Add this legendary cannabis comedy festival to your bucket list

Attention, Humboldt County’s grass farmers, give your work crew a night off, or better still, the weekend, and send them down the hill and into town to laugh. Because the 10th annual Savage Henry Comedy Festival returns October 7-9, with 10 venues hosting over 100 comedians in and around the city of Eureka, CA.

A comedy festival in the middle of harvest season in Northern California gives everyone a chance to relax, inhale, and laugh.

And if you’re not in Humboldt County but driving away from Northern California and want to take a tireless road trip forever, what are you waiting for? What destination could be more worthy than an open-air comedy festival held right at the start of the harvest season in the epicenter of American cannabis culture?

You can turn it into a whole adventure by following Leafly’s cannabis travel guide to find the real Humboldt. Also, if someone offers you a gig, check out our guide to trimming weed before departure. Just stay away, sigh, Murder Mountain.

And be sure to buy locally when buying weed.

Home grown grass and hospitality

So who will be there?

The line-up for this year’s festival consists mostly of seasoned road comics who love to get high enough to play in a small club five hours from San Francisco and ten hours from Portland. Plus a native community of local comedians who go out of their way to keep Humboldt weird while making sure any prankster who makes the hike is treated to some of the killer weed and friendly hospitality that made the county famous.

This year’s festival headliners include Sam Tallent (author of Running the Light), Valerie Tosi (Conan), Dave Waite (Jimmy Fallon), Tess Barker (“Billy on the Street”), Nicholas Rutherford (Rick and Morty) and Robert Jenkins (“laughs”).

The entertainment on offer goes beyond stand-up and features everything from impromptu battles to comedic games based on making up songs or projecting someone’s old vacation slides.

When the nights go on and the edibles kick in, the line between performer and audience can actually get pretty foggy – but don’t dare to heckle.

Who is Savage Henry?

The name Savage Henry comes from an obscure line in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and refers to a possibly made-up heroin dealer whom the novel’s former heroes jokingly say they are on their way to murder:

My lawyer leaned in front of the hitchhiker. “The truth is,” he said, “we’re going to Vegas to croak a baron named Savage Henry. I’ve known him for years, but he ripped us off – and you know what that means, don’t you? “

When Chris Durant lost his job as a Humboldt County crime reporter in 2010, he saved the name for a humor magazine he and his wife Monica started on their kitchen table. For ten years and in more than 100 monthly issues, she and her co-conspirators caused laughter by mocking Humboldt’s illegal grass culture, especially the intoxicating local mix of hippie idealism and backwoods fever paranoia that makes it such a wild and wonderful place.

The free magazine publishes an annual harvest issue with a pull-out Trim Scene motivational poster every fall. A previous example:

Stand-up comedy meets local consumption

The magazine recently closed after struggling to remain solvent during the pandemic, but the Savage Henry Comedy Club in Eureka has managed to stay open and will be hosting the festival’s biggest shows in person this year – with all state and local COVID precautions.

For the small, dedicated crew that has struggled to keep the comedy club going over the past two years, the festival is an opportunity to bring their local fans together with a community of comics from across the country who call the club a second home.

“This year’s festival is something very special after the comedy club put the comedy club on the shelf for months in 2020,” says Chris Durant. “It will be the first time I’ve seen a lot of these comics in about two years since the 2019 festival. We were able to squeeze out a festival last October, but most of it was on Zoom and it’s like being used to smoking Humboldt’s finest and then having to switch to Mugwart – it runs through the movements, but the fun stuff is it not there. And to do so for over a decade is a major milestone. We’ve grown into a festival that uses comics as credit, and comedy fans build holidays around it. ”

The pandemic forced the magazine to close, but Savage Henry’s Comedy Club in Eureka, California survived. (David Beehive Photo)

Of course, it’s 420 friendly

And to make things even more weed, additional shows are happening at the Papa & Barkley Social Dispensary, which has an on-site pharmacy, tasting room, day spa, and restaurant. So yes, you can smoke weed while attending an outdoor show.

Incidentally, an informal survey of comedians at a previous festival found that drunk viewers laugh louder and easier, but stoned ones are much more empathetic, not to mention that it is much easier and funnier to deal with. So, if you’ve ever felt distracted by the sometimes rowdy atmosphere of a comedy club, you should definitely give weed a try.

David beehive

Seasoned cannabis journalist David Bienenstock is the author of “How to Smoke Pot (Properly): A Highbrow Guide to Getting High” (2016 – Penguin / Random House) and co-host and co-creator of the podcast “Great Moments in Weed History.” Abdullah and Bean. ”Follow him on Twitter @pot_handbook.

View David Beehive’s articles

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