disproportionately commit crimes and burden the criminal justice system (which is a big business in America anyway).

America is not the greatest country in the world. Christianity is not compatible with being a soldier.

We are all doomed! Unless we are not...revolution. It will be televised this time.

End of life care is too expensive -- sick old people should be euthanized.

Campaign finance reform is priority one. All other concerns are secondary.

There is no hope unless we can bring ourselves to compromise with our enemies.

As a gay man, I'm terrified of AIDS but condomless sex feels so good.

I really want to hate your show, but I don't. Bravo. Keep inquiring!

I believe that eugenics may be the answer to our future survival.

Robin Hood was returning citizens' extraordinary taxes! Thanks!

[Drawing of a marijuana leaf.] THIS. (I am an intellectual.)

If the world smoked a joint, there would be peace forever.

Stupid people should not be allowed to reproduce.

(I pretty much say everything I think.)

A right not exercised is a right lost.

#GaryJohnson for President

Anything I believe

     I believe is true

But

     I don't believe

     everything I believe

     is true

Rage Across America Tour: July!

I've found that this month has evoked a strong, strange sense of déjà vu for me, for a number of reasons. Des Moines is the first city I ever toured to, for one, and the show I'm touring is a sequel to the first I brought to Kansas City, for another -- not to mention the fact that this was the KC Fringe's tenth anniversary. Just about everything I experienced seemed to be happening in the shadow of something I'd experienced before.

DES MOINES, IOWA
FOUNDED: 1851
POPULATION: 203,433
HIERARCHY: city
NICKNAME: The DSM
VENUE: Java Joe's CoffeeHouse

Des Moines is a weird place. (Actually, I take that back -- everywhere is a weird place. There's no such thing as normal.) I remember my first night there many years ago -- I impulsively contacted all the other out-of-towners and, since we'd been running tech rehearsals and promoting all day, set out to find something to eat at 11pm. On a Thursday. We were stunned to find everything closed. Finally, we found a pair of guys smoking outside a bar. I approached one of them, saying, "Hey, we're from out of town, and we were wondering if there was anywhere nearby we could grab a bite to eat..." and he, no exaggeration, hands-on-his-hips Errol-Flynn belly-laughed at the very idea of finding food after ten o'clock.

Of course, that was years ago, and back before I was more adventurous on the road. This time, I noticed that my venue had a poetry slam taking place the night before my show. My experience at C4 in Rochester taught me that I'd be a fool to not take advantage of this and, after some grumbling and heel-dragging, I hastily packed my stuff and left early enough to check into my hotel and walk down.

I slipped in the side door, ordered a beer, and signed up to compete when the list went up. I'm a competent slam poet, though not a great one -- so imagine my surprise when I plowed through to the final round. After my first set, the host peered out at me and asked "Wait a minute, who the hell are you?" I explained I was from out of town, and he was generous enough to give me a chance to plug my show from the stage.

Aggressively handed out postcards to everyone on the way out, and it paid off -- turnout was small, but more than half of it was from the slam. (The other slightly-less-than-half was from the local libertarian community, so that press release paid off.) Venue offered me a door-cut, so it didn't cost me a dime -- if nothing else, it was another live-fire rehearsal I made some pocket change off of, and it was great to have the chance to connect with both the poets and the politicians. (I chatted with one of the former about the now-defunct Iowa Fringe, and assured him that I, for one, was just waiting for a bunch of them to get together and get it up and running again. I'd be there in a heartbeat.)

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
FOUNDED: 1853
POPULATION: 467,007
HIERARCHY: large city
NICKNAME: Paris of the Plains
VENUE: Westport Flea Market

Another one of the (many) nicknames of this place is the "Heart of America", since it's close to both the population and geographic centers of these United States. I tour a lot (obviously), and just about every city I go to claims to be nation's cultural crossroads. This is the one place I've been (and, indeed, it's one of the reasons that I keep going) that I think has a credible claim to the title.

There's just plain a little of everything there. There's some of the Midwest, some of the South, and a great big dollop of both the coasts, everywhere you go. It certainly has its share of racial tension. I remember a sketch comedy I toured back in 2008, which contained a series of jokes involving racial slurs. In Minneapolis, we'd get some audience pullback, then a sort of cautious "Okay, let's see where they're going with this." In Kansas City, you could hear a fucking pin drop.

I love Kansas City. This is my seventh consecutive year working there, and I fall a little more in love each time. It's weird, but it's a different kind of weird than Des Moines. Similar, in some ways, to Indianapolis. I have the impression that both are, overall, conservative cities, and consequently their arts communities compensate by swinging way left. Jesus-bashing, Bush jokes, and naked flesh go over like gangbusters in both places.

