Drew Hastings strides onstage at the Valentine Theater in Toledo Ohio - all 6’ 6” of him. He’s dressed in black like Johnny Cash, but from the neck up resembles a goyische Woody Allen. He wears thick black glasses which remind most of Buddy Holly, but Hastings refers to them as “my Al Sharpton glasses - big, black, you can see right through them.” In the first moments of his standup concert it’s already obvious — Drew is as multiplicitous as a Picasso painting, as offensive as an Andres Serrano photograph, and as confusing as - well, as a Drew Hastings standup concert.
Drew Hastings has seen many changes in his half century or so. Born in Morocco of a British mother and soldier father, reared in Ohio, he has lived all over the United States and held many types of jobs. It’s a bit sketchy exactly what some of those jobs entailed - in his own words, some were a bit “shady” - but what’s certain is each profession differed radically from the next. Most people pick a profession or two and remain at least in the general vicinity for their lifetime. But Drew Hastings, he makes it clear, is not most people.
“I was a long-haired hippie freak in the early/mid-‘70s and hung with Dayton, Ohio hippies who had long hair, did acid, had an Appalachian streak, and were complete badasses. The drug-using cousins of Larry Flint. Literally,” he said of his early life, via an email interview. Descriptive, eh? Yet still vague. He alludes to running a business and “governmental regulation” which “really started getting intrusive”. But it isn’t clear what type of business that was. At any rate, at some point “in the mid-’80s”, he decided he could be a standup comic - so he gave that a try.
So why is Drew so vague, so reticent about his biographical material? What he does give up is much more interesting than the bad relationship and city slicker on a farm stories to be found in his newly released DVD, Drew Hastings: Irked and Miffed. His blog page on MySpace shows a literate individual - anyone who’s a fan of A Confederacy of Dunces can’t be all bad, right? (Except one does fear that the dunces, to Hastings, are most of us.) The only similarity between his blog musings and his stage act is the elitism he projects outward. What we get, on stage, instead, are jokes and schtick. Rehearsed, exaggerated stories. Bad relationship formulaic humor. Fish out of water humor. Nothing that seems nearly as original as this man seems to be, once one gets a glimmer of what’s behind that hipster costume.
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