Chris Gethard, most recently the star of Comedy Central’s Big Lake, has become a cult figure in the NYC comedy scene with his monthly talk show The Chris Gethard Show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. The show has involved things like flying a depressed teenager from Ohio to NYC to give him the best night of his life, a show in which comedians had to make up jokes on the spot and risk being shot by paintball guns if they weren’t funny, and a show on a bus that brought 60 people to the New Jersey basement where Gethard lost his virginity.
Now, Gethard is taking his show national by turning it into a ridiculous 12-day trek across the country in a rented RV starting on January 15th. He and his cast of fellow comedians (as well as members of his house band the Kung Fu Monkeys) will be driving from New York to LA aiming to create as much weirdness as possible. They’ll be making videos along the way, and Gethard will be chronicling the experience daily right here on Splitsider.
We don’t plan on organizing much of our trip. Instead, we’ll be looking to interact with you, the world at large, via social networking as a means of defining our route. Maybe we’ll tweet something like “We’re outside of Albuquerque, who wants to hang out?” or “Anyone near Indianapolis want to let nine people shower in their house? We’ll put on a show in your living room in exchange.”
Of course, renting an RV and paying for gas for a 12 day cross country trek is expensive. So Gethard has opened up donations for the show, and depending on how much one donates, they’ll do certain things on the road. For example, a $75 donation gets you mentioned in an original song by the Kung Fu Monkeys, $200 gets your face printed on a pillow that one of the castmembers is forced to sleep on for the entire trip, and $500 lets you decide on where one of their stops will be, and “these will be the only stops we pre-determine on the entire trip.”It should be an insane experiment in reality-based comedy, audience participation and the limits of human endurance for the poor folks who signed up to live on that RV for two weeks.
If you want to help make it as ridiculous as possible, you can donate at the show’s Kickstarter page here. Otherwise, stay tuned to January to follow this ridiculous project as it makes its way to LA.
