Best Drunk

You don’t really have a problem if it morphs into a funny story, right? Sean Flannery has long been the local comic embodiment of Alcoholics Anonymous, spewing forth enough anecdotes about his booze-soaked pratfalls to deter even the most red-nosed drinker from ordering another. He’s the creator and host of The Blackout Diaries, a Saturday-night showcase of stand-up and storytelling in which he enlists both fellow comics and everyman guests to reminisce about, say, drunkenly tackling a 30-feet-tall Christmas tree in an apartment-building lobby. And on Thursdays at the Comedy Bar he’s the purveyor of Never Been to Paris, a one-man show (currently on summer hiatus) about “the last dozen or so times” he almost got himself killed. Of course, a good many of those “last dozen times or so” involve knocking back cold ones or waking up after a long night of knocking back cold ones—Flannery’s material, down to the old-school beer ads that fascinate him, is bookended by booze. A couple of my favorite blackout yarns: Flannery charging an exorbitant amount at Wilsons Leather and later denying the charge because he assumed his credit card had been stolen, and he and a rocket scientist attempting to make off with a bulb from a Cincinnati street lamp, resulting in a tree ablaze and a friend’s eyebrows singed.