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."

Rage Across America Tour: Interlude

A little past the halfway point of the tour, now, and with the Minnesota Fringe just around the corner I thought it might be worthwhile to collate/archive some of my online content from the past couple of months.

THINGS TO WATCH

0:35     KC Fringe Promo. The place is crowded and I didn't have a mic, so it's damn-near inaudible, but in the interest of completeness here's a clip of me plugging my show when I arrived in KC.

1:30     2014 Fringe Participant Interview. A brief promo I did of my show with the Hollywood Fringe in LA.

2:22     MN Fringe Preview. Live promo I did with Matt Allex of Vilification Tennis. This was singled out by Graydon Royce of the Star Tribune as "solidly on the nice list."

2:37     Jumpin' Jack Kerouac Trailer. Trailer for a dance show I'm performing in in Minneapolis.

2:50     Jumpin' Jack Kerouac Preview. Live promo I did with the rest of the cast.

4:43     Indefinite Articles Trailer. Trailer I put together for the show some months ago.

5:37     The Calof Series. Promotional video for a storytelling series at Patrick's Cabaret that features about a minute of me workshopping one of the stories from the show.

THINGS TO LISTEN TO

1:00:01     Obsessed with Joseph Scrimshaw. A podcast interview I did in LA about J.R.R. Tolkien and his influence on my work.

1:49:47     Apropos of Nothing. Rather embarrassingly, I get even drunker than usual on this one and it rapidly devolves into us shouting slurred arguments over each other. That does seem to be what this audience comes for, however.

THINGS TO READ

03/23/2014     Story SlamMN! Interview. An interview I did with Paula Reed Nancarrow about competitive storytelling.

06/09/2014     Reddit AMA. I impulsively did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) in which I answered online questions from strangers about my career.

05/30-06/25/2014     Libertarian Rage Blog (Part One and Part Two). Reflections on the first two months of my tour.

06/25/2014     Libertarian Rage as Theater. A rather confrontational interview I did with Stubble, a local men's magazine.

07/07-11/2014     Word Sprout Blog (Part One, Part Two, and Part Three). A series of essays about storytelling that I wrote for a local spoken-word organization.

07/18/2014     Friend a Day. A surprisingly glowing profile by local comedian Tim Wick from a series in which he writes kind things about people he knows.

REVIEWS

Anger, Sarah Palin, and Whiskey. An effusive review from the Tolucan Times, a Los Angeles paper.

Hollywood Fringe Audience Reviews. Just what it sounds like.

KC Fringe Audience Reviews. Ditto.

LISTINGS

...a handful of plugs/calendar listings. Mostly variations on sampling the press release (so not too interesting to read), but included here for archival purposes.

Rochester Post-Bulletin
Express Milwaukee
Body Mind Spirit Guide
Broadway World
Libertarian Party of Missouri
Asian-American Press

...more to come, hopefully. Watch this space!

Rage Across America Tour: June!

"...nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis."

- Aldous Huxley on Los Angeles

Y'know, even if I couldn't have articulated this to myself, I think that some part of my brain was expecting LA to be more like New York (which I revisited recently) -- at the very least, much more crowded. But while it has about half the population, it's got a third of the density. It doesn't feel so much like a city as a collection of cities, each with a distinct culture, although united by one pretty awesome transit system (and as someone who tours frequently, boy howdy am I impressed by a 24-hour bus service).

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
FOUNDED: 1781
POPULATION: 3,904,657
HIERARCHY: conurbation
NICKNAME: City of Angels
VENUE: Theatre Asylum

I also think some part of me was thinking that LA would have some phenomenal theatre scene -- on the basis that it's a film/television town, and consequently full of struggling actors and writers. I was surprised to find, in my initial research, that there were very few papers regularly covering local theatre. I was also anticipating that there would be a much higher bar to clear, in terms of production quality -- but what I found is that, while there's a hell of a lot more of everything (i.e. a lot more really good shows, and a lot more really bad shows), the overall ratio of good to bad is pretty consistent with just about any other city I tour to.

The good shows (and I saw at least one that I'd call phenomenal) aren't that interesting to talk about, because a large part of what makes them good is the fact that they're unique -- they don't conform to obvious patterns. But boy howdy the bad ones do, and different patterns in every city. I saw a string of bad ones as soon as I made it into LA, bad enough that I was dragging my heels and despairing of ever seeing a good one again.

