Having lived and worked in Wisconsin for two years when I was in my twenties, seeing Charlie Berens’ Manitowoc Minute video clips for the first time a few years ago was warmly nostalgic.
While Berens’ comedy is a somewhat exaggerated caricature of the people (his own personality, included) and places in the Badger State he’s known and loved throughout his lifetime, we both acknowledged experiencing certain idiosyncrasies that probably wouldn’t quite exist in the same way elsewhere.
“You know, in Wisconsin, it’s not too completely out of place to see someone wearing a Cheesehead to a funeral,” he affirms with a laugh during our interview a few weeks ago.
There’s that. And shutting down your office early so you don’t miss the keg tapping ceremony on the first day of Oktoberfest. And participating in heated debates about which restaurant/community center/church had the best Friday night fish fry. Or exchanging loud impressions of the late, great Ray Szmanda, the chrome-voiced commercial spokesperson for Menards stores – a sacrosanct Wisconsin-born institution where it’s possible to buy lumber, pants, and canned meat in the space of just a few aisles.
Although a lot of Berens’ material evokes his upbringing in the Milwaukee suburbs of New Berlin and Elm Grove (he now splits his time between his home state and California), there’s a broadly relatable sense of community within it. Regardless of where we happen to live, there’s probably some variation of his “Midwest Nice”-branded folksiness that we can identify in our neighborhoods, friend circles, and families.
Columbus is one of many stops on Berens’ Midwest Survival Guide Tour this spring, arriving at the Southern Theatre on Friday, April 22. The tour borrows its name from his new book (subtitled How We Talk, Love, Work, Drink, and Eat…Everything with Ranch), which quickly propelled him onto the New York Times Bestseller list after it was released last November.
When asked why he believes his regional comedic point-of-view has been embraced so widely, Berens believes “it’s sort of just been overlooked from a comedic perspective for a long time. You have a few notable exceptions to that, but largely I think the Midwest has been underrepresented or misrepresented in pop culture. I think it helps that I was born and raised in it, too.”
He pauses and adds, with quintessential Sconnie humbleness, “I’m just guessing though. I don’t really know.”
A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, Berens’ roots are firmly planted in journalism, having begun his professional career as a street team reporter for MTV News’ Choose or Lose in 2007. Later, he landed at Tribune Media as the host of the comedy news vehicle Nightcap, and then at the CW affiliate station KDAF in Dallas, where he won a News & Documentary Emmy Award for his investigative reporting on the feature “The Cost of Water” in 2013.
The following year, Berens was tapped to host the gameshow You’re So Money for CBS Sports Network, and the comedy/entertainment news broadcast @Hollywood for the Penske Media Corporation.
It was in 2017 that Berens finally decided to develop his own weekly comedy series, Manitowoc Minute, on YouTube. Cutting his teeth as a journalist gave Berens a strong foundation to find his voice as a content creator – not just in terms of how it informed his production skills, but in concocting the personas he put in front of the camera, as well.
“The first character of mine that took off was actually an exaggeration of my own journalist experience when I did local news in Dallas and [Washington] D.C.,” Berens recalls. “There were so many times when people said I couldn’t do voiceovers at one spot because of my accent, and there was another spot where I said ‘bubbler’ live on air. In Wisconsin, that’s a device you use to drink water; outside [of the state], that’s a device you use to smoke the devil’s lettuce. So, it was all those kinds of things that really influenced the character.”
The agility he gained with committing stories to paper early on was also a boon to his creative process as a comedian.
“The writing you do in comedy, I’ve found, is the same kind of writing you’d do in journalism from a structural standpoint, you know?” says Berens. “I mean, when I came up doing it, they said, ‘write from a sixth-grade reading level’ for your standard local publications. That’s what they say. And I don’t even mean it in a talking-down-to-people kind of way, but it’s just sort of the simplicity of language makes things more clear.”
Berens has applied a similar philosophy as he’s adopted his material for a live audience.
“It’s the same thing when you’re doing stand-up – if you get too verbose or too cute, or too quick, people lose your punchlines,” he explains. “So, it’s a simple punchline and a simple setup. And, in fact, the Manitowoc Minute – the first thing that ever took off for me – was just a series of headlines and punchlines. As you know, there are so many headlines out there that are so crazy, they’re just the perfect setup for that.”
