Shawn Bowers is a member of local sketch duo and does a ton of awesome comedy writing, some of which has been published on McSweeneys, which is pretty great. His latest project is a bit different, however; he posed as a woman on OKCupid for a few months, and documented the myriad interactions he had with the men of Chicago.

He'll be reading transcripts of these conversations live tomorrow night, December 1st at The Lincoln Loft at 8pm. I caught the show a few weeks ago at a sold-out performance and was blown away by the insane sort of man-worms that crawl around when you lift up the OKCupid rock. Tickets for the show are free and can be reserved at The OKCupid Project website.

Shawn was nice enough to compile a few conversations that were cut from the final show (but still totally fucking insane) and send them over to run on The Steamroller.

"Two months ago, I created a fake Okcupid profile for a girl named Margie Simmons for the sole purpose of testing men’s patience and seeing how much they were willing to put up with for the faintest promise of maybe-sex.  If you’ve ever been or known a human adult male, you can probably imagine the results of said experiment.  

Now I’m not a stranger to desperation.  I’ve been using Okcupid since I was in college, and it ain't always easy. Oftentimes, you’re working from very little...combing through a profile trying to find the slightest hint of something that you could use as a feasible excuse for sending someone a note, when the truth is that you just think they’re hot and are hoping that somehow they end up being interesting as well.  The blinders get locked in front of your face and you find yourself writing things that, when read back later, are some of the dumbest things you’ll ever have typed.

That's why the Okcupid Project is all found text...snippets of profiles, verbatim messages, texts, e-mails, etc.  I don’t have to tweak it to make it sadder or funnier or more disturbing, because they already did that for me.  It’s a lazy comedian’s dream!  

Now while we get through about 40ish men in the live show, I had a stack of other conversations that didn’t quite make the final cut for one reason or another and the Steamroller asked me to share some of my sexiest unseen conversations (putting the steam in Steamroller, etc etc). The pictures have been blurred to protect the innocent...the words, like so many of the men, remain untouched."

THE STOMACH GASH

THE CHILDREN'S GREASE

THE VITAMIN DEFICIENCY

THE MACGRUBER

THE ADMISSION

-Shawn Bowers