COMEDY
LAUGH IT UP
Sam Tallent rates our favorite things in the People’s Republic of Boulder
FARMERS MARKETS
Tallent: Love them. Especially being on the road — there’s so few things that are actually good. That was my favorite part of Australia. Me and my wife went to so many fucking farmers markets there. … The stuff there isn’t straight-up poison. You can get some locally made cheese, some cherry tomatoes, and there’s someone baking bread or doing some kind of weird cured fish. But dude, when cherry tomatoes are in season, holy shit, get yourself a box and munch ’em.
COACH PRIME
Love it, dude. Anything that gets that program fired up is good for not just Boulder, but the whole state. I mean, that program was so bad. I was living in Fort Collins for the last three years, so I became a version of a [Colorado State] Rams fan. But just seeing how far down both those
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programs fell… And it’s very good to have a definitively Black man showing up in Boulder — a city that loves talking about how progressive it is, but has a notoriously difficult time with people of color being in any position of power. To have someone like that define your city is very cool to see. He’s infused like 90 million worth of ad revenue into that program. College GameDay being in Boulder. These are all cool things that never, ever would’ve happened before. If you’re anti-Prime, you’re probably a hater, first of all, and you’re probably secretly racist [laughs].
JAM BANDS
You know, it’s not for me. It’s noodling. It’s onestring guitar solos. I mean, I was in a band called Electric Mind Gravy in high school, and after high school, we had an album called Jerry Garcia is Dead. I mean, I’ve never been pro-jam band. But hey, to each their own. I will say Trampled By Turtles has been very nice to me. And you know what? I fucking like Les Claypool. I like Billy Strings, Oysterhead, Primus. I’m all for that shit. But I’m not a big Frog Brigade guy. And also, I’m not good at doing
drugs in public. I don’t like doing hallucinogens and going around 3,000 people. But you know, anything that gets people out and about with their friends — outside wiggling to music, it’s fine. But I fucking hate jam bands.
HIKING
It’s good! I love a good walk. The issue is I’m a city guy. When we were in Tokyo, we were putting on mileage, like eight to 12 miles a day on foot. So I’d rather do an urban hike around a city that I’ve never been to. I’ll have a hard time when it’s just walking on a path the whole time, with trees on both sides. Give me a fucking church that’s been there for 800 years that I can stumble upon. There’s no bakeries when you’re hiking in the woods. You can’t accidentally find the best croissant you’ve ever had. I like a long walk, but it just doesn’t need to be a hike. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m from Colorado, but all these people who are so enamored and boned up for walking up to Hanging Lake — we did that when we were kids.
maybe a little stoned. “It’s the perfect crowd,” he says. Other cities in Colorado, like Fort Collins, have established a strong base as well. “Fort Collins secretly had the best Monday and Thursday night shows in the state for years,” Tallent says. “David Rodriguez, Kyle Pogue, Mallory Wallace, Dan Jones: what they’ve built up there ended up paying off as the Comedy Fort, which is without a doubt the best new room in the country.” Boulder can be a little tougher, considering the transience that comes with being a college town. By the time most twenty-somethings start appreciating comedy, it’s move-out day, and many are gone to places that are more affordable. There is, however, one man who Tallent says has held it down in the People’s Republic for more than a decade. “I don’t think Brent Gill gets enough love for giving Boulder an actual space to see consistently good comedy once a week,” Tallent says, referring to Gill’s long-standing Boulder Comedy Show, held every Sunday at Rayback Collective since 2013. Gill got Tallent his first open mic at Red Fish, the long-gone spot next to Bohemian Biergarten, and later his first paid performance at the since-closed Albums on the Hill. It’s bonds like these that make standup comedy here so tight-knit — a community Tallent has called family for a long time. “I’m really grateful for all the things standup has given me,” he says. But he’s not ashamed to admit that his love for writing may perhaps be greater than his love for telling jokes behind the mic. “I finally got an agent and a manager,” he says. “We’re on a Zoom meeting and they ask me, ‘What does a perfect life look like for Sam Tallent?’ I tell them I’d move to Paris and write books. They were waiting for a punchline, but it never came.”
ON THE BILL: Sam Tallent.
7:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 22 | 7:30 and 9:35 p.m. Fri.-Sun., Nov. 24-25, Comedy Works Denver, 1226 15th St. $20-$26
BOULDER WEEKLY
