I Am Not The Hero of This Story

Jackie Kashian starts her 2017 stand-up release with an apology to her crowd. She had prepared a solid, carefully structured forty-five minutes of material, only for the 2016 presidential election to happen six weeks prior, rendering her apolitical set obsolete. Her solution is to pivot directly into the discomfort, opening with a blunt question about whether the audience realized they were going to be the bad guys in World War III. What follows is a pointed, conversational reckoning with a shifting political landscape, delivered with the warm, midwestern demeanor of someone trying to keep her father from starting fights on Facebook.\n\nRecorded live at the Acme Comedy Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the album caught Kashian at a veteran stage of her career. Having started in stand-up in 1984, she had spent decades building a dedicated following through tireless touring and her long-running podcast, The Dork Forest. This release, put out by Stand Up! Records, showed her expanding her typical focus on pop-culture obsession and personal neuroses into topical social commentary.\n\nWhile the record begins with political anxiety, Kashian quickly grounds the hour in the personal. She details the exhaustion of explaining modern politics to her Wisconsin-native father and her own half-hearted attempts to try being gay. The latter half of the set shifts to her home life, highlighting the specific domestic eccentricities of being married to a video game developer, why 47 is the ideal age to have a child, and her confusion over the logistical demands of tantric sex. Upon release, the album debuted at number three on the Billboard comedy charts, cementing her reputation as one of the most reliable technicians on the club circuit.