Road Ragin'

It’s 9:33pm and I’m backstage at a terrific little nightclub called Planet of the Tapes in Louisville, KY. I’m performing the last of four shows here. After tonight, I’ve got one more show in Chicago, and then I’m done for the year. I know a lot of people dream of performing for a living, so I thought I’d share a little bit of my road routine.

First of all, if you think it’s fun to tour the country doing jokes, you’re right. It is. The first few years. And then it’s not as fun as it once was. Once you’ve seen one second-tier American city, you’ve seen everything there is it to see in pretty much all of them. Every city has some version of the rich part of town, the poor part of town, the mall, the thing they’re famous for (Louisville – home of Muhammad Ali and the Louisville Bat Factory Tour. You can tour both if you want, and I don’t wish to tour either.) Every town has the weirdos who think they’re somehow different from every other town’s identical weirdos. Honestly, you could compress every American town into one and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

That’s not to say that people shouldn’t have pride in the hometowns. Of course they should, for no other reason than they have to live there and so they should pretend it’s nice.

The author, pictured with feature comedian Mandee McKelvey in the background.

Once you’ve seen Columbus and Louisville and Des Moines and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, you don’t need to see them again. But there you are, year after year, showing up in their town answering the same questions again and again. “So, what do you think of Tulsa so far?” Nothing. I don’t think anything about Tulsa any more than you think of where I live. We don’t think about other people’s towns because we don’t live in those towns. Do you know how much time I’ve spent trying to figure out my opinions about Little Rock, Arkansas? Zero. Zero time. Because I don’t live there and when I’m there, I don’t leave my hotel room.

That’s the thing about road life. My routine is now: home to car to airport to hotel to club to hotel to car to airport to home. That’s pretty much it. Does that sound like fun? I’ll be honest, it is. I love the part where I’m in a random Residence Inn by Marriott, under the covers, watching poker videos for eight hours in a row. The comedy I perform is just a means to get me back and forth to mid-priced hotels where I can eat plain M&Ms and sometimes lose them under the covers where I will discover them again in the morning when I wake up and then I can eat a little M&M breakfast treat warmed by my own beautiful body.

But the travel is exhausting. I’m now at an age where it takes me a day to recover from any airplane travel. It doesn’t matter if I fly ten hours or two. By the time I get off that plane, I’m sore and dehydrated and then I have to get into a car where somebody says, “So, how was your flight?”

Have you been on an airplane? How the fuck do you think my flight was? Now, whenever people ask, I tell them it was AMAZING and then I don’t stop talking about how amazing it was. “It was so great. Such a great flight. Wow. What a terrific group we had. And the snacks! Boy, they went all out. We were all singing and laughing.” And when I sense that the person is regretting asking the question in the first place, that’s when I double down. “Oh my God, they had movies and the pilot got on the intercom and told us how high we were at cruising altitude AND he told us when we had begun our initial descent. What a cool guy.”

At that point, the conversation usually ends, which was my intention from the beginning. The less talking I have to do on the road the happier I am. That includes my stage time. Sometimes, I talk slowly when I’m performing just so I have to speak fewer words to fill the time.

I’m working with a terrific comedian this weekend named Mandee McKelvey. She describes herself as a road comic who performs mostly in the Midwest. She picked me up from the hotel and I noticed her car had 175,000 miles on it. She said she bought it three years ago. THREE YEARS! And, apparently, that car is the NEW car. She said she’s got a pick-up that has over 300,000 miles. That’s too much driving! There’s not enough comedy in the world that’s worth driving a combined 500,000 miles. Laughter isn’t that great.

Food is always a problem on the road if you’re trying to eat anything that isn’t going to grow you a third hand. Today in Louisville I went to the finest pizza establishment in the city. And guess what? The finest pizza in Louisville Kentucky isn’t, shall we say, great? Not bad, but if that’s the best Louisville has to offer, I’m thinking there’s a business opportunity for somebody out there. Maybe somebody who understands that pickles don’t belong on pizza.

(Yes, that’s a real menu item which I sampled and, I’ll be honest, it wasn’t bad.)

I will say that being on the road is pretty good for my marriage because we don’t have to see each other. The less time we’re together, the better we get along. Like she just sent me a text that I’m not even going to respond to because I’m pretending I’m onstage right now. If were home, she’d be complaining that I’m ignoring her. Which I am. Here on the road, though, I ignore her at will and there’s not a thing she can do about because I’m WORKING!!!

Ok, Mandee is about to finish up so I have to get on stage now. Which I’m excited about, because after this, I get to go back to the hotel. Hopefully, I’ll find some M&M’s in my bed.