A few years ago I stumbled into the Midwestcentric comedy stylings of Charlie Berens, and he’s become a close favorite: I rewatch his and YouBetcha’s collabs constantly. The Midwest Survival Guide is a solo effort of his, one I ignored until I saw that Charlie did his own audio. Well, six hours of listening to Charlie sounds like a good time to me! The Guide is fairly scattershot with a loose grouping around the concept of all things Midwest: Charlie discusses movies set in the midwest, popular food, social expectations, and what to expect month by month as far as lawncare goes. This is a book written for humor’s sake, so gags are ubiquitous: the chapter on food is riddled with corny puns. (Ya see what I did there? I made a pun about a guy making puns, they call it meta.) His history of the midwest includes two Lakota individuals departing with a ‘Tell yer folks I says hi’, and so on. The book’s greatest fault is that in its listing of Midwest movies and books, it fails to include The Mighty Ducks. I’m sorry, Charlie, but you can’t be the age you are and skip the Mighty Ducks. You grew up with those Minnesota kids, dag-nabbit! A lot of what Charlie refers to as midwestern is not exclusively midwestern, and this is something I’ve noticed when watching his and YouBetcha’s collabs. A big example of this is his saying that ‘Watch out for deer’ is Midwest for ‘I love you’. Sorry, Charlie, but that’s ubiquitous in the Southland, and I’d bet money that upstate New Yorkers and and Maineiacs say it, too. Ditto for tail-gating, which is practically a religion down here in SEC Country. Perhaps some things he associates with the midwest are really “rural culture” things? While being the fan that I am of Charlie I was roughly familiar with a lot of the topics being gently mocked, there were still some new ones like the obsession with euchre (which I gather is a card game). I enjoyed myself while listening to this, but I’m a Charlie fan so that was a given.

I hope you enjoyed this non-presidential post: we’ll be right back with Kennedy and Nixon!