16. Mark Klein - Comedian - The Funny Side of Bourbon

I'm kind of blinded by your shirt this morning. You're kind of known for your fashion sense.

This shirt here, folks, I can't tell if it's the sunrise or the sunset with all the yellows and oranges. I know it's picking up about five channels because I think I hear a country channel.

They don't see you coming in the shirt. They hear you coming in the shirt. The shirt is loud.

Welcome to another trip down the Bourbon Road with your hosts, Jim and Randy. So grab a glass of your favorite bourbon and kick back.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Log Heads Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Find out more about their fine rustic furniture at logheadshomecenter.com.

All righty. A few belly laughs this morning. You know, what a fun show. Yeah, Mark Klein. And now I have a new line too. What's that? Horses. They eat dollars and crap problems.

They do crap a lot of problems.

I'm telling you, as horse owners, we know that. Anyway, fun to hear from a comedian.

Yeah. So he's a funny guy. He is a self-proclaimed bourbon aficionado, also a stand-up comedian on cruise lines and at corporate events.

Corporate events calls himself the corp jester. Corp jester.

Yeah, it was really great to have him on the show. What a bright shirt he wore though.

I'm telling you, and we let him get out of here without a picture. We're going to have to go find a picture of him in a bright shirt.

He said he has got a whole closet of those.

30 of those.

Wow. Yeah. Well, it was a lot of fun to have a comedian on the show. Mark was a great guy.

But a history buff, so he was really knowledgeable. And so don't expect this show to be totally all funny. There's some really good information.

Yeah, serious, straight guy, very serious at the same time. A lot of good information about Bourbons, I thought.

Yeah.

He knows a lot and kind of a twist to you. You'll have to wait and hear about that.

Oh yeah, the twist is coming up. In fact, it comes pretty early, so yeah.

All right, great. Let's get on to it, Randy. Sounds good. All right.

Hello, I'm Jim Shannon. Randy Minick.

And we are here today with Mark Klein, and he has been gracious enough to join us after his trip back up the river.

Yeah, we'll have to hear about that in a little bit, how these riverboat cruises go, man. By the way, welcome, Mark.

Greetings, Earth people. What a privilege, pleasure, honor, and thrill to sit among you as a living man and watch breakfast go down in the form of bourbon. Beautiful.

But before we get started, we would like to get right into the bourbon. There you go. Sounds good to me. All right. So today we have Michter's toasted bourbon.

It's the 2018 bottle. One of my faves.

This is a toasted barrel finished bourbon. This is their Michter's US-1, and my understanding is that this one spends an extra period of time in a toasted only barrel. So this is not a charred barrel. This is a new oak barrel that's only toasted. So it should only pick up those kind of toasted notes, right? So this is a 45.7% alcohol, 91.4 proof. It is a limited release and it comes out, if I know correctly, once a year. This is a 2018 bottle.

And I can never get it, so. You can never get it.

That ought to tell you something.

Is it old enough to vote? I mean, how old is this whiskey?

Well, you know what? It is a Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey and it's not age stated. Therefore, it's at least four years old. Fair enough. Kentucky straight or straight bourbon means two years, right? But then they got to state the age if it's under four. So if it hits four, they don't have to state the age anymore. So, and a lot of people are not stating the age anymore. And I'm not sure if the distillery actually comes out and tells us what it is either. Well, it's like art.

It is what it is. And if you like it, you like it. Who cares how old it is?

It's matter of taste. Your bourbon, your way. So let's try this one, what do you think?

I'll be reporting on the looks on these faces as it goes down and you all just enjoy at home. Now sniffing, sampling, enjoying the aroma.

You know, I get the toasted like a, almost like a brown sugar or maybe some, some sugar on a, on a toasted pecan. Definitely the toasted. So it earns its name, I guess.

But you can definitely smell the new oak in it. So that new char barrels giving it some kind of that Rick house smell, you know, get that Rick house.

Good stuff. Good stuff.

I didn't taste it yet though. You've already tasted it.

Yes, go ahead. I, I enjoy it. Of course, first thing in the morning is, oh well, put a little sugar on the cereal.

You know, I got a little bit of smoke on the nose. I definitely get smoke on the palate. It's pretty darn good. But the oak presence on this is definitely there. But you get the caramel vanilla, the typical stuff, and it's pretty darn good stuff.

And Mark's not able to join us.

Well, I am not. I'm going to forego this particular tasting. I used to drink bourbon straight out of a glass room temperature as God intended, and I quit drinking a little bit ago. There's a story about that. Mr. Moskowitz goes to the doctor. He says, what's wrong, Mr. Moskowitz? Because I can't pee. He said, what? I can't pee. How old are you? I'm 92. You've peed enough. I just had reached a point where I'd had enough to drink for a while, so I took a little hiatus. I love watching you guys enjoy it, but for this particular morning session, I'll not be indulging.

That's fine. We certainly respect your choice. I think everybody should touch home base once in a while and make sure that they are not overindulging.

Something interesting, when I stopped, my comedy friends especially, I told them that we went after a show and they said, you want to get a drink or a beer? I said, well, I'm not drinking right now. And the first thing they always asked me was, did you have a problem? Do you have a problem? I said, no, I don't have a problem. I woke up in a cheap motel with five people I didn't know and I'm the only one who speaks English, but that wasn't the problem. That wasn't the problem. No, there was no problem. You reach a point, as with all things in life, when sometimes enough is enough, or you want a break, or you want to go on to something else and then revisit or come back, or not, as you see fit. I'll tell your listeners, when my son was in high school, I was working comedy nightclubs for a living, and he knew that I'd be going out and working a nightclub. He also knew that I was drinking at that time. And I couldn't very well tell him not to drink and drive when he knows I'm at a nightclub going to have two or three shots of whiskey and then drive home. So I stopped so that I was living the lesson I was trying to teach him and glad to have done so. And my wife made the same choice at the same time and both of us glad to have done so.

Well, respect, respect. I can appreciate that.

The respect goes two ways. I also respect the product enough and I respect the art and craft of making whiskey enough that it has its time and place in everyone's life or not as people see fit.

