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.

Christmas Lessons

HOCKEY COACH: And, well, y'know, the kids have another hockey game coming up, and some folks were concerned because it's on December 31st, but, y'know, it's okay, this has happened before, and, I mean, we're pretty good, people usually get out by around seven-thirty...

REPORTER: And that might be kind of a fun way to spend New Year's Eve!

HOCKEY COACH: Oh, yeah, I mean, what else are you gonna do on New Year's Eve?

REPORTER: (laughing) Exactly!

What else, indeed. One of the great pleasures of visiting my folks down in Rochester -- aside from extended cable and being able to watch Bill Maher's Real Time -- is the opportunity to watch local news, or at least what passes for it here.

Size -- as with firearms and male genitalia -- is relative, after all. As an enthusiastic resident of the Mini Apple, most of my colleagues think of Rochester as a small town. But I definitely know of people in the suburbs who regard it as the big city. And I have at least one friend -- who spent a lot of time growing up on her grandmother's farm, where the nearest residence was five miles way -- who would find characterizing Rochester as small to be laughable. Then, of course, there's plenty of people on the coast who regard the Twin Cities as being backwater, a hicksville in the flyover with aspirations of trendiness.

I've commented on this before -- that, as someone who's traveled the world, it's bizarre to experience such severe culture shock between two places that are barely ninety minutes apart -- to leap from the radical liberalism of Minneapolis into the (at times) myopic conservatism of Rochester. And reinforces for me my sense that the division between red and blue states is somewhat arbitrary -- that the real political spectrum is defined by population density rather than geography.

After all, look at any electoral map of the blue-state Minnesota. You'll see an island of blue, representing the Twin Cities and their environs, in the midst of a geographically wide but sparsely populated ocean of red. Most states, whether they trend red or blue, map roughly the same way.

This is something I was thinking about, as a proponent of deregulation. To take an extreme example -- like, say, my friend's grandmother, who is largely self-sufficient -- nearly any government intrusion is going to impact her negatively. In towns small enough for its inhabitants to recognize each other on sight, the community is generally elastic enough to respond to its own needs. (Please note that I'm not romanticizing -- people in small towns can be petty, small-minded, and at times startlingly cruel. Human nature doesn't change, simply because of the level at which it's organized.)

To take an example at the opposite extreme -- like, say, New York City, which packs roughly eight million people into three hundred square miles -- a fairly nuanced system of laws may be necessary just to keep its citizens from obliviously trampling all over each other. I'm not necessarily opposed to this in theory (though in practice, I have plenty of issues with the particular laws that get passed).

The absurdity emerges when a single set of laws is created to legislate the behavior of both populations. And if there's such a wide range within the individual states, what happens when you try to legislate the behavior of a country the size of the United States? That's when we start yelling at the south for electing some of the most lunatic Presidents in our history, and they start yelling at Democrats to go back to Europe.

This is why the great cause that swung me to libertarianism isn't being anti-state or anti-tax -- although, yes, I am both of those things -- so much as my belief in the dire need for decentralization. And going back to Rochester is a good way to keep grounding myself in that important lesson.

All Right Reserved: Reviews and Reflections

So I've been avoiding the DNC coverage as much as possible. But I do a weekly trivia night at my local bar, and I plunked myself down in front of a television broadcasting the Olympics. After about five minutes, the bartender stepped in front of me and switched the channel to CNN. So, uh, there I was.

I've talked about Obama's campaign before. In terms of policy, he's not fundamentally different from most other Democrats; I wasn't really interested in the product in the many other forms in which it was offered to me, and I'm not really interested in it now. But the aspect that I've always struggled with, regarding his campaign, isn't policy, but rhetoric. It's easy to grasp why he's been so fervently embraced: he's managed to seize hold of the language of liberalism, and make it soar. If the philosophy is one that you love, then his speeches must be electrifying. But if you struggle with the underlying assumptions, the linguistic hoops he leaps are rough going.

Former Virginia governor Mark Warner was the first to speak. He expressed the usual shame and outrage, that so much is being invested in our military that could be spent on domestic programs. Erm. What about those of us who regard investment in a vast state-controlled infrastructure to be more monstrous and irresponsible than investment in national defense? For those of us who disapprove of centralizing authority within a Federal government, there isn't a place in either party. It's a game of false opposites: you can choose *where* you want that power to be centralized, but *decentralizing* power simply isn't on the menu. Laying out arguments in this format *creates* the positions that are socially acceptable to adopt.

