DOGS - POOLS - PRIVACY FOR ALL OF YOUR RESIDENTIAL NEEDS “AS GOOD AS THE NEXT, AND CHEAPER THAN THE REST” KEVIN KITTRELL 805-9370
"Crackers of Comedy: Weed, Comedy and Life on the Road" The rain came down on the windshield in large splashes as if someone had dropped the payload from a commercial airliners restroom. Suddenly a smell accompanied the unexpected precipitation with such timing that I could not help but believe my initial imagery might not be too far off target. Quickly the smell reached the part of my brain responsible for identifying the origin of the stink and the old olfactory bulb promptly reported that someone had dropped a handful of rubber bands onto a pile of dog shit and lit it on fire. I responded appropriately in disgust as I rolled down the window and turned to my passenger. Joe glanced at the sour look on my face and let out a childlike giggle immediately revealing his guilt. I couldn’t help but immediately think back to a message he had tweeted just a few weeks before “@mattwardcomedy I plan on eating hot wings every night. By the end of the tour I want you to know what the inside of my ass smells like.” Well, now I knew. It smelled precancerous from a diet void of vegetables or any form of fiber.. We had already completed 8 shows of the Cracker of Comedy Tour and were between Charlottesville, Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky. The precursor to our tour was a show in Chattanooga opening for comedian Doug Stanhope. The crowd for the Stanhope show was amped and ready to laugh with little effort from the comics. Comedian Joe Ruiz mom came up to me before I went on stage and said “This crowd is great, you would really have to suck not to get laughs from them....” She was right, however, none of us sucked and it was a great opening show that ended with an after party at JJ’s Bohemia where Doug acted out a character in one of Andy Pyburn’s homoerotic works finishing by spurting foaming beer from a bottle all over his own face. Then it was off to Wilmington, North Carolina. Just minutes after Joe informed me he couldn’t drive 1 mile of our 4000 mile journey because he didn’t bring his glasses just so he wouldn’t have to drive. “What an asshole..” I thought to myself as we pulled away from our friends house in Chattanooga starting the 9 hour drive to the coast. History of The Crackers of Comedy Tour The Crackers of Comedy Tour came to be in 2008 when myself and 5 other comics decided we were going to book a string of shows in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee and call it a tour. In the end we did two shows, got in a fist fight with a comedian that now pretends to be Scottish not just on stage but when he is going about his everyday life, and headed off to Nashville to try out for Last Comic Standing. After a three year hiatus, the tour re-emerged with only two comics, myself (Matt Ward) and Atlanta comedian Joe Pettis doing all of the dates. We brought comedians in each town on board to do guest spots and host and expanded from 2 shows and a TV show try out to 17 shows and 14 cities. Why the Crackers of Comedy as a name? Because we are the only race that has a racial slur you can say on network TV. If someone is called a cracker they usually just laugh, and laughter as a response to things that should normally be offensive is one of the great things about comedy. Wilmington turned out to be a blast with fans buying us drinks and too many trips to I Love NY Pizza across from the hotel binding our bowels like a boy scout knot. The next night in town proved to be much more eventful with a kidney stone deciding to creep up my bladder just minutes before I hit the
stage. About 15 minutes into my set I was hit with blinding pain that caused flop sweat to form on my brow and make me look shit-faced. I gritted my teeth and dug in finishing my set with my guitar strapped on like a M-16 battling the forces of failure. I returned straight to the hotel and started chugging water until finally I jumped for joy when about an hour later I plinked that little stone into the toilet. Matt one, five hour energy drink created kidney stone, zero. We spent the early part of the next day with my hippie friends backpacking through the seldom traveled section of Carolina Beach, North Carolina where an old Dow Chemical Plant once stood. We smoked weed, climbed around the graffiti tattooed ruins and explored the vine covered tunnels until it was time to be on the road to the next gig. We both agreed to omit the Chapel Hill show from our tour log and memories as it was not only uninteresting, but it was a complete and utter failiure. The cherry on the shit sundae was my car getting sideswiped by a UNC student that didn’t know how to keep his insurance current. Fuck you Chapel Hill. We head back to Chattanooga for another show and were promptly greeted by every homeless person in the town. I decided to buy a bottle of liquor to keep in my trunk so I wouldn’t run