Starting in late October, I will embark on my 2025 tour. Tickets are available for Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, Cleveland, and Boston, with more to be added soon. Buy tickets here. My first time touring was winter of last year, and as a way to ready myself for my upcoming travel, as well as subtly incentivize you to buy tickets (if you don’t, it’s fine--just get ready for months of angsty substack posts about destitution and hopelessness,) I’d like to tell you a little bit about what I learned on the road last year.

It’s currently 5AM in Hollywood, a part of Los Angeles which is talked about incessantly outside the city while being ignored by the local government like a stuttering stepchild. I live near the Walk of Fame, a tourist attraction that somehow has less culture than Times Square. I stand with a backpack slung across my shoulder, on a corner just a few streets down from the stars with names like Bill Cosby, Chris Brown, and Benito Mussolini written on them. I am waiting to be picked up by my friend, AJ, who is as reliable as a well trained horse, and as intelligent as a horse that has been taught to count by tapping its hoof on the ground. I met AJ in Boston. He’s a large vegetarian, and like most mammalian herbivores, he holds in his eyes a kind of vacant knowingness.

I don’t like using Uber, and I’m waiting for AJ to pick me up because Los Angeles refuses to have readily-available public transportation to the airport. Instead, LAX has a beautiful, intelligent system of transport already in place. The way LAX works--and this is really brilliant--is that you drive your car directly into four lanes of perpetually-gridlocked traffic that flows around one horseshoe. As you keep driving at two miles per hour, the traffic gets increasingly lighter because people decide to take their own lives instead of following through with their original plan of going to Jacksonville, Florida. Because you have to drive there, I opt to pay my friends to bring me to the airport. AJ was an obvious choice for me because he has a job as a delivery driver, which means he is already used to waking up early and has a saint’s patience when it comes to traffic. AJ has continued to be a fixture of my life on tour. Every time I wake up at 5AM, even if it’s just because I can’t sleep, I half expect a rickety old Prius to come creaking along my street to pick me up. The car rides with AJ to the airport have been lovely because we’re both generally delirious from sleep deprivation, which means laughs are easy to come by.

“AJ, turn down this alleyway,” I say as we drive, with mischief in my eyes that are underscored by dark bags.

“Why?” he replies, playing along.

“AJ, I have a business opportunity down that alleyway that will revolutionize both of our financial futures.”

“Are you going to buy fentanyl from a guy in that alleyway?”

“Yes.”

And we both giggle like idiots.

After stepping out of AJ’s Prius, the sun only a suggestion on the horizon, I say goodbye, and turn toward the terminal with either excitement or dread, depending on what airline I was able to afford for this trip. If it’s Delta, it means I sold enough tickets the last go around to justify comfort. More often it’s Spirit or Frontier, but I’ve taken flights on even more obscure airlines. Have you ever taken a direct flight to Cleveland courtesy of Kyrgyzstan Airlines? The flight is smooth, but the only thing you can watch on the headrest TVs is an obscure horseback sport called Kok boru.

I try to be friendly towards TSA. Sometimes it’s reciprocated, but often it’s met with the blank stare of a farmer looking at a cow that just mooed. Once I’m through, I walk into a world of chance. I never know exactly what I’m flying to. I’d like to share both a positive and negative experience, using Pittsburgh and Whistler as examples.

A love letter to Pittsburgh:

For cities in the United States, sometimes a bad reputation is the only thing that can save you. Nashville, to me, is getting uglier by the second. What was once a thriving artistic sanctuary, is now just a place where you’re forced to watch endless bachelorette parties parade across your condo window as you finish your work call with your managers at the “Buy and Pollute All The Clean Water In The World” start-up. This is because Nashville is known to be cool, and corporate money sniffs out cool like a pig sniffs out truffles. Because you rarely hear people clamoring to move to Pittsburgh, it has been temporarily saved from this level of development. I’m sure the city has changed significantly over the years, but when I drove into the city, a level of comfort washed over me like warm, if not a little polluted, river water. Pittsburgh was gorgeous. When I was there, I performed at a venue called the Bottlerocket Social Hall. It is the best venue I have ever performed at. The night of my show, I got to the venue early and went to the nearest coffee shop. It was called Grim Wizard, and it’s a goth coffee shop that plays heavy metal instead of Nora Jones. Don’t like that? Go to Starbucks, snowflake--we’ll be over here drinking espresso and playing Ozzy Osbourne pinball. This was the first of many small businesses I encountered in Pittsburgh that actually felt like someone’s passion. Not a cookie-cutter coffee shop made so a rich guy’s wife has something to do with her miserable, Percocet-fueled life. It had real, honest-to-goodness vision. There was also a goth weightlifting gym called Death Comes Lifting. Do you know the sign of a good local economy? Industrious goths.

When I got hungry, I went to a diner where seven men, still in their reflective construction vests, were sitting in a row at the counter. I assumed they were doing road work and pot hole fill-ins, which is desperately needed in Pittsburgh. The roads look like the face of a life long frycook. There was one exhausted-looking server, and one overly-energetic chef you could see through a little window where he would plop down plates like a Vegas dealer distributing cards in a game of Blackjack. When I walked in, the server looked at me, made no attempt to alter her facial expression, and nodded to a stool. I sat down and proceeded to eat the best, cheapest breakfast I’ve ever had, while listening to the road crew talk to each other, picking up several new racial slurs on the way. I walked away from the diner with a full belly and a lot of questions about what a “gourd salesman” was.