He closed out by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." And I'm grinding my teeth, wondering what Jefferson would have made of this whole campaign. This is the same Jefferson who claimed that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," right? A claim that it's very hard to imagine this campaign making. Simply quoting a statement by one of the founding fathers (the author of the Declaration of Independence, no less!), outside of the context of his entire ideology, may not be actively deceptive -- but it's certainly misleading.

The next speaker goes on to state words to the effect of "I'm not going to mention how John McCain is simply carrying on the policies of the Bush administration" -- you just fucking did! The hell? It's one of the most absurd permutations of politically correct speech -- hearing people say things like "I'm not a racist, but there's something I just don't trust about black people." Yes! Yes you are a racist! Throwing a polite caveat in front of the statement doesn't alter that fact! And claiming that you're not going to stoop to the level of saying something, while in the process of saying it -- gah.

Hillary Clinton assumes the stage, and the camera spends half of its reaction shots on her husband. She wields the same gut-wrenching, manipulative human-interest stories about those suffering under our current health care system -- channeling it into applause for a system of universal health care, without any examination of either the underlying problems of our system or any of the countless alternative solutions -- then draws further applause for championing the nineteenth amendment(!).

I don't mean to single out Democrats here (although they're an easier target for me lately) -- the Republicans are, if anything, far *worse* in the language they use. Even alternative parties have been struggling to ape them, consciously or otherwise, under the unspoken assumption that by imitating their most repulsive qualities they can achieve their success.

I can't even blame the politicians making these utterances, either. They say what they need to in order to generate the response they require. They're fundamentally no different from so many of my colleagues, self-styled political comics who use the same words and phrases to trigger the appropriate response, regardless of whether or not they have a script with anything churning beneath that. We're all in the same business, after all -- show business -- and we use *exactly* the same collection of tools to survive.

---

I've been putting off posting my thoughts about the Minnesota Fringe run of the show -- I have, well, too many, and too many that it's going to take me a while to sort through. I will say that we achieved a very mixed response, and that I received more hostility in response to this script than any show that I've produced since 2005 ("Camelot is Crumbling").

I've had several people corner me, arguing about the use of language in the script -- whether or not it's responsible or irresponsible, and laying out careful arguments about why or why not. That's fantastic, and exactly the kind of dialogue I was hoping the script would produce. On the other hand, the vast bulk of responses I've received has been along the lines of the following:

"Some sketches hit the mark and others just seemed offensive -- and I am not easily offended. Since I think that is part of the intent of the show, they succeed."

"The gratuitous use of racial and anti-gay epithets added nothing to the show."

"My father and I went into this show with high hopes. This would be a show that would inform us, that would give us a new point of view of the world. All though we did leave with a new point of view then the one we had when we entered. The way we were brought there left little to be desired.

Rudeness. Not understanding that we live in a day where words are more then words."

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether or not it's appropriate to use a comedy show as an introduction to the entire philosophy of libertarianism -- I don't know that I accept "rudeness" as a legitimate complaint, in a show whose primary thesis is that all kinds of monstrosities can be couched within polite language.

These reviews aren't upsetting so much as frustrating -- because I simply have no idea what I could have done differently; I don't know how I could have written this script in a way that would have made them happier. I don't know what the phrase "Words are more than words" means. The "use of racial and anti-gay epithets" was -- discussed. At extreme length. Within the text itself! Irresponsible? Perhaps. Hurtful? Possibly. But gratuitous? I don't accept -- the use of language is absolutely essential to the point being made by the text.

What could I have done? To not use the language -- in a show that is devoted, specifically, to examining the use of language in a political arena -- seems profoundly hypocritical to me. I worried that the script was too preachy, too obvious, wearing its agenda on its sleeve. And what troubles me about these reviews isn't that they disliked the show, or that they disagreed with the underlying points -- it's that they don't seem to be aware of what the underlying points are. And as a writer, I have to regard that as my failure: but I'm at a loss as to what I could have done differently.

---

And as a writer, watching the DNC -- it's exactly the same arguments being played out, exactly the same rhetoric that I can't stand, exactly the same rhetoric that the script is trying to pull to pieces.

I dunno. A lot of this script emerged from the frustration of sitting through so many Bush-bashing political comedies, and feeling so intensely isolated; of looking around me at all of the people laughing, and wishing that I could join in. So I wrote a script that I was hoping could be an olive branch between us -- "See? We're not so different after all! We all want the same things! We all have the same enemies! All we're fighting over is language!"