up large bar tabs when on tour. Every time I went out to drink from the bottle a different homeless man would come up to me. Finally, I snapped. I was drinking a shot when out of nowhere I here a voice directly behind me starting into his rap about needing help. It was the last straw. I wheeled around and said, “Seriously, you are the fifth person to ask me for money right here in this same spot. How about trying a different part of town or somewhere where there is actually fucking foot traffic!!” “What the fuck?!” Hell, at least the bums in the big city’s have some type of talent, like rapping or playing an instrument or some shit... Show went well, nobody really showed up though, so we packed it in early and headed back to Knoxville unbeknowngst to my wife who had barricaded the doors shut using the dining room chairs for safety. I unlocked the back door and was able to slide the chair out of the way just as she came out in her panties saying, “You scared the shit out of me, I thought someone was breaking in!” Gotta love how her strategy for safety includes walking out to see if it is an intruder in nothing but panties and a t-shirt. We played Knoxville in the family friendly Market Square district at a place called Latitude 35. Which was awesome considering how non-family friendly most of our material was. We actually replaced “Family Date Night” for just that night as it normally was what happened on Wednesday’s. We had an entire doctor’s office come to this show and they
stared blankly as I delivered jokes about punishing pedophiles and being starstruck by internet porn stars. Go figure. We were joined by local radio DJ and comic J Lalonde and Cock County’s finest police officer comedian, Grady Ray. The next show was in Greensboro, North Carolina at a place called The Idiot Box that normally had improv comedy shows. The crowd was large but they were not into what we were doing for the most part. Directly after Joe got off stage he disappeared and quickly tweeted that he had never felt more hated on stage then that night. I could understand his feelings so we didn’t hang out much after the show. We headed out with another comic Adam Allred to check out this place he was looking to do a show. We learned later that we were just two blocks from where a man was shot in the parking lot of another bar. The topper to the classy evening was returning to the place where we were staying only to find out the bathroom was barely suitable for pissing. The mountain of toilet paper wadded-up in the trash can next to the sink alone was enough to make even the most adept forensic scientist perplexed. Were these jerk off tissues? How could one stack those so high without strategically placing each new wad? Thanks to Mike Hannon for the couch’s to crash on and super creepy bathroom to use. Then it was off to Gaffney, South Carolina to The Capri on Main, a converted 78 year old movie theatre (used to be Cherokee Theatre). This place was a favorite of mine because of the ambiance, but it soon became a favorite of Joe’s too. The crowd was not large but they were very receptive and into the show. The town of Gaffney sits between Spartanburg and Charlotte and is most known for it’s Giant Peach Water Tower (know by locals as the Peachroid (looks like an orange ass with a hemorrhoid). Also right next to the theatre was a Oxygen Service Company with a poorly chosen mascot named Oxy the Ox. Gotta love Gaffney, free wi-fi in a town of 13,000 and “Home of Oxy”... We were running dangerously low on weed (that I had purchased for us in Chattanooga) and it was time for another long road trip back through Greensboro up through the backwoods of Virginia to Charlottesville. The show ended up being awesome as the set up and stage/back stage at The Southern Cafe & Music Hall was one of the best of any venue on our tour. Got boozed up for free and fed and a crowd showed up even though it was Sunday and it was Oscar night (Yes, in the world of comedy everything competes with you). Turned in early due to pure exhaustion and packed up to head to Lexington. As soon as I got the shit smell out of the car from Joe’s near bowel movement the storms hit us. Between Charlottesville and Lexington was over 6 hours and lots of mountains. It stormed the entire time. I clenched the wheel and cursed Joe’s existence as I racked up mile 2,200 behind the wheel of my Corolla. We got to Lexington, Kentucky, which is a horse town, horses fucking everywhere, down every street behind every white wooden fence. The venue was a big rock club that was letting us use there bar area. We ended up between two pool tables with a puddle of water on the stage from the leaking ceiling. We did our time and the massive crowd of 20 chuckled over the sounds of a large metal door clanging shut repeatedly as if we were doing comedy in the dungeon of a castle. The next night we hit Asheville at a new joint called The Magnetic Field. We had been interviewed by The Citizen-