So are you originally from the Louisville area?

Yeah, I was born in Louisville. I love being from here. When I travel, people go, Mark, what's Kentucky all about? Here's when I tell them, here's what we make at Kentucky. We make bourbon, we make baseball bats, we make cigarettes, we make fried chicken. Our state motto is, if it kills you, we make it. It's what we do. It also gives you great pleasure. We make many of the things in life and enhance life and make it pleasurable for everyone and I'm very proud of that as well.

So you are very familiar with the bourbon culture and sort of the everything that surrounds kind of bourbon today. It's kind of grown up over the last few years.

I love that we make what we make in this Commonwealth. I love Bourbon culture. I love that it's made here. I know an awful lot about it. I've traveled. I've been visiting many of our great distilleries, Buffalo Trace, Four Roses, places like that. As a stand-up comedian, I would do and still have material about Bourbon in my show, which is great, great fun. A line I use about it, I say, should you drink or not? That's your personal choice to make in a free society. As a free man, I respect that choice, whatever it is. Before you make that choice, consider this. If you took about 10 acres of corn, Kentucky farm knew a little bit about chemistry, give him a charred white oak barrel and wait seven years, you'd end up with a pretty good bottle of Kentucky bourbon whiskey. Corn is still that at a ratio by weight of several hundred parts to one, so a Shaw class could have a whole bushel of corn in it. shot glass of bourbon whiskey might have a bushel of corn in it.

I never thought of it that way.

That's true. The Medical Association recommends you consume six servings of vegetables each and every day.

There you go.

If you're sipping bourbon, we're just saving you some time.

So what does the culture mean to you? I mean, obviously, you talk to groups of people as part of your job, and the culture of bourbon comes up in that. What does the culture mean to you?

It identifies Kentucky, as do thoroughbred horses, as pioneer country, as the lingering historical memory that we were the Western frontier, that we were pioneer country, that people came here from Scotland and Ireland and all kinds of places. And they brought their whiskey making skills with them and adapted them to the corn that grows here, to the shipping of whiskey down to New Orleans, to the charring of the oak barrels to make it not taste so god awful when it got there. All of that wraps up in a historical context as well as a drinking context or a culinary context. And so that's part of our history. And I also tell people when I do urban presentations, which I've done along with my comedy presentations, that what makes good whiskey also makes good horses in Kentucky. The limestone undergrowth of our Commonwealth also contributes to how we have the best horses in the world as well as the best whiskey in the world. So yes, it's something to put in a glass in a drink and drink among friends in a convivial atmosphere out in a bar in your home. But it's also our culture. It's our history identifies us as who we are, where we live and where we came from. And it's a very rich history. And the more you know about it, the more you appreciate it.

So are you a history buff?

I love history. I'm nuts for it. A lot of people do or do not. You guys may or may not know. You can still buy Ulysses S. Grant's favorite whiskey in any liquor store in America today. What is that? He drank Old Crow when he could get it.

Yeah, him and Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt and I think Truman at one time.

Old crow as we get it today compared to something like michters that you've got on the table now, those are two completely different animals. They're made a different way. They're made for a different profile, all that stuff. But you can still reach back in history on any shelf in a liquor store in America. and get Ulysses S. Grant in your glass. How cool is that?

I think it's a little different today, though.

It's grown up a little bit, probably tastes a little better, I would think. I would hope. I think it's the other way around.

I just finished Grant's biography by Ron Chernow, which is maybe the best history book I've ever read. And he details, and unflinchingly so, details Grant's struggle with alcoholism and when he would have to forego it during times when his responsibilities were enormous. And he didn't drink when he was under pressure. He only drank when he was not under pressure, which says an awful lot about the character of the man. And it kind of reverses our thinking on why people drink and how. So it was interesting to learn that.

Now, Grant kind of reached his latter days in a bit of poverty, didn't he?

He had some financial setbacks which were just devastating to him in terms of reputation and his faith in his fellow man. Again, this book that I read, it's just called Grant, the best history book probably I've ever read. And you're not taught about his life for a number of reasons, but he's lived an extraordinary life. And if I had to come up with our most underrated president in modern times, his name tops the list.

Well, that's interesting. And you would know since you were a lawyer at one time. If I'm, if I understand your history.

No, no, no. I was supposed to go to law school. In our family history, I've got a brother, my brother, Dr. Howard Klein is an oral surgeon. So he is our family doctor, medical guy. My sister is a retired college professor from Bellarmine university. So she's the, the intellectual collegiate type. I was supposed to be the lawyer in the family and I got one sniff of, of, of, not only what law school would entail, but the people who were going in there at the time. And I thought, no, let's let's tell jokes instead. So.

So he ended up at the student center majoring in pool 101.

I end up in adult nightclubs run by shady characters in Utica and Syracuse, New York, telling jokes to drunk people in strip joints. And I was going to do that anyway. So why not get a check for it? Yeah, there you go. Get on with it.

There you go.

So let's run the time machine back a little bit, and we'll go back to when you were a very young man. You're still a young man, but back when you were a very young man. And tell us about what was your first bourbon.

Oh gosh.

That's the first experience.

Well, I played rugby for 10 years at the Louisville Rugby Football Club and we were beer drinkers who were sponsored by Sterling Beer at the time. And I drank beer in college, not whiskey. And I would go out with my rugby buddies and it'd be nothing. And I mean nothing to have six, seven, eight beers in a night over three or four hours. You know, I was young. I could metabolize it pretty, pretty efficiently at that time. And I reached a point where I just couldn't hold as much as they were drinking. So I switched to something that was a little less filling, and that was bourbon. And so I started out drinking, and I never liked bourbon mixed with anything. Coke never went through a bourbon.

Because that's how most people start is that a waste of whiskey and a waste of Coke.

