They don’t have a website. They don’t have a regular venue. They jerry-rigged this month’s show in a dirty, depressing warehouse, and the lights kept going out. I had to wait in line for an hour with a solidly homogeneous collection of twenty-something white hipsters who B-ed YOB. The show went on for more than two and half hours, all of which time I spent on a folding chair, occasionally getting chili and spunk-flavored cream thrown on me. I saw more than I wanted to see of the host’s and co-host’s privates. The misogyny was even more casual, with the — inevitably young — women in the audience encouraged to flash and grind at every opportunity. Open and covert homophobic jokes flew every which way. And there wasn’t even any food.
It was awesome.
Jamie “DeWolf” Kennedy’s Tourette’s Without Regrets is awesome not because of its stupidity but in spite of it. The content of the show is entirely beside the point; it could be Christian values hour and it wouldn’t matter. Because what Tourette’s brings is a ritual as practiced and intricately designed as high mass, the deepest concentration of raw talent you’re likely to see in a monthly night in the Bay, and horsepower.
Tourette’s, Kennedy’s performance-competition-cum-low-ring circus, has been working Benicia, Vallejo, and then Oakland for, well, I don’t know how many years because they don’t have a website. Nine? In all that time it’s still undergroundish, and seems to like it that way.
But you can tell Kennedy and crew have been doing this a long time. They start with exactly the sort of hug-your-neighbor we used to “build community” in church, and just like in church, it loosened everyone up. Know thy audience. Rather than offering a main event with side shows, Tourette’s combines variety show with game show for a balanced and rhythmic flow of high-energy scenes: the slam judges introduced themselves by mimicking psychotic animals; two previous “dirty haiku” champions faced off in three rounds; a sick beatboxing duo gave a perfectly timed set; a surreal Burlesque/performance group combined a flute, some high-flown language, and a Snow White strip-tease, etc.