The Sklar Brothers have teamed up with Audible to release a 6-hour audio documentary they made while on the road. Titled Sklars and Stripes, the project will be out as an Audible original on Thursday, April 5th, and if you purchase it, the audio documentary will also come with the Sklars’s full standup album recorded during the tour called The Tour Tapes. Here’s more info:
Randy and Jason Sklar have a knack for exploring what makes America’s cities unique and wonderful, whether it’s finding out who in San Diego serves the best burritos, why basketball is so popular among those in Bloomington, or why the people of Portland can’t let go of their old airport carpeting. 2017 was a year in which everyone retreated to their bubbles – liberal, conservative, and cotton-candy scented. Everyone except Jason and Randy Sklar. They didn’t have a choice; if you’re a comedian, you get a tour date and you go to work. They traveled to red states and blue states, red cities in blue states, and blue cities in red states. What emerged throughout their travels was a real sense of what everyone was going through in a historically insane and twistedly-hilarious year. Audible recorded their experiences, insights, and off-the-cuff jokes along the way, shaping the experience into a long-form audio documentary. Here’s more on the project, from the Sklar Brothers themselves: “In our quest to get out of our bubble, travel the country as outsiders, and write local comedy that connects with people in the cities where they live, we pondered the idea of the tech industry pricing gay culture out of San Francisco, building a wall between Missouri and Kansas, and a gluten-free strip club in Portland, OR. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a comedian on the road in America, creating comedy in the moment…Sklars and Stripes is for you. And, come on, it’s not like Anthony Bourdain is going to write 6 minutes of funny material about Casa Bonita, a Mexican restaurant in suburban Denver that has indoor cliff diving.†On the road, alongside producer Scott Rogowsky (HQ Trivia) Randy and Jason searched for topics specific to each community they visited – then challenged themselves to see whether they could perform jokes about those topics that locals would find funny. More broadly, they dug into the American psyche and explored its dark and quirky crevices both on stage and off. Follow their shenanigans in this comedic documentary which visits 10 different cities, each a new chapter and a new adventure. With an arsenal of jokes and a curious mind, the Sklars attempt to answer one burning question: as a nation, can Americans still laugh at themselves?
Sklars and Stripes is available for pre-order now over at Audible. Check out a preview track from it below, where the Bros visit a weed dispensary in Denver:
Photo by Troy Conrad.