The Blueberry Tour
with Joe Pera, Dan Licata, Jo Firestone, and Connor O’Malley
If you’re a comedy fan and you haven’t heard of the participants in the Blueberry Tour, you just aren’t paying attention. Connor O’Malley’s bizarre comedy has been gracing YouTube and the Seth Meyers show for years (even now that he’s not working there anymore), Jo Firestone, a standup in her own right is a writer on the Tonight show, even though I keep seeing her pop up on the Chris Gethard show and the UCB, Joe Pera is the “star” of the most subversive Adult Swim show since its inception. And, Dan Licata is Dan Licata. That right there is pedigree. Also, injecting some cred to these comedians is the endorsement of Tom Scharpling who has been singing the praises of the Joe Pera show (minus Connor O’Malley) since its inception. And when Scharpling says that the Blueberry Tour is the future of comedy, that’s not something to be taken lightly. The only thing to be taken lightly is his love of Lana Del Rey.
So, if some of the best alt-alt-comedy people are going on a small-scale tour, doing stand-up and quasi-bits, and land my favorite venue in Boston, there’s no way I’m not gonna be there. I get to say I saw these guys on a Sunday night, in a small bar in Boston before they got all huge and wrote for the Oscars or starred in the latest Zach Snyder DC movie. I wasn’t the only one, as the show sold out just a few days before. It seems like Boston appreciates good comedy when it sees it.
Having seen the show, I wasn’t sure what to expect of this night, but it was simply a night of stand-up: very weird stand-up. Connor O’Malley opened up the night and was, honestly, exactly like I expected him to be (intense, goofy, loud, and a complete oddball), Dan Licata was a sort of a more endearing version of a fraternity Comedy club comic (after a while I started to get his appeal), Jo Firestone was the neurotic observational type who could easily connect with her audience (it turns out we weren’t the only ones worried about the show ending too late), and Joe Pera was a carbon copy of his show persona and more spoken word than stand-up. Each comic was so very different yet everyone in the crowd was able to appreciate it. Partly due to the fact that the comedians knew their crowd and that they were able to connect with everyone at such an intimate venue. They weren’t trying to be bigger than they were which is unfortunately a fresh approach to comedy these days, and a total treat.
The Blueberry Tour still has some shows coming up and you’d be doing yourself a service to check it out.