Maybe it was a fluke--I was only there for a day and a night in total--but it felt like the city of Pittsburgh greeted me with open, heavily-tattooed arms. As the sun went down that night, a crackling liveliness seemed to emerge like fireflies on the sidewalks, and every bar had a bartender who you knew at least five regulars had quietly fallen in love with. Do bar owners specifically select women and men who are easy to go head over heels for, or is it something about their control over alcohol that gives bartenders their evil, seductive charm?

The show was perfect. The microphone cut out several times, which gave me something to talk about for about ten minutes before having to dip into material. Speaking to audience members after was a dream--everyone was courteous, no one overstayed or understayed their welcome. I’ve always been happy with my audience. They aren’t a massive bunch, but those who show up tend to be kind people and good laughers. There was a man in the crowd who told me and my feature Killian he was a camera man for gay porn in the 90s, and we ended up talking to him for an hour.

As I went to bed later, a thought swam through my head that 24 hours before I would have never anticipated having: I need to come back to Pittsburgh.

Whistler is not all Sunshine and Rainbows. (Whistler is not the actual city this happened in, don’t go after any Whistler venues.)

People have been perplexed with the delusion and apparent stupidity of stand-up comedians in recent months. Comedians with podcasts have been bringing on guests that are war criminals, sex criminals, or reanimated German dictators who assure the audience they no longer want to take over the whole of Europe and only want to promote their supplement brand. These guests beg the question: how could these comedians be so deluded to think their actions will be received positively? Well, I have an answer, and it’s one I got in Whistler. I learned, on two cold nights, in front of even colder audiences, that a comedian needs to be delusional almost to the point of psychosis in order to make it through the part of their career I am currently trudging through. Those delusions don’t necessarily need to be the evil, self-aggrandizing kind, but they do need to exist, ferrying you through the rough waters of reality on a ship of fantasy.

My first show in Whistler was so poorly sold that we had to do it in the smaller upstairs room, which was still too big for the tiny crowd that showed up. People were seated so far away from one another that there was no chance for them to form a real audience, just a patchwork of infrequent chuckles. The worst thing about shows like this is that when you don’t sell a lot of tickets, the club sort of ignores you. Servers are less excited because they don’t have as many tables, and therefore expect fewer tips. The manager of the club will sort of slink around, and sometimes not even show up at all. It feels like you failed an entire group of people that you didn’t know existed before your plane landed, and it’s hard to be funny for an hour when you just walked through the kitchen and heard a waitress’s forlorn sigh. You need delusion to get through these shows--the kind of delusion where you tell yourself, “It won’t always be like this--some day I’ll sell enough tickets for people here to be excited, some day the manager won’t roll his eyes at me. Some day, I’ll sell so many tickets the servers will be on rollerskates and the manager will carry me into the green room like a newborn.”

I had three shows before my last show on Saturday night. I was told by the ticket taker that the audience was the drunkest one they’d ever seen, and the longer they held off the start of the show, the more intoxicated they would become. I also had a 4AM flight the next morning, so I was almost begging for them to start the show, but there was something strange in the way the assistant manager was answering me.

“Yeah, we just had something come up…no big deal, but were going to hold off for a little,” he said. I was perplexed, so I did what anyone should do when they really want to know what’s happening in an establishment: I talked to a server.

I flagged a young man down and asked, “What’s happening here?”

He paused and looked over both shoulders in a way that indicated that what he had to say was going to be worth the wait. “You can’t tell anyone I told you.”

I agreed wholeheartedly. He proceeded to tell me that earlier in the evening, when a white server was seating two Black women with their party, one of the women told him “I hope we can find them,” and the server responded by saying “don’t worry, you’re usually able to smell those people.”

The two women were obviously shocked, then angry, and the kid who said it promptly ran away. Imagine planning a night out, paying for tickets, showing up, and a server tries to do shitty crowd work on you before you’re seated. Now, the party was rightfully livid, intoxicated, and still expecting to see a show, which was postponed because the assistant manager was speaking to one of the members of the party to see how much he would need to comp in order for this incident to not end up on Twitter. They settled on free drinks.

When the show finally started, the host and feature ate it. They were funny, but unable to quell a potential race war with their jokes about dating. I went up next, and was immediately assailed by a table that yelled, “Freddie Mercury!”

Then a different table yelled, “Tell a joke!”

Then a third table yelled, “he does look like Freddie Mercury!”

This was all before I reached the microphone. The only table that seemed to be content was the Black family up front, who were all laughing at the absurdity of the situation. There were about fifty other tables, and they were all yelling before I spoke a word. I grabbed the microphone like a man grabbing a slingshot to ward off an army of encroaching zombies. I shouted down some of the hecklers, but when I dealt with one, several more appeared. I kept looking at the family up front, and the only solace I got from that night is that they were laughing the whole way through--not necessarily at me, but at the situation.

At the midpoint of the show, a woman yelled, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I responded, “Yes, and I’m glad she’s not here to see this.”

She then responded, “I don’t see my kids anymore.” I looked to the back of the room, and saw the kid who made the “smell them” comment give his apron to the assistant manager. I’m not sure, but I think, during one of the most insane sets of my entire life, I watched a man get fired.

After the show, the people I spoke to were exceedingly positive, as if I’d somehow given them exactly what they wanted. They were so drunk that most of their congratulations came in unwanted hugs and slaps on the back that were way too hard. I went back to the condo that night, walking through the cold, still air like a submarine through dark waters, and I couldn’t sleep. The next night I went to Portland, and had the best set of my life. And that’s the road. There are ups and downs, but one thing remains: I would love to sell more tickets.

With that in mind, come see me at any of the dates above, subscribe to the paid tier, and as always, have a good one.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dandonohue.substack.com/subscribe