In the years of Generation Z, the viewpoints and pop culture of millennials has become something of novelty. As a geriatric millennial, Valerie Tosi will be making her way home this weekend to use that viewpoint to the best of her advantage.
With a pair of shows at Nick’s Comedy Stop this Friday and Saturday (July 30 and 31), Tosi brings her Geriatric Millennial tour back home with a multi-faceted excitement. Not only has the reaction to the shows leading up to her homecoming been wonderful, but as she works her way across the country on her first full tour since before the shutdowns, the Salisbury native’s return home admittedly holds a bit more weight than before — so naturally, it’s even more of a meaningful visit this time around.
“I always love coming home, and it’ll be pretty interesting since my parents moved down to Florida during the pandemic, so this will be the first I’m going home without my folks there,” Tosi tells Vanyaland. “But I’m still really excited because the rest of my family is there, as well as close friends, so I’m really looking forward to coming back home.”
While this weekend’s throwdown on Warrenton Street serves as an anticipated return home for Tosi, it’s also just one more step closer to fully polishing the set of jokes and stories that will find its way into her first album recording next month at The Comedy Attic in Bloomington, Indiana.
The decision to make her way to the Midwest to accomplish such a milestone may be puzzling for those not on stage, as a hometown crowd might sound like the perfect fit for a moment like that. But understandably, Tosi sees it as more than just a bit of additional pressure when it comes to performing in front of family, friends, and fellow hometown comics. She’s quick to stress that, aside from the tendency of Boston crowds to be characteristically loud, it’s nothing negative against her home turf that led her to the decision. Instead, “a little blue dot in the middle of a red state” like Bloomington, and The Comedy Attic being one of her favorite venues to perform, were far more attractive reasons.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love my city, and I too am a loud asshole,” says Tosi, with a chuckle. “I come from a long line of loud assholes, but when you’re recording something, you want a venue that is conducive to a good recording. You want a place that’s still pretty intimate and has low ceilings, because it helps with the overall sound quality, and I know a few people who have recorded their own albums [at The Comedy Attic] and loved it, so that was a big part of [the decision] too.”
With an approach to comedy that dwells more deeply in storytelling than setup-punchline jokes, Tosi’s viewpoint as an “elder” of her generation is a naturally vital aspect of her delivery, and highly influential in sharing her experiences that, in many ways, bring to light the all-too-relatable musings among her fellow millennials of a certain age.
It’s that viewpoint, and that inevitable feeling of getting older while still feeling “hip” that brought Tosi to the fitting and understandable name for this tour. As a super fan of coming up with tour names, Tosi loved the phrase from the moment she heard it, and while it might sound a tad exaggerated to consider herself and her peers to be geriatric in their mid-30s, she’s embracing her elder status while straddling the line between old school and new school.
“The word ‘geriatric’ gets thrown out there a lot,” says Tosi. “It’s so interesting, because you feel like you have one foot on the side of millennial, and the other with Gen Z where we still so desperately want to be cool, but we keep fading into the thought process of ‘I’m not leaving the house past a certain point anymore.”
There are a number of aspects pertaining to this weekend, and the tour in general, that have had Tosi looking forward to bringing her latest batch of material to the masses since starting out on it in June. But above everything, just the opportunity to get back out on the road, and the creative aspect of putting a tour together, are some leading factors in her excitement surrounding this trek, in addition to joining her fellow geriatric millennials all over the country.
“I love performing in different cities because it’s fascinating to see how people react to different sets in different cities. I also love traveling, and I feel like that’s the greatest gift comedy has given me. I’m so happy that it’s back, and I love the sort of structured chaos of the whole thing,” says Tosi. “I book all of my own tours, so half of it is feeling professional because you’re staying in a hotel one night, and then asking a friend from college if you could sleep on their couch on your way through town the next night. That’s kind of the beauty of being an artist, where you just find a way to make it happen, and as long as you do that, it doesn’t matter what road you take to get there.”
VALERIE TOSI: THE GERIATRIC MILLENNIAL TOUR :: Friday, July 30 and Saturday, July 31 :: 8 p.m. (both shows) :: Nick’s Comedy Stop, 100 Warrenton St. in Boston :: Tickets are $20