(KC has an obsession with burlesque that the local audience seems totally unconscious of -- every time I bring up the fact that it's unusual they look at me like I'm crazy. No, I say, every Fringe has, like, one or two that do okay. This Festival always has, like, a dozen -- that are selling out every show. It's both awesome and mystifying to me.)

The flip side of that is that, being that rarest of animals -- the fiscally conservative artist -- no one quite seems to know what to do with me when I swagger in, brandishing my politics on my sleeve. (I had several audience members tell me point-blank that they weren't seeing my show because of the content, which I respect more than the phony glad-handling I received in LA. I was gratified to see that my years of working here are paying off -- I'm generally known to the audience, and I had several people coming up to me gushing praise for my previous shows, even as they acknowledged that they weren't attending this one.)

One pleasant surprise I found -- in every city on this tour, I've been appealing to local libertarian groups. For whatever reason, this is the state that responded effusively. They plugged my show, and I had a handful of libertarians showing up at every performance, often inviting me out and buying me drinks afterward. The sense I had from them was one of wariness (is he really one of us, or is he making fun of us?) (...er, answer: both), which rapidly progressed to relief (oh, thank God, we can actually relax and talk about these ideas without fear of reprisal). I'm nothing but grateful to them, and hope that I provided something in return.

The experience was probably best summed-up by the late-night shows I performed at. The Festival runs a late-night cabaret (of which I've had the honor of being one of the hosts for several years). It's a strange animal with a strange mix of audiences and responses, and I definitely got the full range.

One night, the evening took the format of a playful game show, in which we were asked random questions via the spin of a wheel. Not that I'm a comic genius with the ad-libbing -- it's a loose, silly, late-night kind of deal -- but wow, did I get a sense of audience hostility. My politics were a recurring joke, and I'd look out to a sea of tight-lipped frowns every time I opened my mouth. Not to dismiss the (painfully likely) possibility that I was just chronically unfunny, but I seemed to get audience pullback before even stumbling towards a punchline.

A few nights later, I did another comedy set to a packed house. (And I'll be honest -- I overheard some audience members behind me bad-mouthing me, not realizing I was in earshot. It got me good and angry, and angry is when I seem to do better with audiences.) Frankly, I killed it. One of those shows -- they were hanging onto every word and I knocked every laugh-line out of the park. It was fun, it was gratifying, and it reminded me of the fact that the material actually works when there's a critical mass of people who are sufficiently relaxed -- which makes it all the more aggravating when that audience doesn't show up. Which I have to regard as a marketing failure, on my part. Too confrontational? But how the hell else do you sell this?

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

In Des Moines? Strongly reinforcing what I've already begun to suspect -- that these one-night shows can't just be one-night shows. You've got to show up at least a week in advance to start putting yourself out there and promoting.

As for Kansas City -- enh. I've had other performers, both there and in LA, pull me aside and give me marketing advice, which seems to boil down to "Be more sassy and confrontational!" But my sense is that that is exactly what is alienating my potential core audience. Not that this is a new problem, for me. I have lots more data, if I could only figure out what the fuck to do with it.

FIRST AMENDMENT BOX RESPONSES

As part of the tour, I've included in each programme a "First Amendment Box", in which audience members may write any extreme, absurd, or politically incorrect thought -- and submit it anonymously. I share them here, with no commentary or context.

"Sometimes I feel like I desire stronger relationships with others - but don't say anything due to what they may think like - to tell my husband I have feelings of being with other men who were so amazing in bed & spirit, or telling girlfriends I want to get with them, not that I would, just that I want to, or telling people I believe in Jesus, that's got to be the hardest honest statement to admit to those I know these days."

"Superman sucks donkey dick. Marvel > DC!!! Keira Knightley should not put away her nipples. She has literally no boobs though so it doesn't matter if you see the nips or not. Milton [Friedman]'s assertion that capitalism separates the spheres of economic and political power is a load of crap."

"Quack-a-dilly blip. What to do you call an 80 year old atheist...agnostic. What do you call an oppressed libertarian...Democrat. What do you call a successful business man who is a libertarian...Republican."

"If you are a lawmaker and pass a law = you should have to live by it also...not be exempt. I know how to live my life and spend my money better than any lawmaker or rulemaker. They think - they know how to live my life better than I."

"Our hope is to remove Gov. Sam Brownback in the next election. Or replace w/ anybody but Tea Party person. The GOP party are the zombie party seraching for brains."

"What I meant to say is that George Bush is a narcissist while Dick Cheney is a megalomaniac. And the two cannot be considered in isolation."