Sanity Optional

Mike Guido’s best material comes from the realization that raising a child with severe autism offers very little dignity and an awful lot of physical comedy. When his daughter Maria snatches a fistful of french fries directly off a stranger’s table at a diner, he does not scramble for an excuse; he just shrugs and tells the room she was hungry. When she heaves a twelve-pound shot put out the passenger window of their moving car, it clatters squarely onto the hood of a stranger’s pickup truck. Guido tells these stories without sanctimony or self-pity, treating family life as an exercise in damage control where sanity is purely optional.

Taped at the Dry Bar Comedy club in Provo, Utah and released in 2019, the 36-minute set catches the veteran San Francisco comic in a clean, tightly packaged format. Guido came up through the late-1980s comedy boom, appearing on A&E and Showtime before scaling back his touring schedule to care for Maria, later channeling those experiences into a touring one-man show.

The rest of the performance leans into traditional road comic territory: the impossibility of finding street parking in San Francisco, marital debates about his immaturity, and Tiger Woods driving golf balls hard enough to knock into weather satellites. It is straightforward club material, though the show finds its firmest footing whenever Guido returns to his family’s domestic pandemonium.