I mean, why would you, why would you go down that road? So I would just, I would sip and sip, not shoot back to sip, very small sips of straight bourbon whiskey, starting with classics like Old Forester, early times when it was still a bourbon and not just a whiskey. And then as I developed a taste for it and a palate for it, I slowly moved into a little more exotic flavors and I could afford a little better bourbons as a, as a, had a little more means to do so and developed a real taste for the weeded bourbons. My favorites at the end of when I was drinking were all the great weeded bourbons that we make here. Weller was my all-time favorite for my daily drinking whiskey. Weller Special Reserve, seven-year-old, to me, for my money, as good as it gets.

Oh, yeah.

And then when I had to give a special gift to someone, something they wouldn't get from somebody else, Four Roses Small Batch became a bottle that I'd say Try this. You're going to love it. Here's how you drink it and hands it across. Oh, please have a thought.

Oh, there's something that keeps recurring to me. I'm sitting there going Kentucky rugby. Um, how did that happen? Cause Kentucky's not really known to have a whole bunch of rugby going on.

Well, oddly enough, I went to college on wrestling up at Colgate University. I wrestled for four years in high school and four years in college. And I guess I won about as many as I lost. But I saw them play rugby there, but our wrestling coach didn't much care to have us play in that sport. And we were a small school and you bang up the few guys that can wrestle playing rugby and now you got no team. So when I moved back to Louisville, 1976, after I graduated college, I was going up to a local bar here called Gerstels in St. Matthews.

Still there.

And the rugby team was up there drinking and I met some of those guys and they asked about my athletic history such as it was and said, you ought to come out for rugby. Said, I can't wait. And it took me about 30 seconds to fall in love with that sport. And at that time, we had a very good team. We went on tour in Ireland and in California. I got to play rugby over in Dublin and a California tour and just loved it. Loved it. And I wasn't too terrible at it. It's a rough sport. I was six feet tall when I started playing and I'm five, five and a half now. So you can imagine what it does to you.

You said it took you 30 seconds to fall in love. It took me 30 seconds to go, OK, I'm going back to football.

So we are still on the way back machine. I'm going to ask you a question, but I'm going to exclude one bottle and one person from the answer because we kind of already talked about them. Okay. All right. So you get to choose from history, any person, past or present. that you would like to have a drink with. And again, we're on the way back machine and you get to choose a bottle, any bottle you want. So I'm going to exclude Ulysses S. Grant and Old Crow.

This is so easy. Yeah. This is so easy. I sit down with Harry Truman.

Harry Truman.

Bourbon drinker.

Oh yeah.

Straight, sometimes a little bit of ice. Also poker player. So Harry Truman's dream, wave a magic wand, night in the White House as a poker game and a glass of whiskey and a glass of bourbon whiskey next to him. And I probably, if I can take something with me back in the time machine, I'll probably take back a bottle like Four Roses Small Batch or maybe the Weller 107 and say, here's what people are drinking where I come from. Wow.

What would the conversation be like there?

And look at the look on his face. I would ask him about his journey from being a haberdasher and a political hack subaltern in Missouri to being the president that decided, I'm going to decide to drop the bomb, no regrets and take all comers. That's the conversation I'd like to have. And what a perfect, perfect politician to have a glass of whiskey with.

And that's really interesting because this love of history and historical figures, you were actually an English major.

Yes. Let this be a warning to your children. Those of you who are listening who have children in college, let this be a warning to them. I majored in English. What I do for a living is tell jokes to people on cruise ships. So yeah, the most useless major in American history.

Yeah, most of the English majors I know are word Nazis or they're curmudgeons and these old crotchety, you know, and they come from this whole other angle and you're saying the sentence wrong and you're using the words wrong kind of thing.

All the English majors I know are baristas. Oh, really? They all work at Starbucks for minimum wage.

No, they all went into copywriting.

Oh my goodness, we just lost that demographic.

They're all my great, great friends.

They're 45 in their parents' basements. Oh my God, I still have student loan.

Those are the English majors I know. Yeah, they were about as lost as I was. But English, so does that help you in your writing of your comedy and stuff?

As it turns out in the long view of things, and I was not mature enough at that time to take the long view or even have a long view of things, but as it turns out, yes, knowing what the exact right word is in the exact right place is pretty much how I make my living.

Cause I've heard like several $64 words that I'd have probably used six or $4 word in, and he's got these wonderful ways of saying things.

How does that work? How does that work? Do you, um, So do you sit down in a quiet place and write some material and then go try it out on an audience and make adjustments or do you just sort of, how does it work for you? How do you, how do you develop new material?

It'd be extremely rare for me to sit at my desk and say, I'm going to write a comedy bit on the 1963 Ford Falcon. I mean, I just, that just does not happen. If I'm given a corporate event that I'm preparing material for, or actually for whom I am preparing material. If I'm given a corporate event that's requiring custom material, then I will sit down and specifically write for them and write to that show. As a general rule, when I'm doing my general comedy presentations on cruise ships or comedy clubs, that kind of work, I prepare, of course, material outlines. I know my act. Five different shows from which to choose. I've got a 45 minute family show, 45 minute adult show, second 45 family show, second 45 adult show, and a welcome aboard and farewell show. And all these shows can translate to land material as well. Also do a lot of shows, probably 20 shows a year at 55 plus communities in Florida, Texas, Arizona. So I have shows specifically for them. And my material writes itself. As your life changes, your act changes. So when I first started doing this for a living, this was 40 years ago, I was single, drinking, on the road in comedy clubs. I had an act that was for that and written by that. My life now, I'm married. I've got a son who just graduated from college. I'm in third-bed horse racing business a little bit. I've got material on that. That's written 10, 20 minutes of material for me. Life writes my act for me, and my job is to take what's on the other side of the window, put it in words that come out funny, put it in front of people, and see how they react.

So are you able to read an audience?

A big part of what I do is both reading a crowd as they come in, reading them from the stage as you're doing your show, and knowing how to adjust that show midstream according to where they need to be and where you want to take them. And you also learn the nonverbal communication skills that go with stage performance. How to quiet somebody down without being rude. How to do that without stopping your show to do it. How to reach the people in the back of the room who don't have the best seats. How to work the six or seven points around the room. You want to make sure everybody feels as though you're making eye contact with them. What you're doing is working seven or eight different points in the audience, which focus those groups in on you. How to do shows with children in the audience. How to do shows to senior audiences that have people who have hearing issues as part of that. This all goes into the mix.

