Drew Hastings was nice enough to give me a call the other day and talk about Saturday night’s show at the Virginia Theatre with the Canadian Mist Bob & Tom Comedy All-Stars. He’ll be joined onstage by Bob Zany, Greg Hahn, and Donnie Baker & the Pork Pistols, and Kristi Lee of the Bob & Tom show will be the emcee of the evening. Tickets are $32.50, there’s reserved seating, and the extravaganza begins at 7 p.m.
This is the quote at the top of Hastings’ bio page on his website: “‘Isn’t it ironic that the finest coffees in the world come from countries where no one has a reason to get up in the morning?'” Huh.
Hastings is an Ohio native who owned a couple of small businesses: a trucking company and a paper-shredding outfit. After living in Los Angeles for several years acting and doing standup, he purchased a farm in rural Hillsboro, Ohio which is southeast of Dayton and northwest of Cincinnati.
His guest page on the Bob & Tom site reveals, “Drew is not only one of the most brilliant comedians working today, he’s also one of the only metrosexual ‘Gentleman Farmers’ in the midwest. Unless you know of another guy raising pigs and growing corn while wearing a black mock turtle-neck sweater.”
Actually, he’s raising beef cattle, but he’s not getting rich at it. “It’s holding its own; it’s not doing that well,” Hastings admits.
I thought maybe he’d be sharing farming tips with his fellow southwest Ohio farmer-comic, Dave Chappelle (who lives outside Yellow Springs), but that isn’t the case. “No, we don’t talk. I know Dave, but no, we don’t really talk.”
Hastings also downplayed any suggestion that there’s an orchestrated movement of comedians to purchase farmland in the area. “No, I don’t think it’s a movement,” he demurred. “I think it’s a movement of people wanting to get out of L.A., like [Chappelle] and I have both done, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a movement to farms.” Only you, the reader, can decide if Hastings is telling everything he knows. Even Zach Galifianakis is getting in on the act:
There’s clearly an agrarian movement among today’s comedy heavyweights.
There are advantages to the ensemble cast of these All-Star tours, Hastings says. “Everybody’s different, so you get a different flavor from every comedian. I generally tend to close the show at the end, and I think it lets people see you. A lot of times, some of us will come back through six months later or nine months later, and it gives people a taste of you. They see 15 or 20 minutes of you, and they think, ‘Oh, I’d like to see more of that guy, or I would like to see more of this person.’ So, it’s a nice mixture.”
That’s all the time we have, so here’s a video of Hastings’ stand-up to give you an idea of his style: