Recently, an unexpected postcard arrived at my house announcing a new family had moved on to my street. On one side was a picture of a stern looking couple and their equally taciturn son. According to the text, they were The Bansons and while they were happy to be in the neighborhood, they had one important request.
“We only ask one thing: PLEASE DON’T TALK TO US. We have nothing against any of you. We are just in a religion where we don’t want you to talk to us.”
A disconcerting piece of mail to receive at any point but once I recognized that the address listed for the Bansons was an impossibly high number (56322), it quickly dawned me that this postcard hadn’t been mailed by a strange family but from comedian Alan Wagner.
As a part of Wagner’s ever-growing list of Patreon subscribers, I receive mail like this on the regular. The month before brought a windowed envelope from a restaurant called Petey’s Broth Bar returning a lost item to me. In this case, a strip of skin. “You came in, yelled at my waiters and left all this skin on the seat,” the handwritten note on the envelope read. “What the hell man! My staff does not want to touch this stuff.”
“I sent that one to my friend,” Wagner tells me, speaking from his apartment in Brooklyn, “and she told me that she heard the mailman come to her door, call up his friend, and read the letter verbatim and then he put it in the mailbox.”
Therein lies the genius of Wagner’s comedy. He takes seemingly banal parts of modern life—fliers stapled to telephone poles, store receipts, bargain basement DVDs, reality TV shows about pawn shops—and twists them to absurd ends. And it places Alan Wagner in the long lineage of discomfiting comic voices like Look Around You, MAD Magazine, Andy Kaufman, and Tim & Eric. “Tim [Heidecker] shouted me out last year on his Instagram stories,” says Wagner. “It was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
This strain of comedy comes easily to Wagner. Growing up in the small town of Edwardsburg, Michigan, he found solace in the strange, embracing Spongebob Squarepants, Mr. Show and the Adult Swim lineup. “What made me feel less alienated,” he says, “is when the comedy I was watching was so disturbing.”
Wagner eventually landed at USC, where he double majored in film and videogame design. The goal was always to make a film, but to get there, he decided to start making videos to showcase his talents as a writer and producer. That eventually led him to score a gig making clips for the now-defunct site Super Deluxe and his own YouTube channel. But knowing that the only way to stay on the cultural radar in the broadband era was to keep pumping out content, he started making fake fliers to fill the time between video shoots. “That’s what really took off,” Wagner says, “and I started focusing more on those.”
Wagner found a brief bit of viral fame in 2017 when one of his fliers—an offer “open to men only” to come bathe in a tub filled with milk (“soy, almond, or traditional”)—started making the rounds on Twitter and Reddit with people debating whether it was real or not. That brief moment of confusion is only amplified by the very normal looking people that Wagner hires to be the stars of his fliers and other content. Asked about how he chooses the actors and models to take part in his strange scenarios, he says it comes down to “a gut feeling.”
“I really try to avoid people who seem like actors,” Wagner continues. He prefers “people who have a genuineness about them and are really themselves. It’s kind of a bonus point if it’s the kind of person you don’t see very often in media. There’s definitely a big Tim & Eric influence there. The combination between the absurdity and the ordinary and people who are so ordinary it verges on the absurd.”
As for getting these everyday citizens to participate in Wagner’s oddball visions of a man who can remove blood stains by sucking them off the ground or men laying inside the hood of a car, most people have been more than game to join in the fun. The most notable exception was the gent who starred in the milk bathing flier. He arrived at Wagner’s house dressed in a suit and ready to act, only to find out that he was being asked to strip down and get in a bath.
“I feel like if it was just me, he would have walked out,” Wagner remembers. “But because he saw the crew waiting, he was like, ‘Alright, I’m gonna get in this milk and you’ve got two minutes to take your pictures.’ I feel like that made the picture all the more beautiful, his palpable discomfort.”
As word has started to spread about Wagner’s work, especially among his fellow comedians (I first heard about him through Paul F. Tompkins’ Instagram account), it has become a nice side hustle for him. He now has over 1,100 subscribers to his Patreon and has been asked to produce ads for clients like Amazon, Capitol Records, and, memorably, Soylent.
“It was just a dog who only ate Soylent,” Wagner says. “I think it was like, ‘Someone take this freak dog from me who only ate Soylent.’ There was a number you could call in. Back in those days, I used Google Voice so I could actually hear the voicemails people were leaving. Someone thought it was a real dog and called animal control. I called animal control and assured them there was no dog.”
The continued interest in his work has also allowed him to self-publish Wagnerbook, a collection of the last five years of his fliers and posters that will be out in the world on November 10. The creation of this coffee table book has been an involved one as Wagner has had to make sure that the phone numbers and URLs on the fliers still work, adding new functionality that will allow folks to have text exchanges with, say, the parent of a kid “carving chairs like his friends with horns on the head.”
“I would love for comedy to be my whole income,” says Wagner, who has a day job writing scripts for a video game company. “It’s still my lifelong goal to make a movie and try to expand on the tone of what I’ve been doing.” A laudable ambition that, if nothing else, might get his parents to finally comprehend what he’s been up to all this time: “They don’t understand, but they’re reasonably supportive. I think it baffles them, but they’re also proud when they see something do well. I mean, as soon as it’s making me a livable income, I’m sure my dad will love it.”