The LA bad-show pattern: a solo performance, consisting of a physically attractive actor bouncing around in front of an audience loaded with friends, cheering, laughing, and applauding throughout. The show is a memoir, with maybe about five minutes of story. The actor proceeds to put on a variety of voices, accents, and characters, sing songs, maybe do a little slapstick, all with the thinnest thread connecting this to the actual narrative. And after about four of these in a row, I had the revelation that, ah. I'm sitting through somebody's audition reel.

This is a networking city, no doubt about it. Usually, I have to down a few shots at Fringe Central before setting out and shoving my cards at strangers; here, everyone else is approaching me. I spent my first three days aggressively pushing my show at every Fringe event before realizing, hey, I don't think I've encountered a single audience member. It's all other artists. Likewise, there's hardly a critical review on that website -- it's almost entirely artists gushing at each other. I briefly considered diving in before realizing that this really wasn't the appropriate venue for critical analysis. That's not why anyone's here.

It's an environment that revolves around building relationships and being liked, and consequently my brash, swaggering, confrontational style has been met with an extraordinary amount of audience pullback -- in the shows proper, in my previews, and in my street interactions. The tense, guarded expression that comes over the face of everyone I hand a card to when they see the word "Libertarian" is a study, I tell you what.


SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

Audience numbers have been thin, but I've received some positive press, which was my primary goal in coming out here, as well as at least one serious invitation to a promising performance opportunity, which is one more than I was expecting. I certainly don't regret making the trip.

Would I make it again? That's a harder question. It's a huge investment of time (it's a month-long Festival, most are only about ten days), as well as a huge investment of money -- in addition to just general cost of day-to-day living in a city this size, I was immediately inundated with offers (hire me to do your publicity! Hire me to record your show! Hire me to place an ad!) Definitely couldn't have swung it if one of my old touring buddies hadn't offered to put me up. So while I don't object to the notion of returning at some point, I can't see it happening anytime soon.

That said, in terms of intangible benefits, well...I spent an evening chatting up an attractive Irish bartender with tales of Celtic mythology. I watched a street preacher on Skid Row quote Ecclesiastes not half a block from where I saw a homeless dude lighting up a crack pipe. I spent another evening talking the Fringe circuit with a sex worker who introduced herself by comparing me to a mass murderer.

There was an article going around Facebook a while back, but its basic gist was that Baby Boomers devote their lives to collecting status symbols, while Gen-Xers devote their lives to collecting experiences. I am definitely in the latter camp.

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.

"Morals, while subjective, support the common sense of legislature. Professed Christianity is not, as popularly misunderstood, a shorthand for strong moral character. We should refuse to allow the sloppy invocation of religion as a mass appeal in our political process."

"The key problem of our age is immature masculine energy. All problems can be traced back to some man fucking things up."

"Get more graphic with Palin."

"That I'm awesome."

Rage Across America Tour: May!

So I've been trying something of an experiment this tour: in between Festivals, I've been contacting venues in major cities that I pass through for one-night engagements. My rule? Spend no more than $50 contracting each venue. Pursue press aggressively. See if I can get audience.

ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA
FOUNDED: 1854
POPULATION: 106,769
HIERARCHY: city
MOTTO: First Class City, First Class Service
VENUE: The C4 Creative Salon

C4 was a name that not only came up in my research, but was recommended to me by several of the other venues I contacted ("This doesn't sound like a good fit for us, but y'know who it would work for...?"). I walked in the door and immediately saw why -- it's that eccentric, artsy hole-in-the-wall that every city needs at least one of (preferably six).

Of my three cities thus far, I did by far the best here, which is totally unsurprising, mainly because

- I grew up here, and
- I worked here for several years.

Also, its proximity to Minneapolis gave me the opportunity to drive down several times in the weeks before the show, both to investigate and promote -- the week before, I performed at their open-mic and aggressively handed out postcards. Local press was quite friendly as well, and C4 was more than enthusiastic about advertising the event via social media.

As for the show itself, I was startled to find that my audience skewed quite old -- I would estimate that median age was well over fifty -- with a pocket of twenty-somethings in the front row. Dick jokes are a tougher sell to baby-boomers, and I definitely got some pullback on the crasser material. (I'd say most of it still worked. "My 2016 Presidential Endorsement", a comedy set I do about Sarah Palin, is one of my favorites to perform, because it initially gets resistance -- and then it just keeps going on, and gets worse and worse, and audiences usually break down and start cackling in spite of themselves at how ridiculous it gets.)

My mailing list swelled quite respectably, and I was pulled aside for a solid twenty minutes by another libertarian. One of my favorite things about doing the political material is that in every city I do, these guys just find it, they come out of the woodwork -- and they're so grateful to find a like-minded individual in the entertainment industry. Libertarians are lonely folk, and there's so many more of us than we think -- we're just so goddamn afraid of making ourselves visible.

