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Bob the Drag Queen—the alter ego who won comic/actor Caldwell Tidicue (We’re Here, A Black Lady Sketch Show, High Maintenance) the crown for RuPaul’s Drag Race’s eighth season in 2016—returned to Portland on Sept. 26 for the local stop of his This Is Wild! stand-up comedy tour, along with opener Solomon Georgio.
“I’m so glad to be here! I don’t know what Jinkx [Monsoon] is talking about!” Bob said, cheekily implying the Queen of All Queens trash-talks her hometown.
Bob and Georgio both have stand-up specials under their belts, the former on Netflix and the latter on Comedy Central, where they talk about their lives as queer people.
“I’m nonbinary, like a god,” Georgio said. “I don’t care what pronouns you use as long as you capitalize the first letter.”
Bob was as comfortable talking about politics and religion as he was talking about his favorite Y2K-era movies and TV shows. Although the material was largely fresh, Bob repeated an anecdote shared on social media about working with an Australian theater troupe as a school drama teacher for a health assembly. But the story of how his American students learned a thick Aussie pronunciation of “epilepsy” is funny no matter how many times he tells it.
He dunked on Gens X and Z to give Gen Y the respect his generation needs to hear. “We are the keepers of the culture,” Bob said. “The older generations don’t know how to attach a photo to an email, and the younger generations don’t know how to send a fax. But we can do both!”
Bob closed his set with a tough-love sermon for gay men in attendance to treat women of all sexual orientations better and abandon the “gold star gay” jokes some men make about never having been intimate with women.
“You came out of the closet and forgot about the first ally you ever had: the girl who took you to prom and got the football team to leave you alone,” Bob said, to applause.