Will Franken's one-man sketch comedy performances have traditionally taken place after 9pm, making it hard for people from out of town to get home afterward at a reasonable hour. His current Marsh run, however, includes Sunday night performances at 7pm every week between now and December 3rd. The show lets out before 9pm and it's just a few blocks to the 24th & Mission BART station.

I saw the show last night. Highlights of the set for this run: "Conference Call," the new skit "Voice of God" (which includes a bonus callback to the title "Good Luck With It" bit), "Movie: The Remake/Matrixian Philosophy," "Q&A," and "18th Century." Also, the mix CD "overture" that you hear as the audience arrives and leaves includes a track from "Switched on Bach." So I'd be willing to go again.

This run has the highest per-ticket cost of any Franken show I've seen; then again, there's no one- or two-drink minimum, and for the first time the ticketholder gets an actual paper program. I speculate that any given multilevel performance venue, like The Marsh, uses profits from high ticket prices on select shows to subsidize the low ticket prices for less well-known shows/performers who are trying to build audiences. Franken has gone through that entire cycle, then, at The Marsh.

In other cycle hypotheses, many smart suburban/small-town/small-city Californians I knew went to Berkeley, then moved to San Francisco, and are now moving to New York. I assume they will then move back to smaller towns to have kids. I assume.