Tell me about the goofiest locals in your city

Reflecting on my stage stage (doing live shows)

I’m in a stage stage, which is to say that I started doing live Wikipedia-themed comedy shows a year ago and I’m suddenly realizing that I don’t really know why I ever did that (willingly subject myself to the horror of standing on a stage and ‘being funny’). It’s not a normal progression; there is no real gimmick-account-to-live-performer pipeline. And I don’t really know how I got here. This newsletter is not a heavily-hyperlinked missive but rather a rambling reflection on why I ever started doing live Depths of Wikipedia shows in the first place. I definitely could have kept all of this in my journal but I thought it might be interesting to a few of you.

How I became a comedian by accident:

May 2021: I was sitting in my Bed Stuy apartment on the day I turned twenty-one and a half when I got a DM on my depthsofwikipedia Instagram account from an account called aspiecomedians which asked me to be in a live comedy show in Manhattan: “Perhaps you could read some of the more interesting obscure bits you’ve found?” wrote Noah Britton, a member of the Aspergers Are Us comedy group, which has a great Netflix special in 2016. This message instantly made me want to barf, because a) stand-up comedy is one of the most embarrassing things that people electively do and b) I knew I would forever regret turning down the opportunity (I had to say yes).

The idea terrified me. I had pretty much no experience being on a stage save for high school band concerts and the one time I played Jesus in an Easter play in third grade (I was cast — no joke — because I could hold my arms out longer than anyone else). Sure, whatever, I’d read some Wikipedia articles or whatever. I sent a reply to clarify that I do not have an autism diagnosis but was totally willing to perform in the Aspergers Are Us show. Sure! What the heck! I figured it was scary but doable — like, of all the audience to bomb in front of, the one with a condition characterized by difficulty interpreting the nuances of social interaction seemed like one that wouldn’t be intimidatingly judgemental. Trying out standup comedy seemed like one of those things that’s extremely unpleasant but sort of interesting, like getting a Brazilian wax.

Noah then informed me that the event wasn’t just for people with autism and it wasn’t a small event — the other performers were Joe Pera (whose TV show I love) and Please Don’t Destroy (a sketch group that is on SNL now) and that there’d be an audience of hundreds. I realized that I was completely out of my depths. I was a random woman with a small gimmick account and I was going to be surrounded by up-and-coming faces of alt comedy. I spent the next month preparing a presentation of goofy Wikipedia articles that I practiced to my friends on Zoom. On the day of the show, I called off work and I dry heaved. I showed up to the venue several hours too early and while I waited, I incessantly chatted (nervous coping mechanism) with the woman taking tickets, who had a college class with my childhood neighbor, it turned out. Cool! The event started, I took awkward selfies with my fellow performers slash my heroes, recognized the NPR Planet Money TikTok guy and my favorite artist Sidney Gish in the audience (more heroes), and then gave an adequate 10-minute set. I made it out alive!

Fall 2021: One thing led to another. A very cool guy named Reed Kavner, who is on the first google image page when you search “white guy” and has done a bunch of interesting projects like mapping New Yorker restaurant reviews, invited me to do a set in his show. Sure! What the heck! After that, he teased the idea of an entire show about Wikipedia, and I was like, “Sure! What the heck!” We set a date for January, which we then postponed to March due to a Covid spike.

March 2022: I don’t really have very many memories of that first show, except that I a) survived and b) made like a thousand dollars, which is more money than I had ever made in a single night. It was at Caveat, a ~130-person venue in the Lower East Side that was founded by a former physicist a few years ago. People always ask, “what do you do in your show?” and the answer is that I give a silly slideshow about Wikipedia culture and content and lead a few audience-participation games. Sometimes I have cool guests. It’s 70-90 minutes, and based on the consistent sellouts and positive reviews, people seem to generally have fun (I think?). I’ve always been pretty adamant about keeping ticket prices relatively reasonable (at first it was $15ish I think, and now it’s like $20 or $25ish) I still find the whole concept of charging money to listen to my goofy thoughts is extremely delusional but not too deranged for me to be above it.

Anyway, I did this first show, and it was fine, I think. Probably? A story about that first show is in The New Yorker (which is extremely cool to me!!!!!!!!!) and it repeatedly mentions me assuaging my feat with this Simpsons line: “Why would they come to our concert just to boo us?” Like an embattled post-race marathoner or a new mom just out of labor, I finished the show and said “never again” but promptly forgot all the pain and agreed to do it all again.

