Arrested development
We follow comic Prescott Tolk as he crafts a show about his adolescence.
The moment Prescott Tolk describes crashing his mother’s car into another car (that then slammed into a Chinese restaurant), it’s clear he’s killing. The 32-year-old, a Chicago stand-up since 2003, is working an unruly crowd at Olive Black Martini & Wine Lounge in Richmond, a sliver of a town near the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Tolk is here, in part, to workshop material for his new solo show High Jinxed, opening Thursday 25 at Gorilla Tango Theatre. “It’s a collection of stories concerning my [youthful] misadventures,” he says of the departure from the traditional setup-and-punch-line format. “I reveal the misguided thinking that has defined my existence.” We’ve joined Tolk on this frosty February night in exurbia, the second outing in a three-night tag-along designed to unveil how one of the city’s top joke tellers hones his craft.
Monday, February 1
Our journey begins at Please Enjoy Yourself, a stand-up night at the Underground Lounge in Lakeview. “I first had this idea four years ago,” Tolk says of the show he’s currently calling Highjinks and Showdowns. “I had done several stories onstage. I kind of dipped my toe in the water and it felt all right, so now I’m going to go in for a dive.”
For his debut narrative show, Tolk will revisit his adolescence in the town of West New York, New Jersey, where his boyhood adventures included shoplifting, finding guns and cocaine, getting arrested (multiple times) and receiving dog shit in the mail. “I did a lot of this crazy stuff because I wanted to have stories to talk about. I wanted to be an interesting grandfather,” Tolk says. “I realize now, no kid wants to hear their granddad telling stories about shoplifting.”
Tolk’s set tonight reveals his natural storytelling abilities and a relaxed cadence, evoking This American Life. But he isn’t satisfied: “The audience was bored, and there were a lot of problems.” He cites his “ums” and “ahs” and a lack of crowd response. There’s work to do.
Friday, February 19
At Olive Black, a gaggle of women refuses to shut up. Both host and opening comic struggle to win over the crowd, but headliner Tolk opens with a zinger: “I just bought a nipple ring for my girlfriend because, as Beyoncé says, ‘If you love something, put a ring on it.’?” With jokes like that, Tolk captivates the 40-plus crowd before segueing into material from the upcoming show. Afterward, he’s exhilarated: “I feel really good. It’s an audience I wouldn’t normally ascribe the ability to get my stories, and they did.” His storytelling is funnier this time around; he punches up the car-crash tale with several asides about growing up white and Jewish in a predominantly Latino town.
But Tolk has dropped the narrative’s showdowns portion, in which he recounted skirmishes at Hye Bar and Wiener’s Circle, and renamed his revue High Jinxed. “It makes no sense to me to do two stories that happened when I was 28,” he says. Tonight’s a success.
Saturday, March 20
At the Lakeshore in Lakeview, Tolk performs ahead of visiting headliner Nick Thune. The storytelling is tighter—when he describes his father’s reaction to the car crash, the punch lines really hit—but his set’s abridged; Tolk didn’t know a guest comic had been booked before him. “The guest spot took ten minutes away,” an irritated Tolk says. “I was cramming to get in as much as possible.” But he delivered an almost complete version days earlier at the Rock n’ Bowl Comedy Showl, a weekly stand-up night at Diversey River Bowl. “That was my dress rehearsal and it went great,” he says. “Since then I’ve been playing around with different parts to try and find the joke onstage, but I’m really happy with it.”
For Tolk, the evolution since our first meeting has been tremendous. “It’s a self-contained show, it’s storytelling, it reveals a lot about me and my background, and it’s funny. I hit all my objectives.” The tweaking will continue, but if he can get Chicago’s hipsters to laugh so hard their drinks come out of their noses, as the audience did in Richmond, he’ll consider it mission accomplished.
High Jinxed opens Thursday 25.
