Comedy Festival Diary, Day #2: Breakfast TV, Decorative Sidewalks & the Jason Sandwich

I'm performing in Traverse City, Michigan this week. These are my stories. < DUN DUN>

Thursday, 6:15 AM – The Locked Door

Location: Hotel Indigo Lobby

I woke up after precisely four hours of sleep with a crick in my neck, a throbbing headache, and the distinct feeling that I’d aged a decade overnight. I dragged my carcass through the shower and down to the hotel lobby to meet Ann, the festival director.

She had just woken up Bob, the marketing director, from a deep, peaceful slumber because -in a classic piece of festival scheduling- both of the local TV stations wanted to interview her at the exact same time. She threw Bob to the wolves at the Fox affiliate, and she and I hightailed it to the other station.

We arrived at the studio with minutes to spare... The door was locked. We stood there in the freezing morning fog, peering through the glass, until a long, heavy silence settled over us. We had gotten the time wrong. Eventually, the TV host wandered out, unlocked the door, and looked at us like we were crazy. “You guys are really early,” he said. “The show doesn’t start till 9:00. You aren’t on until 9:30…”

Defeated and bleary-eyed, we retreated to the hotel for coffee and breakfast to do the thing comics do best: talk shop and crack wise.

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Thursday, 9:30 AM – The Garbled Brainfart

Location: The Local Affiliate

We returned to the station just in time to go live on the air. I sat under the studio lights, squinting into the camera, trying to drum up a cogent sentence about the festival, and comedy in general.

I have absolutely no memory of what I said. It was a garbled, sleep-deprived mess. The anchor’s questions were so spectacularly vague that forming a complete, grammatically correct sentence felt like defusing a bomb. I just smiled, fumbled my way through some syllables that vaguely resembled English, and prayed the viewers were as tired as I was before they brought on the coach for the local Curling team.

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Thursday, 12:00 PM – The View

Location: Hotel Indigo

I attempted a nap. It failed. I tried to write. It was useless. Eventually, Devin Keast -the man, the myth, the legend- knocked on my door to show me the incredible view of the bay from the other side of the hotel.

I, of course, do not have a view of the bay. My window looks directly out onto a brick wall. But honestly? It’s deeply comforting. After being overwhelmed by all the fresh air and open sky yesterday, waking up to a solid wall of masonry makes me feel right at home. I’m a New Yorker; give me a brick wall over a horizon any day.

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Thursday, 6:00 PM – The Slabs & the Utes

Location: Right Brain Brewing

Devin dropped me off at Right Brain Brewing, where I was slated to host a show, before racing off to his own gig at the comedy club. The brewery is gigantic. I constantly forget how much physical space the rest of America has. I walked through the doors, past a sprawling ceiling and various doors covered in stickers, and into a massive barrel room. The smell of the hops and the old wood immediately transported me back to my childhood, doing stocktake with my cousin Gavin in the bottle shop of my dad’s pub.

We used to spend our afternoons watching tradies rumble through the drive-through, piling slabs of beer into the trays of their utes after a long day on the construction site. Gavin and I used to give them all nicknames based entirely on their faces and their drink orders. I hadn’t thought about those guys in years, but standing in this brewery, their names came rushing back: No-Neck Nev, Four-X Phil, Sweaty Pete. What a time to be alive.

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Thursday, 7:45 PM – The Jason Sandwich

Location: Right Brain Brewing Stage

I checked in with Greg, a comic who usually performs at the festival but is volunteering to run the shows this year. He and the bar manager were deep in logistical negotiations, trying to figure out how to get the audience completely drunk without interrupting the comedy. They settled on a paper-slip system where people could write their orders down and clip them to the table.

Brilliant in theory, except it required everyone to open a tab before the show. The line for the bar snaked all the way out the front door.

We started late. We couldn’t figure out how to dim the house lights, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn down the venue music. So, I just jumped on stage and hoped for the best.