But I suspect now that I was wrong. Maybe we don't have so much in common. And we are different. Maybe I just plain don't have anything to say to the left, and maybe they just don't have anything to say to me.

But I'll confess -- working on political comedy always leaves me in a pretty bleak place. And watching yet another election process leaves me in a bleaker one.

Final Note From Kansas City

Normally I don't reprint e-mails that I receive without first specifically receiving permission from the person who sent it -- but in this case I kinda thought, well, fuck it.

hey... you pieces of shit. that was the most fagasious shit i have even witnessed in my entire life. you call yourselves actors, ha, I call you fucking, faggot, china babies, whose use of arrogant words such as, nigger, are for shock value alone. You call your selves playwrights? who the fuck do you think you are coming to my city? seriously? You come here thinking your cool and then you call my city a ghost town as you drive into the distance... fuck you! seriously? why don't you fuckers go back to china where you belong and wright shit plays for them instead.

sincererly

FUCK YOU! minnisota nigger cunts!

niggggggggggerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
chink, gook, honkey, chinese piece of shit cong!

come back soon we miss you already!

NOT!

Now, putting aside for the moment that the most wounding part of this missive is its utter butchery of the English language -- this is far from the first message of this nature that I've received, and I'm sure it won't be the last. I'd hope that it's self-evident that there's more going on in the play than shock value, but the accusation of carelessness in my writing is always dismaying. The true arrogance on my part, I suppose, is that I can write political satire -- containing much material that I know will be hurtful to members of the audience -- and not expect to receive any backlash from it.

That said, it's almost impossible to discern exactly what his purpose is -- whether he's someone offended by use of racist terminology (in which case his e-mail is either a case of failed irony or stunning hypocrisy), or whether he's a racist himself annoyed at having been shown up (in which case, well, I will cheerfully and unapologetically say "Fuck him").

Still -- good to be back in Minnesota, y'know?

Last Night

I have to confess, exhaustion is finally starting to get the better of me – we mostly spent the day in working (with a brief excursion out for one last rack of Kansas City ribs).

Our show tonight was finally a gratifying one: a packed house, with an incredibly responsive audience. Lots of laughter, and one of my soapbox speeches was actually greeted with cheers and applause.

Part way through the show, it started to hail outside, and since we were beneath a skylight, that meant we found ourselves shouting over the thunderous storm of hailstones on the roof. Then our set, um, kind of blew apart. The screen collapsed, though the cast ad-libbed around it nicely. At one point, I grabbed a piece of it, flung it backstage, turned back to face the audience, tap-danced, grinned, and spread my hands in a little “ta-da” gesture.

This got a laugh. And the thing that’s so interesting about that to me is that it represents a clear disconnect between myself and the character that I’m playing: the audience appreciated it because I allowed the mask to slip and peered out at them from behind it. That’s notable to me, because that distinction is one that I think audiences have struggled with in the past: I’m often accused of playing myself. I certainly write to my strengths, but I think that that confusion is something that often results from writers who perform their own material: the audience assumes that the character is you.

Penner isn’t me. He may have been at one point, when I first started writing him (whoa, nearly a decade ago now) – but he’s certainly by now evolved into his own entity. In this play, he functions primarily as a buffoonish figure, a kind of summary of everything that drives me crazy about left-wing pseudo-intellectualism. He occasionally stumbles backwards into intelligent ideas, but that’s more a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day than it is of any kind of real insight that he possesses.

That distinction is critically important to me as a writer. And it’s certainly possible that it’s one that I’ve simply manufactured to allow me to work – but the fact is that I’m not all that interested in self-portraiture.

The show we saw afterwards was appallingly bad, and I stepped out about halfway through. Went for a walk, and ran into another set of Kansas City locals.

THEM: So how are you enjoying our city?

ME: I dunno – we’re strangers here, so I think that we haven’t found out where everyone is hanging.

THEM: What, are you looking for more posh places?

ME: Actually, I think we’re looking for dives.

They nodded serenely, and recommended a place called the Lava Room. The next show we saw was absolutely phenomenal, and we invited the cast to join us there afterwards.

Our last night in Kansas City, and we finally had a positive experience – a laid-back bar, populated by locals, hanging out with other artists. It’s remarkable that it was so difficult for us to find this. I’ve kind of felt pretty isolated since we arrived – there’s no out-of-town coordinator, we haven’t really had much contact with any of the artists. It’s taken us this long to finally start making these kinds of interactions happen, and it’s a shame that the Festival doesn’t really seem to have the mechanisms in place to make it work.

I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.