wellRed Comedy Tour brings hilarious, liberally-minded humor to Little Rock

by Julian Spivey
The wellRed Comedy Tour featuring Trae Crowder (aka “The Liberal Redneck”), Corey Forrester and Drew Morgan brought its brand of liberally-minded, redneck comedy to the Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock, Ark. for a two-night stop on Friday, April 1 and Saturday, April 2.
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I attended the April 2 show, and these boys had the sold-out crowd in stitches from start-to-finish with jokes that were at times incredibly poignant and other times the most vulgar thing I’d ever heard in my life (I’m looking at you Corey!).  

I had just seen Jim Gaffigan, one of my favorite stand-up comedians and a legend in his field, do a set in the much bigger Simmons Bank Arena two nights prior in Little Rock and, honestly, I laughed harder at Crowder, Forrester and Morgan more than during Gaffigan’s set.

The three guys might not be big stars in the stand-up world, and Crowder and Forrester might be known more for their social media posts that sometimes focus more on politics than actual jokes (which I how I was introduced to them), but if you get the opportunity to see their tour you shouldn’t pass it up. It’s non-stop laughs.

Forrester opened his set with jokes about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars the weekend before as a segue into a story about how he once choked out an off-duty police officer at a pool party in his late teens (maybe early twenties) when he was high on Percocet. It had the audience in hysterics right from the start. He then followed with a bit about how he once almost physically stimulated himself to a photo of his own backside before finding out it was a photo of him from the night before trying on his female friends underwear, something he had no memory of doing.

Forrester ended his set with an outrageous bit about a surefire way to handle people who come up to him bitching about what gives him the right to espouse his liberal views. The way to get rid of these folks is to talk about how he’d essentially like to have a very explicit orgy with Jesus Christ.

Drew Morgan followed Forrester with a bit about how it’s incredibly hard to follow a comedian who had just ended his set with a disturbingly graphic telling of an orgy with Jesus Christ before launching into a new bit about how he doesn’t trust the Amish.

Morgan, sporting what appeared from the audience as a black eye, told the crowd about how he’d just recently had skin cancer removed from his face.

Morgan joked a lot about how his wife and him were attempting to start a family, but also about how her bisexuality made him feel emasculated because women are better at pleasing women then men are and how “Lorrie was a better man than he.”

Crowder was the last of the three comedians to take the stage, and the most famous of the trio as his social media posts as “The Liberal Redneck” began taking the internet by storm in the early 2010s. Definitely the most polished of the three comedians as a stand-up, Crowder was in complete command of the stage telling jokes about being picked up from school as a kid by his mom wearing blackface because she celebrated “Pancake Day” at the diner she worked at by dressing up as Aunt Jemima and how people in Los Angeles, where he currently lives, view him as lesser because of his accent and about how Americans are treated around the world the way Southerners are treated in non-Southern parts of America.

Crowder has had a couple of television deals in the past with Fox and ABC, but none of his prospective series have made it through pilot season and onto television, which is a shame because he has leading man material in a show that resembles his “liberal redneck” stand-up material.