The Chris Gethard Show Cross Country Adventure: Wearing the Thong of Gwar

In yesterday’s tour journal entry, I described showing up in Philly and surprising a comedian on stage who had talked shit at me over twitter, resulting in an eight-person brawl. You didn’t believe me? Here’s the video.

Last night ended treacherously, as we drove from Philadelphia to Baltimore in a snow and ice storm. It was one of those situations where everyone in the RV was thinking something along the lines of “Probably we should pull this thing over, being that it’s a huge vehicle none of us have experience with and this weather is sort of horrifically scary,” but choosing to instead say things like “Let’s just get there now so we can sleep in for 15 extra minutes in the morning.” You know, dangerous behavior.

We slept on the floor of a friend of Bill Florio’s. Bill is in the show’s house band and he’s got insane stories. Every city we go to he either attended a crazy punk show there or got punched in the face by someone or witnessed an unbelievable feat of humanity. And he’s an unassuming guy. I think it’s because he’s been in 80 percent of all New York punk bands that formed from 1992 to the present day.

Anyway, Bill’s friend Sue offered to put us up. She was really nice. She mentioned she went to Rutgers and I realized we had some overlap time there and some mutual friends. It was one of those odd “We have definitely met” sizing each other up type of interactions. Instead of nailing down how exactly we knew each other like a normal human being would, I instead slept on her basement floor using a balled up thermal shirt as a pillow, because I’m a sad maniac.

We woke up and stop one was to pick up a sandwich at The Wine Merchant for one of our donors. He contributed a ton of money to have us bring him a sandwich from Baltimore to LA. We all got sandwiches there to see if they were worth it, and they were really fucking good. I am glad I got to eat at The Wine Merchant outside of Baltimore.

We drove down to Richmond. The worst part of the day came when we realized our generator is broken. Editing and uploading shit from the road is tricky no matter what. Now it looks like we have no on board power source for our editors to plug into. This is a real pain in the ass. And Jon and JD don’t really like fucking around. When they decide to get shit done, they’re Terminator like in their pursuit of the goal. It makes me realize why they’re so good at what they do. I am lazy and weird. Even with this project it was like “I’ll rent an RV, that’s funny,” then after putting down a down payment was like “Oh shit, you have to also do stuff, right. I have no plan and wish I didn’t have to organize shit.” And then other people were like “Cool idea. Let us help,” and I was like “Yes.” And then I put my shitty little name on it and get more credit than I deserve.

We got to Richmond and we had to hurry up, because our hosts for the early part of our day had to go in a few hours. And we didn’t want to miss a visit to their place, because they were fucking GWAR.

Without our prompting, residents of cities we’re doing shows in have been organizing their own Diddy-esque campaigns, and some Richmond residents got Balsac from Gwar to pay attention to me. He watched a bunch of road trip videos and thought we were funny and invited us to come tour the slave pit.

I got my entire sense of humor from my brother, and he was super obsessed with Gwar growing up. So I used to really get into all their mythology, the shady dealings of Sleazy P. Martini, all of it. So meeting them was cool as shit.

They were super nice guys and let us play around with all of their equipment. We dressed in their costumes and fought with their weapons. I didn’t even know I wanted to see a bin marked “tit rips” until I saw one today and realized that deep down I had always wanted to see a bin marked “tit rips.”

At the very tail end of the tour I asked them “If you were me and you were coming to Richmond, what would you do in the face of all this stuff to seem worth watching?”

That’s when Balsac suggested I wear a Gwar thong and let the crowd dump bloody marys on me. Who am I to refuse Gwar?

But before our show, we went to Buz and Ned’s bbq, because a guy on Twitter told us it was the fucking best. He was right. It was the fucking best.

I got brisket, hush puppies, cinnamon apples, and mac and cheese. More importantly, I bought three other people their meals. I posted a tweet that said we’d be there for a while and anyone who walked up to me and said “I pee poop and poop pee” would get a meal bought for them. So a lot of people who pee poop and poop pee got free brisket on this guy.

During our show, after some initial technical/timing difficulties, things got rolling. I did indeed get bloody marys dumped all over my near naked body by a bunch of sadistic Richmond natives. Shannon killed it as Howard Diefendorfer. I learned that Richmond sports a statue of Arthur Ashe beating kids. I also watched the entire crowd sing the jingle for a local bike company and it was so surreal I might call it “end of Darren Aronofsky movie-esque.” Although it was more earned.

We slept at our friend Jesse P-S’s house last night. He splits time between Richmond and New York and is mostly a New York guy now, but was down here. His mom is the nicest person I’ve ever met in my entire life. We got to their house and there were meatballs, chimichangas, and fucking bacon wrapped chicken skewers waiting for us. We all took showers and most of us got to sleep in actual beds. This was the motherfucking shit. I’m currently writing this from a queen sized motherfucking bed. This is a good thing.

It’s also bullshit. I promise this tour will soon deliver on its promise to see a bunch of cracked out weirdoes living in complete uncomfortable misery. There’s no way people are as nice as we’ve been finding — at some point, generosity will fail us and we’ll get the internet video we desire.

Chris Gethard is a comedian from New York and the host of the Chris Gethard Show.

The Chris Gethard Show Cross Country Adventure: […]