Around this time (February - April 2022), a few things happened:

• I’d been writing part-time at a tech publication called Input for a few months, and I had a few banger articles about Wikipedia that got shared a lot (high five couple, Russian Wikipedia downloads). It was really exciting to transcend the “hey look at this dumb thing” to “hey look at this interesting data trend that sheds insight on international relations and our collective relationship to free information.” I was no longer just a curator of goofy screenshots — I was a curator of goofy screenshots with occasional thoughts!

• The New Yorker’s ~1000 word story about the first show ran and it attracted attention from a few people in the comedy world, who encouraged me to keep going. This is a bit beside the point, but I gained a deep respect for the magazine’s fact checking when I was asked twice to say the name of the species I was dissecting in my genetics lab so that they could include this line: “The other day, after Rauwerda finished a class in which she dissected the brain of a fly, she joined the Google Meet call, with her cat, to discuss ‘Depths of Wikipedia live!,’ the first in-person event for this inherently online community.”

• The New York Times Styles section ran a story about Depths of Wikipedia (slow news day, I guess?)

• I did really poorly on one of my university biology exams (not the first time that happened) but I didn’t even care (the first time that happened!!) which made me realize how much my sense of purpose had shifted away from school performance

May 2022: All of this, in combination, did such a number on me that I reached out to Union Stage in Washington DC and asked if I could do a Depths of Wikipedia show there. A staff member responded instantly, and in the span of a few minutes it was all set in stone: I was going to do another show. I recruited Paul O’Sullivan Band (a band made up of four guys, each named Paul O’Sullivan) to sing some songs. I also recruited two Wikipedians: Andrew Lih, who wrote an excellent book on Wikipedia in 2009, and Steven Pruitt, the most-active Wikipedian ever ( >5 million edits). I went to DC, crashed with a friend from high school who lived near the venue (thanks, Seth), and did the show. Was it amazing? Probably not. Did it change any lives in a meaningful way? Probably not. Am I being too hard on myself? Maybe. I, once again, survived it! I still was not very excited to be in front of an audience, but I did appreciate finally making money off of this gimmick account that I had obsessively maintained for two years. I’m pretty nervous to monetize at all. It’s not lost on me that volunteers are writing Wikipedia’s content for free, and I don’t want to profit on their backs. When I talk about this, people sometimes ask if I give proceeds to Wikimedia Foundation and the answer, as of right now, is no. Based on the size of their endowment (huge! and growing rapidly!), they’re not particularly desperate for funds. I personally have a recurring monthly donation, and I contribute to the encyclopedia in other ways, namely editing and hosting edit-a-thons to encourage old and new editors. But I digress!

Fall 2022: My part-time job at Input, a fledging tech blog where I’d been working ~20 hours/week for about a year (starting when I was in college), shuttered. I decided not to get another job and to instead do more shows. I’d ripped the Band Aid; I’d fallen into the depths. I was, officially, no longer afraid of doing shows and I also had venues proactively reaching out to me. I did a show in LA (with Jamie Loftus, my favorite podcaster!), and another in NYC, and then one in Seattle. At this point, I was living on the road and crashing with friends. I felt alive! I don’t know about you, but I was feeling 22. I did shows in San Francisco and Austin. Both were fine (I survived). At this point, I got an agent to book shows for me, and I started magically getting much higher percentages of door sales from venues (thanks Ben!). In December, I did shows in Philly, Boston, Pittsburgh, NYC, and another one in DC. Were they life-changing, incredible, world-shattering? Probably not. But it was really damn cool to constantly be meeting Wikipedians and Wikipedia-enthusiasts from around the country.

That brings us to the present. I never really wanted to be a comedian, and now I’m going around the country doing like eight shows a month, but I’m having fun, I think! What a happy accident. What a weird life. It’s been nine months since I graduated college and I’m totally able to live on money from shows and freelance writing (mostly in publications, but occasionally people do paid subscriptions to this unfrequent newsletter which is very sweet). I also bit the bullet and agreed to a paid ad last month for Netflix. I’m doing it! I’m living life as “a creator”! I’ll probably get a real job sometime soon, whenever being a Wikipedia influencer on the road stops being fun or sustainable. But I think I have a few more months left in me. We’ll see!

