Photo credit: Sara Bill
As an entertainment option, book tours usually don’t offer a whole lot of razzle dazzle. That’s not really the fault of authors, though. It’s a tricky thing taking what’s usually a solitary experience for both creator and consumer and turning it into a communal one, especially when most writers aren’t also capable performers. Bob Odenkirk, however, is no ordinary writer. In addition to serving as scribe on many of the best comedy shows since the early 1990s, including everything from Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Conan O’Brien to Tom Goes to the Mayor, he co-created and starred in the cult series Mr. Show alongside David Cross and more recently has turned heads as a thespian through his role as sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad (plus it’s impending spin-off). It’s no surprise then that the tour for his new A Load of Hooey was anything but sleepy.
The stage at the Pabst Theater Tuesday did bear traces of your cliché book tour, however, in the form of a small table festooned with a glittery homemade sign, of the sort you can just imagine setup in some sad little corner of a Barnes & Noble. Initially Odenkirk followed a comfortably predictable path too, a little standup, something he doesn’t do often but is still skilled at despite a writer’s-room tendency to explain why something is funny instead of just giving it the room to be funny, interspersed with selected essays from A Load of Hooey, which, with the midterm election results rolling in, tended to be those that mocked the absurdity of American political culture. After a time though, and with little warning, some seemingly off-the-cuff observations about boring book signings segued into an elaborate musical number on the subject, mostly centered around appropriate reading speed and microphone availability.
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From there the show took a number of further turns, starting with some special guests, namely a pair of standup comedians: Brandon Wardell, who, considering he’s barely out of high school, has an irreverent, impressively polished voice, even if some of the material went of the heads of the older audience members, and Tom Johnson, a veteran comic whose likably cranky take on politics and stupid people didn’t pull any punches, followed by Second City cast member Chris Witaske, who delivered a dramatic reading of an entry where Odenkirk recalls the sights and sounds of his boyhood Christmases in Chicago with foggy incoherence. Even after all that there was still time for the whole group to run through a couple sketches and even for a brief comedy geek Q&A, which provoked some interesting stories about working with Chris Farley and provided a nice coda to the best book tour ever.