Next up, Mark Klein School of Comedy.

No, serious. Have you ever thought about maybe, you know, trying to do a class, an online class, you know, with some video stuff of comedy? You know, here's Mark Klein's points for comedy.

I've always viewed teaching as a calling as well as a profession, and I'm not called to it. And the people who are good teachers have the heart of teachers, they are called to it. They can't help but teach people. I don't have that. That's not part of my makeup. Tasting fine bourbon, explaining what's in there. The notes of oakiness. This barrel comes from here. This comes off of a mountain in Vermont. That's why the Cooper chooses this barrel. He's going to sell it to Stiller. Having the heart for that and the passion for that is what you guys do, not stand-up comedy. So I'm a big believer in find your lane, stay in it, floor it, go as far and as fast as you can. So back to your teaching school of comedy issue, I just don't have the calling to it. And it's a profession of patience, much like distilling. It's a profession that requires patience. And I'm in an immediate gratification business, which is standup comedy.

Yeah. Well, I have a question. I'm kind of blinded by your shirt this morning. You're kind of known for your fashion sense. This shirt here, folks, I can't tell if it's the sunrise or the sunset with all the yellows and oranges. I know it's picking up about five channels because I think I hear a country channel.

They don't see you coming in the shirt. They hear you coming in the shirt. The shirt is loud. I'm in Hawaii a couple of weeks out of the year on cruise ships. I love Hawaiian shirts. One of my goals in life was to find a Hawaiian shirt so ugly my father refused to wear it. I never did before he passed away. I finally found one that was just on the edge but had a naked Hawaiian woman playing a ukulele on it and he wore it to a wedding. I never found a Hawaiian shirt. You get it honestly then, don't you? I've always loved them. It bothers me when they become popular because now my closet full of heirloom quality ugly shirts is no longer anything special, but I got a closet full of these at home. This is one of my favorites and I'm glad you like it.

How did you get into the cruise ship industry? How did that all come about?

I was doing almost strictly a comedy club performance 40 weeks out of the year. I got married and knew you cannot be away 40 weeks a year and still have a life at home. So I cut my schedule back to about 30 weeks and developed a more family friendly act and a more corporate friendly acts. I really want to move into corporate humor speaking.

It's much better. They call you the core gesture.

That's my company name and I knew the money would be better. an adult wants to be. I mean, I didn't want to do this 25 year old drinking single man show anymore. And so I began to put that material out there and a cruise ship agent who was just riffling through the internet, surfing, trying to find cleaner acts to put in, because cruise ships require a clean show, found me and said, you ever work ships? I said, no, do you want to? Yep, I do. And she started putting me on cruise ships. And I have two cruise ship agents, one exclusive to certain ships that are booked by their agency. The other sells me to other cruise ships around the world. And that's when I work now. My cruise ship clients have very specific requirements of my comedy act. And so I write to those specifics and have an act for them.

So, you mentioned earlier that you have both a family-friendly act as well as an adult act. Right. Now, what is the difference between the two? Is it simply content or is it language? Are they both clean acts?

There's difference of content and language. For example, I've got a line in my show, three words on drinking. I like it. Then I do a thing about bourbon and drinking whiskey. I'm not going to do that for five-year-olds. Got it. Certainly. So you've got a family show on a cruise ship. You've got 30 or 40 children in that audience between ages of five to 12. There are techniques I use to engage them in the show and keep their attention so they don't get distracted or start looking down at the games they have on their phones. There's techniques to do that. And the material has things to which children can relate even in my act at my age. Like I've got a pet dog. Well, these kids have dogs. You do your stuff about dogs. I've talked about my brother, my sister, my son. So you include things to which they can relate. For my adult show, that has adult themes in it, which address themes like sexuality and marriage and getting pulled over by the police under the influence, things like that. Adult topics, not appropriate for a seven-year-old. Not going to understand it anyway. It's in my adult show. My adult show is not a vulgar show. You could bring anybody to it. It just has adult topics in it. Years ago, I used to have an X-rated show. In fact, I made a tape called Truck Stop Comedy, which was made for truck drivers. And that's our X-rated material. It's got language and topic matter to match. That's not the show I do anymore. So as my career has evolved, I've evolved different types of programming for different audiences. That's great.

What I'd like to do now, I think, Brady, is this is probably a great spot for us to take our break.

And the second half coming up, we'll find out more about how World War II ended and the whole thoroughbred thing. So stick around folks.

And then Rainey and I will try our second bourbon of the day while you describe to our listeners the expressions on our face. Lovely.

Lovely bourbon expression, a whole new meaning.

We would like to thank Tommy and Gwen Mitchell from Loghead's Home Center for supporting this episode of the Bourbon Road. Loghead's Home Center, nestled in the hills of Kentucky, is an industry leader in building handcrafted rustic furniture. Family-owned and operated, they take pride in offering only the very best for their customers. The Logheads, and that's what they like to call themselves, are skilled woodcrafters who are passionate about creating rustic furniture for people who appreciate the beauty of natural wood. Owners Tommy and Gwen don't just sell the rustic lifestyle, they live it. And you can be sure that Loghead's furniture will always be handcrafted in Kentucky by artisans who embrace the simple way of life. Loghead's rustic furniture is made from northern white cedar, a sustainable wood that's naturally rotten termite resistant. Its beauty and quality will add warmth to your earthy lifestyle for generations to come. Be sure to check out everything they have to offer at logheadshomestenter.com. And while you're at it, give Tommy and Gwen a shout on Facebook or Instagram at logheadshomestenter. Okay we are back and we've got Mark Klein with us here and we just took a short break so we, Randy and I, could finish off our our mickters and we're going to move straight into the second pour. And so today we have the new bourbon from Peerless. The new bourbon from Peerless. So Peerless has not produced a bourbon. The company's got a lot of history. They've been around a while. But they have not produced a bourbon in a hundred years.

I love the old apothecary style bottle they chose for their packaging. This looks so cool.