Some highlights from 2022 live shows:

• A few seconds from of the NYC shows was broadcast nationally on ABC News. An entire TV news whole film crew showed up to the show.

• Jesse Eisenberg emailed me to say he likes Depths of Wikipedia and that he was willing to be involved. He came to a show in New York and acted out a Wikipedia article

• Over the summer, as Corn Kid swept the internet I got Julian from Recess Therapy (Corn Kid’s interviewer) and the Gregory Brothers/shmoyoho (the guys who made the song) to perform at a NYC Depths of Wikipedia live show. They extended the “It’s Corn!” song with a few verses, one for each different “Corn” on Wikiepdia’s disambiguation page, like the small municipality in Oklahoma called “Corn” and the ingrown foot callus.

• In Washington DC, the biggest venue I’d ever done (550!) the screen stopped working which is VERY BAD because I show a lot of Wikipedia screenshots. The horror, the horror! Anyway, I spotted a woman in the crowd that looked a lot like the former CEO of Wikipedia and invited her on the stage to chat while the tech team figured things out. To my delight, it was in fact the former CEO and she was in fact down to have a little chat while the tech team figured things out. Thank you, Katherine Maher!!!!!!

• The iconic guy from the Wikipedia article for shrug (see below) did a live-reenactment of the iconic shrug. It got covered in Axios lol.

  

• In Philadelphia, I got the guy who ate 40 rotisserie chickens to do his first live interview. Also, I randomly hired a bagpiper (thought it would be interesting?) and the crowd really liked it, so I hired bagpipers in a few more cities. At first, I would mention Wikipedia’s “List of nontraditional bagpipes usage,” but then some editors deleted the article because it was full of non-notable and unsourced trivia, so there was really no great bagpipes tie-in. I just like bagpipes.

• I try to bring random, weird people on stage. Sometimes I find them on Craigslist. In Boston, for example, I saw a Craigslist ad from a poet who’s also a WWE fan, and he really wanted to form a group to perform poetry in the style of WWE announcements. I couldn’t not call him. He told me that he had a group together and I told him that he was welcome to have his first performance in Boston. It was…. truly incredible. My expectations were pretty low — I mean (it was a random person from Craigslist) and this blew them out of the water. I wish I had a video

• I met Melissa Franklin, the Harvard physicist who dared a guy to put the word “penguin” in his quantum paper, which led to the penguin diagram (the story is told better on Wikipedia)

• Other cool past and upcoming guests: my favorite musician Sidney Gish, Birds Aren’t Real, Lyle the Therapy Gecko, the woman who inadvertently spread a huge rumor that Amelia Bedelia was based on a maid in Camaroon, a bunch of Jeopardy! contestants I idolize, Jamie Loftus, the podcaster who joined Mensa as a joke and wrote a book about hot dogs, tons more I’m forgetting

Here’s what I’d love from you!!!

I have shows coming up and I desperately need goofy guests. Who are some niche viral people? Like the busker who spent decades dressed up as a bush in San Francisco. Or the researcher who carried a bunch of model kidneys around Disney World to see if roller coasters help you pass kidney stones (the verdict: yes, maybe, probably?!). Or the guy who raised the world’s oldest cat and gave her wine every day. An eye-witness of the Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident. The guy who filled out a bunch of paperwork to name an island after Busta Rhymes. Or someone with a really unique story about Wikipedia (please not Wikipedia vandalism, though; I try not to promote that sort of thing!)

I have shows coming up in these cities:

1/22 San Diego
1/24 Salt Lake City
2/2 LA (Brea)

2/23 Detroit
2/24 Minneapolis
2/25 Bloomington
2/26 Chicago

3/4 Atlanta
3/5 Nashville

Please let me know if there are any niche celebs (… or real celebs) that I should reach out to. I love making people play little Wikipedia-themed games on stage. Oh! And buy tickets, if you’d like (if you’re a really active Wikipedia editor, I’ll give you tickets for free — just ask). I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be doing live shows. You can become a touring comedian by accident, it turns out. What a funny world.

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading. Hope you’re doing well! Leave a comment!

Love,

Annie