Kathleen Madigan’s ‘Boxed Wine and Bigfoot’ a perfect pairing for Washington audiences

Comedian Kathleen Madigan readily admits that if she’s going to do a tour called “Boxed Wine and Bigfoot,” there’s no better place to perform than Washington state.

A fan of all things supernatural, Madigan mentions the Loch Ness Monster and the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in her most recent special, “Bothering Jesus.”

The name “Boxed Wine and Bigfoot” even refers to her penchant for pouring a glass of wine and going down a rabbit hole researching legendary monsters online.

So the unexplained might be to blame for Madigan’s luck in securing a copy of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which she recently finished reading to her fans, one Twitter or Instagram video at a time, right after its release.

“Nobody could get the book there for awhile, and I don’t know what happened but I went on Amazon and it was super weird,” she said before a recent show in Albany, New York. “It said ‘There’s already one in your cart.’ I’m like ‘OK, I don’t know what’s going on,’ but I hit buy and got it.”

Madigan knew a lot of people were curious about the book but probably didn’t want to spend $25 to get it, so she decided to read “Fire and Fury” to her fans.

Though there wasn’t much revealed in the book that Madigan said you didn’t already know from reading a newspaper or watching the news, she enjoyed the project and is already picking the next book for “Storytime with Kathleen.”

At the moment, it’s down to two books she picked up recently at an airport: New Directions’ “Cat Poems,” a collection of poems written from a cat’s perspective, or Brian Tracy’s “Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time,” which Madigan, a self-proclaimed procrastinator, picked up purely to laugh at.

Spokane-area fans can cast their vote when Madigan performs at the Bing Crosby Theater on Saturday.

“Boxed Wine and Bigfoot” will feature a few jokes from “Bothering Jesus,” which premiered on Netflix in 2016 and was released as an album in February.

Nessie and the missing Malaysia Airlines flight aren’t the only things Madigan talks about on “Bothering Jesus.”

The special kicks off with a batch of jokes about Madigan’s home state of Missouri.

“My state is not really a state that you want to brag about,” she said in the special. “We just try to lay low. That’s our best outcome, if we’re not noticed.”

After mentioning the tension in Ferguson, near her hometown of Florissant, Madigan tells the audience about CNN’s coverage of a debate the state Senate had about noodling, “when hillbilly people get in muddy rivers,” stick their hands in catfish holes, wait for the fish to bite then pull the catfish out of the hole.

She also mentions a group of Mormons who believe the original Garden of Eden was 35 miles north of Kansas City and that Jesus will head there when he returns.

“Look, I am from Missouri and if you think Jesus is coming back to Kansas City, 35 miles outside of it, by the way, then you must believe that Jesus is a big fan of barbecue and crystal meth,” Madigan said in “Bothering Jesus.”

Madigan isn’t afraid of telling these jokes to Missouri audiences, saying, simply, “We know.”

“We just made the top 50 dangerous cities, St. Louis did, in the world,” she said, referring to Business Insider’s list of the 50 most violent cities in the world in 2017, which placed St. Louis at number 13. “More dangerous apparently than Culiacán, Mexico, which is the home of El Chapo. I’m like ‘Really? You think this is as dangerous as Culiacán?’ I don’t agree.”

Her family, including her mother’s habit of wrapping her credit cards in tin foil to keep them from the “ray gun people” and the lack of “I love you’s” her family exchanged when she was growing up, also get a few mentions.

“At this age, if I walked into a room and all my siblings were sitting there and they all started to say ‘I love you,’ I would run out because I would know it’s some sort of intervention and I’m not falling for that,” she said in the special.

In between the release of “Bothering Jesus” on Netflix in 2016 and as an album earlier this year, Madigan drove across and performed in Canada with fellow comedian Lewis Black, a bucket list item she mentioned to The Spokesman-Review before a 2016 performance at the Bing Crosby Theater.

“We did just about every city you can do across the whole country …” she said. “We’re really good friends, so we had a lot of fun.”

With that goal behind her, Madigan is open to new ideas. She just has to do some brainstorming first.

“There’s nothing on my brain right now, but that doesn’t mean I won’t think of something after we hang up,” she said.