Going Out, November 2025
Last Friday, I clocked out of work at 5:30 as I normally do, then pulled out my phone and opened Google Maps. My destination was 2.6 miles away. I had more than three hours to get there before the doors opened for the show I had a ticket for. Time to figure out how to occupy myself, and more importantly where, in the meantime.
It was back in September that I first saw something somewhere about the 312 Comedy Festival, an early-November weekend of standup shows around Chicago that didn’t seem, at first glance, all that different from a typical schedule of standup shows around Chicago on a weekend. I’d looked through the lineup on the website, only recognizing a handful of the acts, all of whom were playing either the Chicago Theatre or the Riviera; but I’d just been to the Chicago Theatre in June, and the last show I’d seen before that was at the Riviera, and I wanted a more diverse set of experiences for this newsletter than that. So I clicked on the one black woman on the list, and bought a ticket for Marie Faustin at Zanies on November 7th.
I’m not sure, now, why I bought a ticket for the late show; I don’t think the early show was sold out yet. Maybe the years I’d spent listening to comedy podcasts where standups kibbitzed about late shows being looser, rowdier and more electric was an influence; maybe I overestimated how long it would take to get from work to Zanies in time for the early show. Maybe it was $5 cheaper, I don’t know. But now, on Friday, it meant that I had three hours to kill before the show, and I’d neglected to bring either my laptop or my earbuds charger.
So I started walking north. There were plenty of cheap transit options available, and I’d just refilled my Ventra card that morning, but walking would take longer (not to mention being a chance to offset the incoming carbs; like most comedy clubs, Zanies has a two-item minimum and a limited menu), and I wouldn’t be stuck to a bus or L route. I looked up bookstores that lay in the path between me in the South Loop and Zanies in Old Town, and found two in River North that could eat up some time. Both were equal parts nostalgic and disappointing, for different reasons.
The first, euphemistically referred to as an “adult bookstore” on Google Maps, must have been the first time I’d been inside a brick-and-mortar sex shop in close to twenty years, although it was certainly the first time I wasn’t haunted by religious compunctions the entire time. But unlike my memories of the endless, wondrously arcane shelves in the equivalent emporia in the Phoenix metro area of my youth, it was tiny and unprepossessingly stocked; I’d hoped to maybe run across some of the obscurer out-of-print titles I hadn’t had luck sourcing online, but of course I was already all too familiar with everything on the shelves. Eventually I settled on a handful of French imports that would be an upgrade on the ancient VOD files on my collection’s hard drive, overpaid (online sellers offer them for a quarter of the cost, shipping included), and left.
My second stop, After-Words, is a proper bookstore, of a kind I deeply respect without ever really liking or feeling comfortable in: the dedicated, earnest, indie bookstore that curates its selection and loves to recommend a good read. I have always preferred either the impersonal anonymity of the big-box bookstores (R.I.P. Borders), where you could often find something you didn’t know you wanted, or the vast, anarchic clutter of a secondhand shop that doesn’t know what to do with its profusion of printed matter, where you are almost guaranteed to find something wholly unlikely but unexpectedly great. At After-Words, as I expected, I could find almost nothing I was interested in. I am mostly out of sympathy with the literary currents of the present, and the shelves were far too curated to have much of my beloved early 20th century that I hadn’t, at some point, checked off a syllabus. Finally I decided that since they didn’t have the Penguin reissue of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Men of Maize, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch would do (I am always meaning to read more of the Latin American Boom, even as my heart lies in the pre-Boom vanguardia). Naturally, one of the clerks mentioned that it was one of their favorite books as I was paying; I murmured appreciative noises and made my escape.
My feet were starting to get sore as I made my way into the Gold Coast neighborhood, and I began to look around for somewhere I could sit down, eat a bit, and prepare my daily Bluesky post for the music challenge I’m participating in, which I’ve been trying to post at 9 p.m. every day. But every place I saw was crowded, expensive, noisy, and full of young people from the suburbs or, even worse, Gold Coast residents. So I kept walking; and as I passed into Old Town I could feel my blood pressure settle and my shoulders lower.