The lack of nerves was a red flag, but the Midwest audience was a dream. They are generous. They smile. They clap. They respond when spoken to, but they don’t heckle. They don’t try to make themselves the main character. They don’t have TikTok-brain, demanding crowdwork every 3 seconds. They actually respect that we sat down, wrote material, practised it, and are now performing it for them. God forbid.

I tested out some local material Devin had fed me while we drove around town. I asked the crowd about Vernors- the local ginger ale that Michiganders treat as a mystical, medicinal cure-all. Everyone in the room knew exactly what I was talking about. Outside of this state, it doesn’t exist, but here, it’s penicillin in a green can. I also asked if the Flapjack Shack over on US-31 was an actual restaurant or just a front for a meth lab. The entire room nodded in solemn agreement. Meth lab.

The lineup was incredible. Janelle Draper -an old friend I haven’t seen since before the pandemic- absolutely crushed it. She recently moved back to NYC from L.A. after opening for Jay Leno, and she is sharper than ever. I opened the show, and Jason Jameson closed it, making the entire evening a perfectly executed Jason Sandwich. (That doesn’t sound great now that I’m seeing it written out.)

These are the comics that appeared on the show - all hilarious, all worth a follow:
• @brownryancomedy • @renqcomedy • @janellejokes • @darrickervinii • @thejasonxperience • @im_nthenya • @lisarimmy • @pattyrooney

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Thursday, 9:00 PM – Decorative Sidewalks

Location: The Streets of Traverse City

After the show, I needed to move. I hadn’t taken more than twenty steps all day, so I started walking toward the Opera House. A navy blue Mercedes SUV pulled up alongside me, and the window rolled down to reveal a smiling woman in her sixties. “Thank you so much!” she yelled. “Your show was so funny, we had a great time!”

I thanked her. She looked at me, confused. “Do you need a lift somewhere? Why are you walking?”

It was in that exact moment I realized that in Manhattan, walking is transportation. Here, the sidewalks are purely decorative. There wasn’t a single soul on the concrete for miles in any direction. I politely declined, explaining I needed to stretch my legs. She looked at me like I was insane, rolled up her window, and drove away.

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Thursday, 9:05 PM – Touching Dog Hair

Location: Traverse City Whiskey Co.

Still walking, I glanced through the window of an unassuming building on the corner and saw lights and bottles stacked high against a brick wall. It was the Traverse City Whiskey Co.

I walked in and was immediately greeted by “Roo,” an Australian Shepherd with one brown eye and one blue eye. I spotted him, he spotted me, and we both knew exactly what was about to happen. I sat down and patted him for ten straight minutes. It completely reset my nervous system. It was the comic’s equivalent of “touching grass,” but with dog hair.

I ordered a local whiskey, talked to a few locals, bullied them into buying the last remaining tickets for the weekend, and headed out.

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Friday, 11:20 PM – The Comedy Camp

Location: Hotel Indigo Bar

The Opera House was locked, so I headed back to the hotel. It had transformed into a full-blown welcome party.

Comics, bookers, agents, managers, and festival staff were packed into the lobby. This is the real reason we do these festivals. It’s Comedy Camp. We are all afflicted with the same brain derangement, which means we get to skip the polite formalities of normal human interaction. Within ten seconds of meeting a stranger, you are already trading war stories, hell-gig survival tactics, and social media strategies.

I bumped into Roger Paul, a booker who used to send me out on the road years ago. His assistant, Johnny, is now a dear friend of mine and a brilliant New Yorker cartoonist. When Johnny was booking my road gigs back in the day, I had no idea he was sitting on that kind of talent. Roger told me he has Johnny’s top three cartoons framed on his office wall.

As the night wore on, the laughs got louder, the stories got darker, and someone -I still don’t know who- snuck in a few tiny bottles of something truly disgusting for us to do shots of. I am going to pay for this tomorrow with a throbbing headache and crippling reflux. But right now, surrounded by people who willingly chose this ridiculous life, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Bring on Day Three.

‘til next time!
Your pal,

PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.