It's really unique. Beautiful. And this bourbon has a little bit of a red hue to it. It's kind of interesting. I don't know if the label trim on the bottle that has red in it actually causes the bourbon to appear to have a little, maybe brings out a little bit more red in the bourbon. But this was signed, this bottle was actually signed by Corky Taylor and Caleb Kilburn, the master distiller over there. Got this at the gift shop. It is 54.9% alcohol, 109.8 proof. It's just four years old. And let's try it, Randy, what do you think? The first thing I get on the nose is, man, it's sweet.

It's got a whip on it out of the gate, doesn't it? 109 points on that.

It does. Yeah, so it's uncut, unfiltered, barrel strength bourbon whiskey.

Well, you guys sip and enjoy. And I'll ask you a question regarding this as you take in a sample there.

Yeah, it's got a spicy nose, a little bit of fruit.

Yeah, but you know, my whole round the corner thing is it rounds the corner there. The finish is really good.

He's so far ahead of me on this track with this corner on it. I'm still on the nose and he's always rounding that corner.

I tell you how I used to sip my bourbon. I don't know if it's traditional or standard or not. When I found one that I thought I would like, I would sip it as you guys are, straight up, room temperature out of the glass. And then after it was down, I would close my mouth and breathe out my nose. and bring all that back up through another set of ways to taste it and enjoy it. And I would judge a whiskey that I liked by how much it would kind of fill that headspace up exhaling as well as drinking it down. Well, let me try the Mark Klein tasting method. I think this is a whole new world for you guys. Maybe the end of the show, too. Who knows? But let's see how it works. All right. Now close your mouth. Breathe back out through your nose.

This fills the space quite nicely.

Yeah, it's nice. It definitely adds to the experience.

As designed. I like that.

As designed. You know, every day is a school day and you learn something new every day.

I also found when I was enjoying bourbon that it slowed down the pace at which I would sip my whiskey. And it would kind of artificially impart on me a way of enjoying the bourbon the way it was probably meant to be enjoyed instead of just in the middle of a conversation, you know, sip, sip, sip, and all of a sudden my whiskey's gone. The way I drank it by doing that really kind of brought me down to a pace that made me enjoy it way, way much more.

Now there's some faint notes in here that I get, and I think I mentioned these in a review I did earlier, but just a hint of mint and a little bit of citrus. But the fruit is there on the nose and on the palate. man, I tell you what, when it hits the back, it's just like this pepper explosion. It's very spicy on the back end. Very creamy.

You get that when you try the Mark Klein method. You get that when it comes back through.

Now there's, I mean, you can definitely tell that this is not a well-aged bourbon.

I mean, this is something in the four-year range, but it's- But I've had a whole lot worse in the four-year range too.

I was talking to a man, we were talking about bourbon and who likes what and why, and this guy's pretty knowledgeable. And his opinion was, and I've never had proof to counter it, certainly not in my drinking experience. He said after bourbon's been in a barrel for eight to nine years, his opinion, you're going to get all of it out of it, you're going to get. Two more years in the barrel is not going to help that whiskey. He thought seven to nine years, it's going to get everything out of it and put everything into it that the will could put into it. That's the end of it. So he was saying, we're talking about pricing on these 12 and 15 year old whiskeys. And to him, it was just totally superfluous. I'm not calling it wasted money, but he said after seven to nine years, that whiskey's done. I think you're probably right.

I've heard that too, and it's not just from anybody. We've heard that from people like master distiller Jimmy Russell who says eight to 12 years. That's the

I would think that the body, what they call the body of the bourbon or whiskey would be mostly by then will have come out. You get the notes maybe on some extra year aging maybe.

I think just like you were starting to develop a lot of new bourbon And we'll get into bourbon aficionados here in a minute. We're starting to develop a new group of people who enjoy the higher proofed bourbons, the extra aged bourbons, the more oaky bourbons. Not particularly where I like to go as far as the over-oaked kind of bourbons, but I do like the higher proof stuff. But you are said to be a bourbon aficionado, right?

What does that actually mean?

Well, when I consumed a bourbon, I loved testing and tasting various wines to see if I could tell the difference. If I could develop a palate that is it meaningful that this is a weeded bourbon and this one isn't. This was a higher corn kind. And all the notes you guys talk about, I was trying to develop a sense of, could I develop a palate that could detect that and appreciate it? And then to be able to ignore the price, Forget that Charter cost this and Forrester cost that, Imperius is going to cost this, and forget that. Find the one you like, decide why you like it, and that's your whiskey. And I enjoyed that process tremendously. So when I say bourbon aficionado, that's what that's describing, is the learning process of what do you like? Who makes their whiskey the way you like to drink it? Forget what it costs, forget the status it's supposed to have, forget high up on the shelf it's put, forget all that. find the one that sings to you and make that your whiskey. And I found, again, two or three that really, yeah, not only do I like this, I like sharing it and I like to give it.

Yeah, so I kind of feel the same way. That's wise and sage advice. You know, what's in the bottle needs to speak for itself, irregardless of price. Now, we all have to buy the bottle, so we have to open that wallet and lay that money down. But judge the bourbon on the bourbon itself. and then determine whether or not you can afford to buy it as a separate issue. Do you like it or not? I think that there are some bourbons out there that I have spent way too much money on and did not feel like that that was a bourbon for me that I would drink on a daily basis, irregardless of the price.

Well, price is an odd thing. If you're having, say, if you're having two slow shots a night because you love it and enjoy it, and you're not going to go get in your car and go have two more someplace else. If that's how you drink your bourbon, then from $40 a bottle to $80 a bottle, who cares? Because over the span of time that it takes to consume that bottle. It may take you six months. You're going to forget the price. It's not going to make any difference. So don't let the price be the issue one way or the other.

I like that. I save up if there are certain ones I go, okay, I know it's cost this and I want to have it by Christmas time.

You know, you start saving up and that bottle becomes an old friend that you visit once in a while.

And it's usually gone by about fall of the next year. And then it's time to work on the next one. You know, who cares what it costs.

Now, the finish on this Peerless is amazingly lengthy. Yeah, it is. It's definitely a longer finish than the Mikters we had earlier. Right. I think it's...

