Courtesy of Brennan's Work & Leisure
Comedian Yale Hollander
When SLM last spoke with comedian Yale Hollander about his then-new Clayton Comedy Series at Kingside After Dark, he followed up with an email reading: “...in my ever-continuing quest to bring comedy to all of St. Louis, I have great aspirations of one day hosting a show on the Loop Trolley. That is not a joke. Just trying to figure out how to make it happen.”
Sure, the comedian has a track record of bringing local comedy to unexpected and perhaps underserved areas. But the trolley?
That exchange was just four months ago. And now Hollander’s got his Loop Trolley show in hand.
What started as a couple of tweets two years ago between the comedian and the Loop Trolley Company is now Laugh Tracks, a partnership between Hollander and the trolley folks. The series, which will run monthly (except for November when the Flyover Comedy Festival takes over St. Louis), on the second Friday of the month, is set to begin September 13 at 9 p.m. Passengers and local comedians will board at the Pageant stop on the trolley route for a 2.2-mile, 40-minute series of sets. Performing on the 13th will be featured comics Kenny Kinds, Angela Smith, and Sam Lyons with guest sets from Travis Terrell and Ken Warner. Hollander will emcee.
SLM caught up with the comedian to talk about how the series came to be and the next unexpected place he wants to start one.
I saw a tweet you reposted on the origin of Laugh Tracks. It seems the trolley company had the same idea around the same time. Is that how it started?
How it started with me was I had just kind of made a tongue-in-cheek comment on Twitter as I am wont to do. This was two years ago—in August of 2017. And I just kind of put it out there, “Hey, Loop Trolley, I want to do an open mic on the Loop Trolley.” At that time, I was running an open mic in the Central West End, and it was the only show that I had going on at that point. So that's all I was really thinking about. But I just thought it would be kind of a funny thing to throw out there. I got a response back almost immediately from the Loop Trolley people basically saying, “Oh, yeah, well, we were actually thinking about having comedy on the Loop Trolley, and we want to call it Laugh Tracks.” It was just kind of one of those things where it's like, Oh, yeah, that's clever, that's very funny. I was just being facetious about it. Then I started producing some other showcases and had kind of developed a niche for putting local comedy in places where it ordinarily had not been in the past. So I thought, “OK, this is a challenge.” This is something that started as a joke. But golly, it seems like there was at least a passing interest in it. Let's just see what we can do.
I put together a proposal, which I sent to the Loop Trolley just through their website, through their Contact Us page. Maybe two weeks later, I get an email back from Kevin Barbeau [the Loop Trolley Company executive director], saying, "Yeah, let's talk about it."
He said, "We've been thinking for a long time about what we can do to kind of be a supporter of the local arts community, and at the same time, maybe provide some sort of onboard entertainment from time to time on the trolley." And he said, we just didn't even know how to approach it from a comedy standpoint, because they, you know, don't do comedy. They run a trolley. So I'm the subject matter expert there. They’re outsourcing that function to me.
It seems inherently funny to do a comedy show on an old-timey streetcar. Is that what was so appealing?
It’s niche. If there’s one thing that we’re known for in St. Louis, it’s all of these little idiosyncratic things. Like toasted ravioli, which, if you believe the legend, was born out of an accident. Same thing with gooey butter cake. We have these quirky little unusual things. I mean, the City Museum, another perfect example. How do you describe that? We like doing things differently, having this local character. We have this trolley. ... It's here, it's not going to be uprooted and removed anytime soon. It's not The Admiral. It's going to be here, so let's have some fun with it.
Fortunately, the folks at the Loop Trolley kind of have that same vision. I mean, this isn't going to increase ridership by any measurable percentage. I know a lot of people seem to be of the mistaken belief that this is being done in order to increase ridership. It's really being done to provide another entertainment option that's 40 minutes one night a month. It's not going to put 10,000 more rear ends in seats every month or anything like that. It's another thing to do in the Loop.
How do you design a show on public transport?
We’re going to have to work around the fact that there are going to be 10 stops. And so we're going to have to work our bits around that stuff. We have to abide by all of the trolley regulations, so we can't have profanity, we're not going to be working blue—it's going to be, at worst, a PG show. We're gonna have to use the PA system. We’re not going to have a mic or an amp. We’re going to look like mall cops up there. It’s just a big, silly, fun way to entertain ourselves and to get people on the trolley just to do something that’s not running an errand down to the History Museum or whatever. It's entertainment.
It's gonna be one of those things where, until we actually do it, we really don't know what to expect. The best part of all, at least for this first show anyway, is that it is going to be unpredictable. And I think half of the fun is going to be seeing how we all work around these quirky things, and what types of reactions we get both from the comics and from the audience.
Where can we expect a new comedy series from you to pop up next?
I have sent a proposal to St. Louis native Danny Meyer about doing a show at Shake Shack. He suggested that I flesh it out a little bit, and he indicated that he would pass it on to his corporate people. So that’s probably just Danny being his gracious self and not wanting to let me down from the get-go. But who knows? The trolley thing kind of started as a bit of an offhand joke. And now here we are getting ready to do it.
