Top Comics Share Tour Tales with Brian Simpson on SiriusXM’sStories from the Road
Photo by Troy Conrad
Touring is a fundamentally weird concept. Making your living by traveling from town to town, going from an airport to the rent-a-car to the clubs to the rent-a-car to the airport, depending on strangers everywhere you go… it isn’t really something you can relate to if you spend your days in a cubicle or in front of a computer screen. That’s why Brian Simpson’s new SiriusXM show Stories from the Road has us interested.
In Stories from the Road Simpson—a veteran touring comic who you can see on Netflix in a handful of specials, who was a Variety Top Comic to Watch in 2023, and who Paste’s Clare Martin praised for his “casual delivery” and “hilarious and thoughtful bits about race” in a review of the third season of Netflix’s The Standups—talks to fellow experienced vets Mark Normand, Vanessa Gonzalez, Amy Miller, Gianmarco Soresi, Anjelah Johnson and Fahim Anwar about the ups and downs and sheer unpredictability of the touring life. It promises to be a candid, unvarnished, and uproarious look at the odd, peripatetic lifestyle of the stand-up comedian, and because it’s on SiriusXM you can listen to it as you’re stuck in traffic on the way home from your soul-sucking office job. As Simpson says in a press release, “Comics have the most outlandish experiences on the road… it’s the kind of comedy that writes itself.”
Stories from the Road launches tonight at 7 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s Netflix Is a Joke channel—channel 93. Mondays at 7 p.m. will be its regular time slot, and episodes will be available on demand through the SiriusXM app. If you don’t get enough of tour stories from tonight’s debut, you can listen to the second episode a week early through the app, starting at 7 p.m. ET tonight. And if you want to catch some of Brian Simpson’s comedy, you can find him on Netflix right now in The Standups, That’s My Time with David Letterman, and in his own special, Live from the Mothership. Just to make it a little easier for you, here’s a clip from his episode of The Standups, which premiered on Netflix in January 2022.