Blurred Derision

Dave Attell, the host of Comedy Central’s ten-episode show Insomniac, has been going from city to city to figure out what keeps night owls scavenging. He hopes to provide stay-at-home insomniacs with a few laughs by showing them what people are out doing at night. But when we asked him about his experiences during last month’s trip to film the Kansas City episode, he tended to answer questions obliquely.

Maybe he was embarrassed about that painted cow he had the gall to sit on. When we inquired about precisely which cow he had seen fit for his rear, he replied with a hesitant, “Uh, the one that was painted up?”

It was painted all right. They all are. But it might be better identified as the one that had to be delivered to the Cow Hospital’s emergency room late one July night. We don’t know because Attell doesn’t seem to remember much about the incident.

Sources say he was plastered, which might have something to do with his inability to recall major details of his trip. And while he does regret the cow incident — “I apologize,” he insists; “no cows were hurt, but I wanna say to the kids, ‘Don’t sit on those cows,'” — he thinks fondly of the bars that led him down that blurry path.

“The great thing about Westport is that you can walk from bar to bar to bar,” he says. After visiting Buzzard Beach (where he wasn’t actually permitted to shoot video but is said to have remained long enough to snub a local woman who was eager to talk to him about her love for Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart) and the Beaumont Club (where he rode the bull and “won,” noting that, “it’s harder than it looks”), he made his way to Dave’s Stagecoach Inn. This final destination is known for random outbursts of drunken hullabaloo, with frequent slurred declarations by regulars standing on bar stools and a few generous folks known to buy a round for the whole bar so that everyone can keep up. Attell’s claim that he was probably the drunkest person there that night constitutes no small achievement.

Attell assures Kansas Citians that although the bars here close earlier than they do in other major cities, we can still drink the rest of them under the table. “That just means people get drunk earlier,” he explains. But one might wonder: Where, oh where, do the sober folks go?

It’s not that Attell doesn’t take them into account; Insomniac did tour the offices of The Kansas City Star at night (he says he saw “people putting together a newspaper”). Similarly, his ride with bail bondsmen led him to the following assessment of their work: “They catch people who jump bail.” So either Insomniac‘s investigation of the hours between sunset and sunrise prefers inebriation to enlightenment, or Attell simply needs to tune in with the rest of Comedy Central’s viewers when the Kansas City episode airs this Sunday at 11 p.m.

Meanwhile, a few of Attell’s misconceptions about Kansas City were cleared up by his visit. Kansas City is, “like, under the radar,” he says. And his trip disproved once and for all his inexplicable assumption that “it’s gotta be all trains down there.”