The Dose: A Psychedelic Comedy Experience
Vanguard
January 11, 2025
Remember the halcyon days of A.I.?
When we laughed at how badly it rendered human hands? When it gave us the boomer phenomenon of “Shrimp Jesus” and the Willy Wonka Glasgow Experience, the latter being an event executed so off from its marketing that the cops were called in? Before Silicon Valley bought our 47th president and promised a techno-feudal hellscape, the scariest thing about A.I. was a character called The Unknown that it invented for that Wonka experience ... and he was still pretty funny.
Well, those days are gone. Skynet is at our doorstep, and escapism and comedy are the most immediate fixes for existential dread. The Dose, a travelling “fully immersive psychedelic [comedy] experience,” promises such a trip into a different kind of “unknown.” The Dose is advertised as “a mind-bending journey of experimentation, laughter, and healing,” facilitating “the perfect set and setting for both the comedians and the audience to find the funny within their expanding minds.”
Meaning: their comics are on drugs and want the audience to follow suit.
I, Mitch, the writer, and Ollie Moreno, herself a comic with an affinity for psychedelic experiences, decided to tag-team the event. Ollie bravely presented herself to the comedic void by taking nearly four grams of shrooms before arriving at Vanguard under the trip-sittage of good friend Russell Moore. She reported on The Dose directly into her voice memos, in real time. I am now writing this review, guided by Ollie’s remarks.
“I entered the venue feeling excited and childlike,” Ollie said. “Ready for chuckles. I saw a full house. One artist was painting with a black light and a handful of vendors were selling psychedelic art that you could barely make out because they had zero lighting … apart from the glow of the headliners' tie-dyed shirts.”
The Dose’s website exclaims that “the show also features our very own DJ and she will play before, during, and sometimes even after the show!” To the horror of Ollie and at least one other local comic, they weren’t lying. “I expected a Disney's Fantasia-meets-Seinfeld club intro, but they instead opened with the Friends theme song,” she said.
It seemed the Glaswegian Wonka debacle and The Dose had more in common than a trip into “the unknown.” Despite promising a fully immersive psychedelic experience, The Dose's only stage decoration was a mandala drug rug on the DJ’s table. Ollie described the opening scene as “a Dollar Tree rave consisting of a laser pointer and three rave balls paraded out to the Friends theme song.” The hosts wandered into the crowd, twirled those flashing balls above random audience members' heads to “feel their vibe,” and asked them to say a number, after which the DJ would play a randomly jarring noise.
The Dose made good on at least one promise: people onstage were definitely tripping balls. But not everyone. Even though the hosts were visibly frogged, local opener Lacee Rains claimed she was the only tripping Tulsan onstage.
“I did two grams of shrooms!” she told me. “The other locals didn’t trip, so I felt dumb, [but] I think the three touring comics were tripping hard.” Rains is easily one of Tulsa’s top comics, and I was curious how the party favors would affect even her performance.
“Honestly, seeing all of the eyes while I was tripping was too much,” she continued. “I couldn’t get my pacing right. I listened back to my set and it was all over the place.”
Our correspondent, ripped asunder by a heroic dose, disagreed with Rains’ self critique. “Lacee came out as her neurospicy, sex positive, witty self, dressed as our favorite convenience store beaver, Buc-ee,” Ollie said. “This easily made her my favorite local comedian of the night.”
Although un-Dosed, the other local comics still slayed, according to Ollie. Cepeda Cheeks opened playfully, riffing with Dose DJ Kelsey T Wood who interjected with more random noises. Cepeda “got some good chuckles out of the full house over a bit about ass eating.” He had some fun with crowd work, too, commenting on the largely white audience’s level of intoxication: “They played that Friends theme song and none of y’all got the claps right. I thought, ‘They’re at their most vulnerable right now.’”
Local favorite and secret death metal historian Evan Hughes “brought down the house, per usual,” according to Ollie. “He finished with a masturbation joke while Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ played in the background.”
As for the completely nuked headliners, Ollie reported that “co-host Nick Dean did a bit about being excited to go to his first concert, Kid Rock, with his mom at age 11. He thought it was a rock concert for kids, and was upset when his mom flashed her boobs and he discovered it was not.”
“That gave me a good chuckle,” Ollie said, “because I too, at the age of 11, thought ‘Kid Rock’ was rock for kids but only wished my mom was that cool.”
Headliner Steve Gillespie was definitely feeling his psychedelics when he hopped on the stage, she reported. “He had some funny bits about conspiracies from lizard people to Pizzagate, and then ended by spending an uncomfortable amount of time on a bit about bathing in his mom’s ass water.”
The Dose Crew wrapped up the show with what Ollie called “another abuse of power” by “asking a tripping audience to hold hands with strangers while they played the Friends theme song … again.”
She summed up The Dose experience like this:
“Nobody wants to get stuck breaking down a beloved ’90s sitcom from its problematic themes of trans/homophobia, misogyny, fatphobia, lack of diversity, casual SA, toxic masculinity, and Ross making a pass on his cousin while you are on psychedelics. But overall, the comedians had us laughing. It was a night of escapism via a traveling show, with room to grow in the visual department. (Even if it’s just a YouTube video of a Y2K visualizer playing on a screen behind the stage ... I don’t know, give me something to play with.) But even without the psychedelic visuals the show’s marketing teased, I had a good time.”
In the end, describing this as “The Glasgow Willy Wonka Psychedelic Comedy Experience” might be unfair. It was more of a super high night of laughs, just a little light on the “psychedelic art” aspect, Ollie said: “So, kind of like Eureka Springs.”