Eventually, Berens’ weekly videos blossomed into a mini-empire with hundreds of YouTube features (and nearly a million followers watching), a large merchandise store, and a regular podcast, Cripescast (comedians Sasheer Zamata, Jeff Foxworthy, and Kevin Pollak were recent guests). In his mind, persistence has been one of the most important keys to his success. After the first Manitowoc Minute installment gained traction, it became his sole focus.
“I knew how hard it was to get something to take off, I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do a second one,'” Berens recalls. “And that one took off. That was when I said, ‘Okay, that wasn’t just a fluke and there’s a demand for this.’ I just kept doing it, and I was holding on for dear life for it to work, you know, because when you’re trying to start a fire for so long and nothing takes – but when something does, you give it as much oxygen as you can.”
While Berens is unquestionably the north star of his brand, he insists that much of it is a collaborative process among friends, family, and colleagues – on-screen and off.
“I’m lucky enough over the years to have developed a great team of people I work with – producers, editors,” he affirms. “I’ve got a really great team that helps me out with the videos, and we all brainstorm a lot of these.”
Berens also credits fervent audience participation as a major source of inspiration.
“The thing I like the most is when the fans send over ideas,” he says. “And that’s the thing I’ve liked about the Manitowoc Minute from the beginning is that fans will submit punchlines, or they’d submit headlines. Or I would put up a headline, and I’d say, ‘Alright, let’s hear your best punchlines.’ I like that because it makes it less about me and more about it reflecting a larger culture. That’s when it’s the most fun for me when it’s that kind of interactive process.”
“The thing I like the most is when the fans send over ideas…I like that because it makes it less about me and more about it reflecting a larger culture. That’s when it’s the most fun for me when it’s that kind of interactive process.”
Of all of the things that have transpired so far in his career, Berens seems to find his newfound cachet as an author to be the most unexpected – especially when he finally saw The Midwest Survival Guide in its published form.
“Yeah, it’s pretty slick, you know? I thought, ‘I can’t believe I did that! I really can’t,'” he says. “So, it’s super cool. It was a lot of fun and I was lucky to be able to do it.”
Penning a book turned to be a bit of a challenge, however – even for a seasoned writer.
“You know, Jeez Louise, it is nothing short of a marathon to get a book going,” Berens exclaims with a bit of exasperation. “I bit off way more than I could chew. It was a nine-month process, with most of it crammed into the last three weeks, you know? A lot of procrastination goes on with a book.”
A lot of themes from Berens’ videos fill the book’s pages. Others began in earnest as a few rounds of fan correspondence.
“People would email me saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to college in the Midwest. What do you recommend in this city?’” says Berens. “Or ‘My grandchildren are in the Midwest and we’re moving up from Florida. What should I expect?’ Someone even said, ‘I’ve just hit a deer. What do I do?!’ [laughs] And I said, ‘Well, I hope you’ve got your buck knife!’ I started writing response to some of these people just over messages, and it was kind of the seed for the book. Eventually, I had enough of them that I could see a book coming out of it, and I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”
With Berens now on his third major tour since last year, taking the time to explore the cities and towns he plays is a valued part of his road trip ritual – and often the source of good new material.
“If I can, I walk around – you really get a sense of things when you do that, especially some of the smaller towns, which I play a lot,” he says. “The best part is walking around and going to the bar and just listening to people. You get some great bits just by doing that. There was this bait shop owner in Fond-du-Lac – we were going fishing. I said, ‘Is it good fishin’ out there?’ And he said, ‘The water’s clear as gin – take that for what you will.’”
Berens has an inextinguishable likability that makes him easy to root for – no doubt it’s why his audience continues to grow. His opportunities also seem to be multiplying; on deck for the rest of the year is a stand-up special he’s scheduled to record this spring, plus a few as-of-yet unnamed scripted projects that are in the works.
But, even with many doors opening, Berens feels it’s important to not take anything for granted and maintain a reasonable amount of perspective.
“I would’ve never imagined being at this point,” he says. “But just being able to keep going and keep working and seeing what naturally comes is part of the fun, and not holding too hard to any given plan, you know?”
Charlie Berens brings his Midwest Survival Guide Tour to the historic Southern Theatre, 310 S. High St., on Friday, April 22. Show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $30 and $40, plus applicable taxes and fees.
To learn more about Charlie, visit his official website.