I made the same comment at both the open-mic and at my one-man show -- that I grew up in this town, and there was just plain nothing like this venue when I was here, and it would have made one hell of a difference to a teenage me struggling to find his creative identity. I remain deeply ambivalent about the city, but fell right in love with this venue. WOULD PURSUE AGAIN

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN
FOUNDED: 1846
POPULATION: 594,833
HIERARCHY: large city
NICKNAME: The MKE
VENUE: The Irish Pub Milwaukee

Did not go so well, and it was largely my fault -- the venue I initially engaged with canceled on me less than a month before the show, leaving me scrambling to find a last-minute replacement -- which I managed to do less than two weeks before performing. Which is not a lot of time to get press out.

Despite this, I got a very nice plug from Express Milwaukee -- the local alternative weekly, roughly equivalent to the Minneapolis City Pages. (Online edition, not print, which believe me makes a huge difference -- uh, people who are reading this online.)

Should probably have canceled, but I was determined to continue with the experiment. The experiment didn't fail, because experiments by their nature *can't* fail, they can only yield new data, but boy did the show fail. Canceled due to lack of turnout.

Did hit it off quite nicely with the server, however, who invited me out to eat with her husband -- both of them quite well-traveled, and we spent the evening trading stories about places that we've lived and worked. Certainly eased the sting of humiliation.

Any data from this is naturally skewed by the ludicrously short turnaround time I had (I typically spend at least two months on press -- here I had less than two weeks). Nevertheless, don't believe I'll be booking another show here anytime soon -- city seems like a lot of fun, but not a good fit for my material.

ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN
FOUNDED: 1824
POPULATION: 113,934
HIERARCHY: city
NICKNAME: The A2
VENUE: The Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room

I've spent some time in this city over the past couple of years, and have developed quite a fondness for it, not least because of the Vault of Midnight. I did have a healthy wariness of bringing this particular show here, however. After all, Michigan is notoriously left-wing union state. And Ann Arbor is a notoriously left-wing college town. And I managed to book a venue that really could not possibly be more left-wing. (You don't expect to see my kind of material in a place that sells healing crystals.)

I was very up-front about the nature of my jokes, and they didn't bat an eyelash about renting their community room to me. Was still a bit surprised to arrive at the space early and find one man feverishly waving his hands around another man's still body (my best guess? Massaging his chi).

They were game to let me putter around and set up, however, and I entertained myself behind the box office by reading Barack Obama's memoir while my iPhone blasted a pre-show playlist consisting of "Taxman", Public Enemy, and Ice-T. Actually managed to attract the attention of some of the clientele, including a beaming, wide-eyed woman who asked

HER: So what's the show about?
ME: It's political comedy. I should warn you, the material's very crass. And very juvenile.
HER: Oh, so, like...I won't get the references?

...no, like, it's really baby-Jesus-corpse-fucking-irrationally profane. Was a bit nervous about it -- after all, the kind of thing I do is mostly only for the kind of people who are actively seeking it out, and I don't want anyone to be unpleasantly blindsided -- until her husband trundled up and chattered away while she visited the facilities. Was pleasantly surprised to find out that, hey, he belongs to my target audience -- a jaded, foul-mouthed libertarian -- and enthusiastically invited them to join the show.

Audience was small enough that I took the liberty of turning it into a kind of workshop -- talking freely to the audience throughout, and getting feedback on the individual pieces as I was doing them -- and turned out to be surprisingly fun. Would probably do it again -- and have some ideas as to which shows to bring, and how to better target the locals.

SO WHAT HAVE I LEARNED?

I think the biggest lesson I've pulled from this experiment so far is that touring outside of a Festival context requires cooperation from the venue. If they're willing to cross-promote, and get your information out to their own mailing lists and clientele, you've got a good shot of drawing a local crowd. If they're hesitant, it's time to find another venue.

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.

"Islamists claim to be inviting a Crusade. This is a grave error for them and the majority of fine upstanding Moslems who do not suppress them. They invite the gentle mercy of the victors at Beziers in the Afghanistan crusade. 'Sir, how do we tell the good Moslems from the fanatical Jihadists?' 'Kill them all, Allah will know his own.' There are no Cathars left. Anywhere."

"phil, I have never had such terrible imagery in my head...ever...thanks...? I lost my virginity to 'Loser' by Beck."

"Speech without context. Is it really free?"

