Five Reasons You Should Buy Your Ticket To My Zanies Show Right Now, You Beautiful Doomed Animal
Chicago, somewhere north of Wells Street, the air thick as gravy, the lake doing that thing where it looks like it’s plotting.
We were somewhere around the corner of Wells and North when the panic began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded, maybe you should sell the tickets…” and then suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like enormous laughing bats, all of them holding confirmation emails I did not send. It was clear to me then, as it is clear to me now, in whatever passes for clarity at this hour: you have not bought your ticket yet. And this is a problem. Not for me, I will be there regardless, because I am contractually and spiritually obligated, but for you, personally, in ways I will now enumerate with the cold precision of a man who has read exactly one page of a legal document and understood none of it.
1. It Will Sell Out
Understand something about a sellout: it is not a prediction, it is a weather system. It forms out over the lake, it gathers, and then one Tuesday afternoon a switch flips and the little seat map goes red and there is nothing anyone can do. Not me. Not the box office. Not your friend who “knows a guy.” The room holds what it holds, and when it is full it is full, and you will be standing outside on Wells with your face pressed to the glass like a Victorian orphan who has heard rumors of soup.
2. I’m Extremely Handsome
I say this not as a boast but as a public safety notice, the way a city posts a sign near a cliff. Photographs do not capture it. Photographs flatten it, the way a map flattens a mountain range into a few polite squiggles. In person, under the lights, at close range, it becomes an entirely different animal, and people who were not warned have been known to make poor decisions afterward, texting exes, buying jackets, taking up sailing. Come and see it. Bring water. Do not stare directly at it for the first four minutes.
3. There May Or May Not Be A Very Cool Special Guest
Note the construction: may or may not. This is the most honest sentence in show business. Somewhere out there is a very cool special guest, and somewhere out there is a version of the evening in which they do not appear, and both of these worlds are currently alive and humming and refusing to collapse into one. The only known method of collapsing them is to be present in the room. This is science. I did not make the rules of the universe, I am merely the guy who noticed them and sold tickets accordingly.
4. I May Be Swedish Now
I want to be careful here, because I am not a lawyer and the paperwork is ongoing and possibly imaginary. But there have been developments. There has been a certain feeling. A pull. A distant fjord-shaped ache somewhere behind the ribs, an unearned confidence around herring, a new and troubling instinct to remove my shoes in other people’s homes. I cannot prove any of it and I will not be taking questions about the specifics beforehand. Come to the show and observe the evidence with your own eyes. Bring a jury if you like.
5. As A Swede, You Have To Go, Otherwise The Most Historically Neutral Country In The World Will Be Mad At You
Consider the stakes. This is a nation that sat out the big one. Two of them, arguably. A country that has spent centuries perfecting the art of not getting involved, of standing calmly at the edge of every catastrophe with its hands in its pockets. And you, you, are going to be the thing that finally breaks that streak. The one provocation too far. Somewhere in Stockholm a very tall man in a nice sweater is looking at the seating chart and quietly noting your absence, and when neutrality finally ends, history will not blame the tanks or the treaties. It will blame you, and a Tuesday in Chicago, and a comedy club on Wells Street.
Honorable Mention: I Was Voted Chicago’s Slim Thickest Comedian
I did not seek this title. The title sought me. There was no campaign, no lawn signs, no shaking of hands outside an Aldi. The people simply spoke, as the people do, and what the people said was: slim thickest. You may live your entire life in this city and never see the honor conferred again. The scientists cannot replicate it. Come see it in person while the phenomenon still stands upright and tells jokes.
⸻
Zanies Chicago. CLICK HERE to grab your tickets before the seat map goes red.
Buy them now, while the bats are still friendly.