The Dose: A Psychedelic Comedy Experience
Vanguard
January 11, 2025
Remember the halcyon days of A.I.?
When we laughed at how badly it rendered human hands? When it gave us the boomer phenomenon of “Shrimp Jesus” and the Willy Wonka Glasgow Experience, the latter being an event executed so off from its marketing that the cops were called in? Before Silicon Valley bought our 47th president and promised a techno-feudal hellscape, the scariest thing about A.I. was a character called The Unknown that it invented for that Wonka experience ... and he was still pretty funny.
Well, those days are gone. Skynet is at our doorstep, and escapism and comedy are the most immediate fixes for existential dread. The Dose, a traveling “fully immersive psychedelic [comedy] experience,” promises such a trip into a different kind of “unknown.” The Dose is advertised as “a mind-bending journey of experimentation, laughter, and healing,” facilitating “the perfect set and setting for both the comedians and the audience to find the funny within their expanding minds.”
Meaning: their comics are on drugs and want the audience to follow suit.
I, Mitch, the writer, and Ollie Moreno, herself a comic with an affinity for psychedelic experiences, decided to tag-team the event. Ollie bravely presented herself to the comedic void by taking nearly four grams of shrooms before arriving at Vanguard under the trip-sittage of good friend Russell Moore. She reported on The Dose directly into her voice memos, in real time. I am now writing the article, guided by Ollie’s remarks.
“I entered the venue feeling excited and childlike,” Ollie said. “Ready for chuckles. I saw a full house. One artist was painting with a black light and a handful of vendors were selling psychedelic art that you could barely make out because they had zero lighting … apart from the glow of the headliners' tie-dyed shirts.”
The Dose’s website exclaims that “the show also features our very own DJ and she will play before, during, and sometimes even after the show!” To the horror of Ollie and at least one other local comic, they weren’t lying. “I expected a Disney's Fantasia-meets-Seinfeld club intro, but they instead opened with the Friends theme song,” she said.