Phil 'n' Max Hit the Road

Just a head's-up -- most of my blogging for the next couple of months is going to be taking place over at the Maximum Verbosity Production Blog. It's essentially documenting my first international tour, but because I'm me I've noticed that the tone's already become pretty aggressively political. So feel free to click here and cruise on over if you're looking for more of my musings on the subject.

In Defense of Darkness

Writing the kind of work that I do, I'm frequently accused of being pretentious -- of trying to elevate the significance of my own obsessions by recasting them in the heroic language of the past. (And if that bothers you, boy, are you going to hate this latest show.) That's an accusation that I'm not necessarily prepared to refute -- but even greater than that sin is, perhaps, the period of time that I choose to fixate on -- not the classics of Greece and Rome, nor the enlightenment of the Renaissance -- but rather, on the Dark Ages themselves.

Why, some have speculated, would anyone choose to fixate on those benighted and barbaric times? Particularly when they're surrounded by the ideals of democracy and humanism and all that good stuff? Because, I counter, it's in the Middle Ages that the modern man was born. Current scholarship favors the Renaissance, but I disagree. My reason? Here's, say, nine.

1) The language that you and I speak? That I'm writing in right now, and that you're reading? Medieval. Dating in its earliest form to the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, at which point the island was renamed to Angle-land, or, as we know it today, England -- and its brand-spanking-new language, English.

2) The two largest religions in the world today? One of them -- Islam -- was born in the Middle Ages, when the merchant Mohammed supposedly received a vision from the Archangel Gabriel -- and the other, Christianity, also rose to prominence in this time. They came into conflict in a series of wars known as the Crusades -- memorably evoked (by name!) by President Bush during his tenure. So that animosity and vitriol that fuels most of our current wars and blog posts and whatnot? Born -- naturally -- in the Middle Ages.

3) That middle-class that politicians talk about (and cater to) constantly? And the union system that wields such devastating power of our economy? Can be traced directly back to the rise of guilds of skilled artisans that were emerging as European cities swelled in size.

4) Our entire legal system -- one of common law, with a trial by a jury of peers and founded on the concept of legal precedent, accountable to the state rather than to the church -- we largely have Henry II to thank for, thank you very much.

5) Angsting over your last relationship? We have the Middle Ages to thank for our whole existing concept of courtly and romantic love. The significance of this can't be underestimated. The chivalric code of Lancelot du Lac may seem silly and archaic, but he was a pioneer for the fucked-up relationships that we're struggling through now. The gender roles and combinations may have shifted recently, but the template we still use for relating to each other was born a thousand years ago.

6) Then there's concept of individual liberty, and the limitation of state power. All effectively articulated in the Magna Carta, a medieval document that subjected executive authority to the law. The document's easy to romanticize -- in reality, all it was really doing was taking power from one thug and dividing it among several -- but it started a dialogue, a language, and a system of thought that eventually led to Oliver Cromwell and John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.

7) Maybe this whole conversation seems silly and annoying, and you just want to nip down to your local watering hole for some libation. Beer and wine have been around for nearly as long as our species has -- but the distillation of liquor? Whether you want to order a brandy, scotch, whiskey, vodka, or gin -- all of them were discovered in the Middle Ages. Even if you abandon those and grab a beer -- the whole concept of brewing hops into beer, and thereby being able to control its flavor and consistency, was born then as well. Even the bar you're sitting in exists because of the Saxon alehouses that preceded it.

8) The literacy that enables you to read windy and rambling blog posts -- for that, you can thank yet another medieval invention: the printing press, which for the first time in human history enabled us to disseminate written information widely, without relying on monks copying out every letter by hand. (Oh, by the way, Catholic monasteries? Those centers of learning, which are responsible for the preservation of nearly all of the texts we have both from this period and before? We can thank the Monastic Rule of St. Benedict.)

9) Or the country that you occupy (assuming that the bulk of my readership is in the United States) -- although we have pretty solid evidence that the country had been discovered by both the Chinese and the Icelanders previously, it was the voyage of Columbus that brought our continent to the attention of European civilization.

So why does any of this matter? Because the vast bulk of what you do, think, or feel, can be traced directly back to a single period of time. My own religious faith, political ideology, theatrical profession, racial identity, sexual relationships, and alcoholic fraternity -- all achieved their current form within a single millennia. That's *extraordinary*. And to not be conscious of that fact seems to me to be failing to acknowledge *why* any of us believe the things that we believe, or behave the way that we choose to behave. It is to live in profound ignorance of why we are the way we are.

Which is, perhaps, why I -- throughout my career -- keep coming back to the romances of the medieval writers. I find something modern in Malory's imagination. And we haven't evolved as much as we like to believe that we have.