By James Porter
Some of the funniest stories ever told involve drunk people. Bonus points if that person was you. A gold star if you can still remember half the details. Comedian Sean Flannery remembers, with startling clarity. For about a decade now, Flannery has curated the Blackout Diaries, where people get on stage and unashamedly tell about their wildest and weirdest drunken spree. Flannery gets off on creating stories from hair-raising situations that would have finished off a lesser person – he is the author of a book called Places I Can’t Return To – and he’s damn near turned his “blackout diaries” into a cottage industry. Flannery admits that there is some embarrassment involved, but humor saves the day. “I think the best drinking stories often need some level of embarrassment or shame,” he confesses. “After all, in drinking stories, you, the drunk, are usually the villain. So if you tell it with too much pride, the story can drift into a kind of frat-house brag about the vainglory of how much you party. I think most people like to hear drinking stories where there’s enough distance that everyone can laugh about it now, but it’s still an inescapably embarrassing story. I think we like that layer of embarrassment in the story because it reminds us of our own missteps in drinking, where we wished we had said ‘no’ to that last tavern our friend suggested but, months or years later, we can laugh about the embarrassment of separating a shoulder while dancing at a late night bar.”
The famed Diaries shows are magnets for some of Chicago’s finest comics to come up with unique material, but these shows also have people from other walks of life reliving their experiences. “When The Blackout Diaries first started, and we did not yet have a consistent weekly audience, I mostly found the regular folks at bars,” admits Flannery. “After someone told an amazing story, I would hand them a card – like I was a talent agent for jackasses – and then explain the show and ask if they would consider telling that story on stage. You would be surprised how often people said yes – probably over 80% of the time.” Flannery concedes that he’s “not sure if that’s because Chicagons don’t fear public speaking too much or we are so drunk we don’t process what we are agreeing to. But once the show became successful and drew consistent, large crowds, people usually found me.” Flannery promises that the upcoming show on April 18th involves “a teacher, a contractor, an actress and a bartender who all live or work in the neighborhood.”
The genesis for the Blackout Diaries happened ten years ago. “I was doing a separate, one-person comedy show downtown called Never Been To Paris. That show was about the last ten times I nearly killed myself by accident and, after each show, a few people from the crowd would approach me and tell me their own stories of nearly dying. The stories people told me were always hilarious, and usually involved drinking, so I started to think about a way I could get them to tell these stories on stage. I created The Blackout Diaries a few weeks later, as a vehicle for everyday Chicagoans to share crazy stories. Last year we finally launched the show as a podcast as well, where you can hear these stories on the Internet.”
Last year, the Blackout Diaries were launched as a podcast, where these stories are captured for eternity, but the live show is ongoing. As Flannery says, “After each Blackout Diaries show, there are usually two or three people waiting to meet me in the back and ask how they can participate in the show because, ‘I have a crazy story about why I’m not allowed near waterways in the state of Indiana’ or ‘wanna hear how I learned all police handcuffs in the US use the same key?- I was drinking in Phoenix and…’”