So you're still tasting that. That's still got some mouthfeel and aroma to it.

Yeah, actually this Peerless is a little more oily and creamier than the Mikters is. I don't want to compare the two. They're both wonderful bourbons. I don't want to say one's better than the other, but I am contrasting their flavors. And the Peerless is a little more creamier and oilier and has a higher viscosity. And that might help that finish, you know, stick around a little bit longer because it kind of clings to your tongue a little bit better. But it is a peppery finish. Yeah, it's really good.

My enjoyment of bourbon never translated to other liquors, by the way. I never became a Scotch guy. Or wine connoisseur. I forget wine. These people who, it's tequila made from blue agave. It's grown in the exact right, I never ever found anything in that. This cactus is too damn from the elements. I was reading a wine review thing and you think your bourbon guys have, it's got notes of leather and smokiness. And this wine list had all that stuff times 10 on every wine. And I thought, I don't need to know how this tastes going down. This is wine. I didn't know how it's going to taste coming back up because I just could never go down.

When the gears reverse.

Again, the wine thing never, never said yes to me. It never struck home, but good bourbon did.

So you do clean high energy comedy.

Tell us about what does clean high energy comedy mean?

It means if you've got an event, whether it's a church fundraiser or a family show on a cruise ship or you're doing a show to raise money for the March of Doms, whoever that shows for, you've got to go on stage and grab them in 10 seconds, get their attention. Make it count for 40, 45 minutes. It has to be, when I say clean comedy, my definition of that has a couple different layers to it. It's not what we consider to be adult material in terms of issues of sexuality. I try not, I don't try not to, I make sure that I do not offend people's values as well as their ears. So when you book me for a clean corporate event, you're not going to hear something from that podium that's going to make the CEO's wife uncomfortable ideologically. It's not going to go down a political road that makes your people out there uncomfortable, no matter for whom they vote. That's part of my job is to entertain people, not re-educate them socially or politically. It's not what I do. There are people that do that and bless them for it. It's not who I am. It's not what I do. I have contracts. specifically prohibit that. And I make sure to stay within those parameters. My act has a point of view. And politically, I'd be on the conservative side of a libertarian. Any more specific than that's really my business and no one else's. But again, that doesn't come through as a talking point in my show. Here's what you need to think and here's how you need to vote. That's not what I do.

Yeah, so do you feel like that is limiting to your act or do you feel like that is liberating? Liberating.

It frees me up to talk about the things I really care about. My family, my wife, my dog, my kid, horse racing, being from Kentucky, the stuff that perks my ears up, gets my engine going. Doesn't particularly float my boat to convert anybody to one way of thinking or another politically.

What's interesting is when I first heard about you and started looking into your past and I was going, oh boy. He's got his own version of how World War II ended. I was like, oh my goodness, this guy is going down a political road or a historical road here. I thought that was kind of interesting. You might want to tell us a little more about that.

I love history. My father was a World War II veteran. I studied World War II history a lot, which I really still enjoy. And it's the favorite line in my show, my favorite joke in my show. Probably forever. And this changes over time what you like and what you don't like about your act. This is my all-time favorite line on my show. I'm talking about my father in the context of the show. My father was a Purple Heart decorated veteran of World War II. He fought in Tinian, Guam, and Saipan in the South Pacific Theater. They teach your children in school that World War II ended in 1945. on the deck of USS Missouri. A battleship in Tokyo Bay when the Imperial Japanese government of Emperor Hirohito surrendered to American generals MacArthur and Wainwright. It's not exactly true. World War II ended in 1996 when my father bought a Toyota.

Or when NASCAR started letting Toyotas run. That'd be another marker for sure. That's another marker. That's awesome.

I will tell you, I do that joke on ships, many of which have a large Japanese compliment of passengers on it. I've never gotten a complaint about it. I've never had a word said to me about it, because further on in the act, there's a reference back to that joke about human beings not only being the only animal in the history of life in the universe that can laugh, we're the only animal in the history of life in the universe that can forgive. And so the joke has a subtext to it that has some depth to it. Wow, that is cool.

So how, you know, you're performing in front of different groups, and I guess your acts have to be tailored to each group. How do you do that? I mean, how do you tailor an act to a particular group?

For a nightclub or cruise ship show, I see who's on the ship, I see who's out there, and I've got an act for them.

So you do a lot of observing during the day.

Yeah, and that show's already in there. I've already got that Rolodex in my head, rolling through, here's what I do, here's what I don't do. For a corporate event, there's questions you ask the person who books it that you need the answers to. I need to know how many people are going to be there. I need to know how they're going to be dressed. I want the split of male to female. I want to know what you hear about. Give me the three bullet points of your meeting or your company that you want in this show. And more importantly, what don't you want to hear? Tell me what you don't want to hear. because one false step can ruin 45 minutes of hard work. If I'm in a nightclub, I can make up for a show that doesn't go over well. I can take care of that. Not a problem. I'm on a cruise ship and as joke falls a little flat, 10 seconds later, I'm going to have you right back where I need you. Not a worry. You're at a corporate event, it's a different animal. You're in a meeting room. There's not a bar in the room. There's not people that have level of high energy at a show. They're at a corporate event. They're in a meeting. You want to be entertained. And knowing what not to say is every bit as important as knowing what to say.

Well, I like the idea of the bullet points. Here's the bullet points. Because if you go to conferences and workshops, it's, you know what I mean? And if, okay, here's this comedian and all of a sudden he's hitting on the points that somebody had made earlier, even though you laugh about it, it's almost like in a way you're helping those who present. to help the people remember.

