“I’m not in a band, but I still want to be a rock star,” says comedian and Wham City collective member Mason Ross. Seated around a table in a homey back corner of a Copycat Annex building warehouse space with fellow member Ben O’Brien and an awesomely chubby tabby, they’re talking about the collective’s first wide-reaching comedy tour, how most everybody in the world is actually funny, and what it takes to nurture a scene. “I’m very excited by the fact that I am in Wham City, and I’m not in a band but I get to [tour],” Ross says. “This collective is other things too.”

If you’ve been in Baltimore and paying attention over the past few years, this comment isn’t actually news. Music is only part of what goes on among Wham City’s many changing members. Theater, performance art, visual art, and comedy have always been just as deep in its DNA. Music, however, is what travels, which is natural: The music economy is just that much bigger. But the collective finds itself having the rare opportunity to question just how fundamental that fact really is.

“[Comedy] represents more my experience of Wham City,” says O’Brien, a friendly and thoughtful 26-year-old who performs under the banner of his Showbeast project. “On a person-to-person basis it’s almost impossible to talk to anyone without them making fun of you or making a joke out of everything you’re saying. It’s just the way we interact with each other. There’s almost, like, this very serious culture of comedy between us that until now hasn’t really been collected into one thing.

“For me, this is what Wham City is, this group of very weird, hopefully funny people,” he adds. “A lot of the music has humor elements too, so for me this is kind of a distillation of that kind of interaction, what inspires both the music and the comedy.”

Within the collective, and in Baltimore in general, O’Brien and Ross—both of whom take comedy as their main art, rather than the side project of, say, Dan Deacon or punk guitarist Pete O’Connell—point to a rise of nonmusic performance in the city, comedy being just a part of that. “I’ve been noticing [in the two and a half years] since I’ve been in Baltimore, growing in a lot of nonmusical scenes like comedy, the lecture series, the writing scene—”

“Underground theater,” Ross interrupts. “There’s so many groups. I feel like when I moved here there was nothing—not nothing, but, like, now you have plays at the Copycat and here [at the Annex], and I don’t think that was really happening [before].”

“I think there’s a slow building up,” O’Brien adds. “And I hope we see a lot more things like this. I love the music scene, but I love the variety—and I think that’s what makes a good scene.”

Stand-alone comedy nights have also become a regular local fixture, just over the past two years or so. “People just started doing comedy things,” O’Brien says. “Andy Abelow was booking comedy nights, Adam Endres at Zodiac, [Mother’s Day comedy show] Mommy Side Up. There’s a few others.”

A comedy night “was one of those things that the first time we had one there was a huge turnout, ‘cause I think it was something new and something else to go to,” Ross says. And after the first event, “there was a little lull in it. And we started doing it more. The last we did had a really awesome turnout.”

Ross also sees the comedy tour as a sort of returning to the collective’s roots. “I think the first thing I would call a Wham City thing was the Beauty and the Beast production at the Copycat, and after that, the Round Robins started happening,” he says of the in-the-round performance style the collective’s been experimenting with for years, with much success.

“And I love those first ones the most,” Ross continues. “You’d watch a band and then on the other side of the room was a two-person skit and then a clown and then another band and then a standup comedian. And I love that. That was what won me over. I was, like, I need to be a part of this really, really badly.”

To Ross, performance and musical performance started to segregate themselves a bit after that. Projects became compartmentalized. The more recent Round Robin tours have been almost 100 percent music. The collective’s delirious, hilarious take on Jurassic Park was almost three years ago, and the upcoming comedy tour is the first nonmusic project that Wham City has taken on the road since.

O’Brien, who started doing standup at open-mic nights in college, estimates that about half of the collective members got into comedy, whether standup or skits, through Wham City. “A lot of the people that didn’t have that motive or whatever got cast in Jurassic Park or were like I always wanted to try standup—I think I’ll sign up for the comedy night.

“Funny is such a weird thing,” he continues. “Most people are funny, but don’t necessarily identify with it. There’s definitely people that don’t identify with being funny that are funny and smart and come up with clever things to say.”

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