I finally stopped at the Small Cheval on Wells. It was the first time I’d had a hamburger and fries in almost a year, since I made some drastic dietary changes and less drastic exercise ones in preparation for a medical intervention I won’t get into here. It was good, though not good enough to live up to the hype or the prices, and while I ate I used my phone to remote into my desktop at home, because that’s where the images I use to make my daily music challenge Bluesky posts are. And, listen, technology is miraculous, but it still feels like remoting into a Windows computer on an Apple device using two different versions of a Google app should be easier than it is. Of course the deprecated version worked better.
Zanies was only a block or two further north now; but the doors weren’t scheduled to open for another forty minutes. Ah, there was a Starbucks nearby. Perfect. It wasn’t until I’d entered and made eye contact with the barista that I remembered having seen on Bluesky earlier that day that the striking Starbucks Union was asking for a consumer boycott. Like a coward, I ordered a grande chai latte and sat down to squint through the first few chapters of Hopscotch, having also neglected to bring my reading glasses. (First impressions: dazzling prose, beautifully evocative of the time, place and milieu, and I do not trust the narrative voice about women one bit.) About ten minutes after the doors opened for the late show at Zanies I went down and joined the line. The line seemed to be a surprise to many of the people who joined it, each of whom I could see in real time reorganize their understanding of Marie Faustin from their special little internet discovery to a touring headliner who can draw a sold-out, diverse crowd at 9:15 on a Friday.
So nine paragraphs deep, it’s time to talk about the comedian I went, or stayed, out to see. Other than what pops up on my social media feeds, I haven’t been paying attention to current standup for a good decade, so I hadn’t immediately recognized Marie Faustin when I clicked on the ticket link, but a near-instinctive Select + Right click + Search in new tab brought me up to speed, and I realized that I was at least a little familiar: her “evil laugh” clip had popped up on my TikTok some months back. I watched her on Caleb Hearon’s podcast, listened to a bit of her own podcast, cohosted with Sydnee Washington, and felt good about my choice of ticket.
Witty, expressive, and charismatic, Faustin may protest that she’s a nice person stuck with an evil laugh, but her comedy is thoroughly amoral (honorific), revelling in materialism, selfishness, and hot girl privilege, with enough absurdist escalation to remind you that it’s all jokes and enough ego-puncturing admissions of embarrassment and failure to keep any but the most hardcore misogynist audiences on her side. Friday night’s audience was not: there was a larger than usual whoop when asked if there were gay people in the audience (the opener did material on being a lesbian, though both the host and Faustin talked exclusively about hetero relationships), and during the now-inevitable crowd work portion of the set, gay men, parents, and a very Midwestern woman who described her ideal romantic partner as “consistent” all received over-the-top lambastings from Faustin, a native New Yorker with all the prejudice, bluster and impatience that you would expect.
Ridiculously, it was my first time at Zanies, a comedy venue I’ve known of by reputation for over twenty years (I first started listening to standups’ podcasts in 2005), and the efficiency with which the audience was hustled in, seated, slaked, fed, charged, and hustled out again over the course of two hours was almost dizzying: I came away with the impression that comedy-club laborers are harder-working, and have to regularly deal with worse shit, than the staff at any other venue I’ve been to all year.
But my experience has been, obviously, limited. I started this series because I wanted to start trying to make up for ten years of living in Chicago without going to almost anything ever; although I try to be perceptive, I don’t doubt that my attempts at observation are unhelpful or elementary to any more committed show-seer. Which is why this is more of a diary entry than a review; my impression of the evening, not what anyone else might be able to expect from the same show, is what I’m after.
After the show, I started walking again, this time west, to the L stop at North and Clybourn (another three-quarters of a mile.) My uncharged earbuds gave up before two blocks, so I walked in pleasant silence, and later got to hear conversation on the northbound Red Line, something I normally never do. Apparently nerdy teens these days are into Batman: Knightfall, just like they were when I was a teenager. And the boys still talk over girls when they try to interject.
I’ve paid for December’s outing already. Talk to you again then.