You can make comedy a vehicle for a lot of things. I specialize in actually three areas. One, in your all's field, I had a program that did with Four Roses and Dan Gardner, who's their brand manager, called Bourbon for the Splash of Laughter. And Four Roses, this was about three or four years ago. We would go to country clubs around the Midwest, and it'd be a 90-minute program. Dan would go on and do Speaking About Four Roses, the brand, how it's made, the history of the company. Funny, fun, great 30-minute presentation. I'd go up and do 60 minutes of comedy. I'd have bourbon material in the comedy, but it was my comedy show, and I wasn't drinking at the time. It didn't make any difference because it was there to put the brand in front of their target market. Older men with money, they're at country clubs. Pow, could that be any more perfect? Get them to come to an event, put your bourbon in front of them. They stay. They've brought their wives for a big social event at the club. They're entertained. What a perfect mix of product and entertainment. And they were great, great fun to do. The program ran its natural course. And of course, I'm open to doing it again with anyone else who wants to put their bourbon in front of those crowds. But then I'm into horse racing. I've been a thoroughbred horse owner in very small syndicates for many years. I go to the track every day when I can. I love horse racing. I love handicapping thoroughbreds and speaking about it to others. So I've got a program that has horse racing in it that I do.

How did you get into this whole thoroughbred thing? Is it just being from here in Kentucky? I live in Mobile. Yeah. Okay.

Everybody I know either owns one, just sold one, and wants to get another one. I mean, that's who we are. My wife owns a real estate company. I know a lot of people in the mortgage business, so I did a number of programs for mortgage companies where it's called Lunch and Laugh, where the mortgage company invites every realtor in that county to a luncheon event. They present their new mortgage products, and here's our speaker, comedian Mark Klein, and I go do my comedy act. What a great way to get, again, your product in front of your target market by using something that'll draw people to it without beating them up with industry jargon and too many technicals. It's not a technical event. It's an entertainment event. Oh, and by the way, Here's our mortgage bankers to serve you when you have mortgage needs. So you can use Comity as a vehicle to get a lot of things done for different industries if you know how to write to that particular industry. And again, it's not what they hear, it's what they don't hear that makes us acceptable and makes it work.

So back to the horse racing here, are you are you good at handicapping?

I used to be better than I am now.

Yeah.

When I was single, I had a lot more time to devote to it and I would. I was in a syndicate that would try to hit the pick six at Churchill Downs when it rolled over over 100,000. This is before they had off track betting or online betting before all that. This is back in the late 1970s. You had to be at the track to make those bets. And I've been at Churchill Downs and people were flying money in the Bowman field and Stanford field on private planes to bet that pick six. Wow. And I was pretty good handicapper back then. My skills have kind of eroded over the years as I've had to travel for comedy. I can't go to track every day. Being there is a big part of it. The computer programs that drive the odds now, you're never going to outthink those programs. So the advantage for a small handicapper like me is to be at the track and read horse's body language and get the information you can collect while you're there. What happened yesterday and this morning that the computers will never know about, that's the only edge a little guy like me has at the track. But I love going, I love the puzzle of it, love the intellectual challenge of figuring out what horse belongs here and which ones don't. I'm kind of a guy for numbers in the head, so I like to figure odds on the fly and kind of see whose value and who's not. And it's always fascinated me. I've owned a small piece with thoroughbred somewhere along the line all the time for the last 20 years, I guess. That's a fascinating part of the business, completely separate from the handicapping and wagering. Great fun to be a part of. As I tell people on ships, I pretend to own them and they pretend to run.

Have you had any success with any of your

Oh yeah. I've had horses that won for us. I've had horses that didn't do very well. I've had both kinds. I've been in the winter circle at Churchill with my brother and my sister and our trainer and our horse and my father got to be there and 50 of our new best friends. I mean, yeah, the new best friends. I got to experience that. And I'd be in there morning at seven o'clock when they go work out and they come back and the groom, you know, brushes them down and they get the steams coming off of them after a good hard morning work. And there's a beauty to that that we have to actually be there to see. So it's extraordinary. People ask what it's like to own a thoroughbred. Well, they eat dollars and crap problems. That's what they do. If you can't remember that, you don't have patients, pockets and partners. You got no business out there. Eat dollars and crap problems. But when they do what they're supposed to do and you get to walk with them into that circle and get that picture taken and nothing like in the world of sports.

Well, that's fun, isn't it? Wow. Well, there's something about you that I wanted to, I think I'm going to have to argue with you on this one. You say that you are the walker of the dumbest dog. I beg to differ because I've got a few of my own.

I grant you probably have dumb dogs. I don't doubt it for a minute. I got the dumbest dog in the world.

How is your dog any dumber than the rest of ours? don't know who breathes for my dog at night.

I love her.

Don't get me wrong.

I love my dog. She's a rescue dog. We rescued her from the Jarvisville, Indiana animal shelter. And she had no idea how lucky she is to have gotten us instead of where she was. If Who knows if God gives them the ability to know that. I hope, I hope they have it. Cause, uh, I love this dog to that. But, but, well, how is she so dumb that she's dumber than ours? Oh, Randy, she's stupid. Here's how stupid my dog is. Every morning, every morning for the last year, she got up at four o'clock, four AM. She shakes her collar with all the metal ID tags on it so that everybody can share her morning experience. Comes downstairs, goes into the kitchen, sees a reflection in the stove, and barks at herself because she truly believes that I have her twin sister trapped in the oven. A year of this. She's an idiot.

I love her, but she's dumb.

Her name is Lady. Lady. She's called Lady because disobedient shedding poop machine was already taken.

Well, I always say the dogs have some Russian pile eater in them. They rush up to a pile and eat it. Every dog out there has got some of that breed in there.

That's the truth.

The truth in that. Well, when you own horses and dogs, you get to see a lot of that, right? Oh, I guess.

It's like having a buck and a hundred dollar bills disappear every day. Are your dogs rescue dogs?

Yes, they're all three coon hounds and rescue, so that ought to tell you everything you need to know.

The thing about a rescue dog is they have this ability. You look at them happily, ensconced in your home. And you know that no matter what else you've done that day, you've done something good. You've done, you've done something worth doing. Uh, what you've given to the life of that animal. There's a value to them that, that transcends, uh, almost anything else. It's a great feeling.

Yeah. Well, that's true. That's true. Well, credits, let's talk about where you've been. You know, CBS, I know, was one of them. You know, some of the shows you've been on and ships you've been on and that kind of thing.

I've been very lucky. I've had some national television exposure many, many years ago. I was on a CBS show called 48 hours and they followed me around the country doing what I do. I was in the comedy nightclub business then and I was famous for about 15 minutes from that. I've been on, I'm on Sirius XM. They still play me on Sirius quite a bit. I've been on the Bob and Tom show. I did, had a profile of me done for GQ magazine, which is- Cover, right? King of the one night standups. Oh, there you go. That's what they called me. And smaller fish down the line, you get to go on local media. I've had a big boost locally from people like Terry Miners who always puts me on his show. And when people like that put you on regularly, it does a lot for your career. It keeps you visible and it keeps you relevant to the people in your community. And so you're very grateful to people like that because they can put anybody on they want. They don't have to take someone like me. And I've always been grateful for that. So, I've had a chance doing what I do to go around the world, get paid to go around the world, literally. I've done shows in Tahiti and Russia, cruise ships parked in the Black Sea, off the coast of Hawaii and Australia and New Zealand. I see the most beautiful places in the world doing something I love and there's a check for me when I get home. So, my business has been great to me. It owes me nothing and I love going to work every day and can't wait to go to the next one.

So, does your family get to accompany you sometime on the tours?

They do. My wife comes with me three or four weeks here on cruise ships. When the ship goes someplace she wants to go, I take her with me. She gets on the ship, asks me where the spy is. I show her and she says, I'll see you in a week. It's great to have her on the ship with me. It took me 10 years to convince my mother-in-law to come with us on a cruise. Because I'm close with my mom-in-law, and I really love her. I say, you're going to love these ships. And she would not go. Her last cruise ship experience was a two-day gambling junking out of Jacksonville, Florida. I mean, just nightmare, oceans, and disaster. I really want to do that. This industry is not that anymore. Come with me on a ship. 10 years, she fights me. Finally, she goes, OK, we got her a cabin on a big Norwegian cruise ship, the Escape, I think it was, out of Miami. I'm thinking to myself, God, I hope she likes this. Second night on the ship, she's in the piano bar at one o'clock in the morning singing It's Raining Men.

She had a ball. I can see you on the cover of GQ again with that shirt right there.

Well, I don't know if GQ is not sniffing around me anymore, but back when I was young, good looking, I'd get some exposure.

Strapping young rugby player, right? So what suggestions would you give to young and upcoming comedians? Kind of a word of advice based on your career and the years you spent in the industry.

It's never been an easy business. It was a hard business when Mark Twain was trying to do it. It was a hard business in the 20s and 30s and 40s. It was a hard business in the 60s and 70s. It was a hard business in the 80s and 90s when I started making records. It's never been an easy business in which to make a living because so many people want to do it. So many people think they can do it. And being funny is one thing, being enough of a show business and business person to make a living at it's another thing entirely. The one advantage that up and coming young comics have today that people from my comedy generation did not have was that if you write six minutes of material and get it polished up, you can put that on YouTube and now you have a career. for whatever it's worth, for what you make of it. You can expose your comedy life to millions of people that you've never seen every day on Facebook and YouTube and Instagram. That's an advantage and it's a disadvantage. People can see how good you are, they can see how bad you are. But through the digital world that everything has moved into, it's an entirely different industry. It operates at a different speed. It favors different types of performance over others. The day of the thoughtful storytelling comedian is a day that's passed. People don't have that kind of patience anymore to watch it either on their phone or on YouTube or even sit through it and laugh performance. That type of comedy presentation is a thing of the past. It has to be immediate. The more visual, the better. The more shocking, if you can shock anybody anymore, and that's becoming impossible. And it's all about how many hits and how many views. And you get a lot of people working nightclubs now that have two million viewers on YouTube and you get them in front of an audience and they can't carry 10 minutes of material. You also have to have an act to back that up. You have to have 45 minutes to an hour of material that works for 45 minutes. Right. That keeps people, that keeps their attention and keeps them focused and gets from point A to point B. And that's an art unto itself that's starting to go by the wayside.

Do you feel it's a necessity for you to have a presence on YouTube as well?

It is and it isn't. For me, for what I do, people do want to see it before they hire me, so I have to have a presence. My website has video demo on it. I'm on YouTube as well, so yes, you can go see me do what I do. The way I book my particular business is the agents who need to know me, they know me. People sell me to cruise ships, know my act, know how to sell it, and I can make my living doing that. So but if you're not an established performer who has the connections and the people who believe in you enough to sell you to other people, if you don't have that, you absolutely have to be in social media, posting every day to try to get clicks and hits. You have to be on YouTube and you have to spend your life at your computer terminal doing that. I'd rather go to the racetrack, rather take my wife to dinner, like rather walk my dog. But I'm able to do that now, so.

Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on today. We'd like to give you the opportunity to let all our listeners know how they can reach out to you, how they can view your content, where you're going to be, your schedule, how to book you, that kind of stuff.

You go to Churchill Downs on a Thursday afternoon, you see a man studying Spanish, speaking eldest jock in his native language. Right. That's me. That's how you reach me. I'm easy to find. You can Google Mark, M-A-R-K, Klein, K-L-E-I-N, comedian. pop up on Google. My company is Corp Jester, C-O-R-P, as in Paul, Jester. It's all one word, corpjester.com, or Google Corp Jester, and that'll take you to my website. I'm easy to find, hard to forget, and my job is to make you laugh. My corporate logo, the whole message of it is, mission, I talk, you laugh. That's what I do.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure to have you. We've enjoyed having you, Mark. Thanks for coming out.

Thank you, gentlemen.

We do appreciate all of our listeners and we'd like to thank you for taking time out of your day to hang out with us here on the Bourbon Road. We hope you enjoyed today's show and if so, we would appreciate if you'd subscribe and rate us a five star with a review on iTunes. Make sure you follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at The Bourbon Road. That way you'll be kept in the loop on all the Bourbon Road happenings. You can also visit our website at thebourbonroad.com to read our blog, listen to the show, or reach out to us directly. We always welcome comments or suggestions. And if you have an idea for a particular guest or topic, be sure to let us know. And again, thanks for hanging out with us.