We end up at a lot of comedy shows around here — it’s a scene we love and keep a foot in. Most nights the tour vehicle parked out front is a van. The other night it was a bicycle.
Skyler Bolks is a Sioux Falls comedian, and at six-foot-seven he’s a big presence on a genuinely big bike. He’s a seven-time “Sioux Falls Funniest Comic” who’s worked his way through 36 states, and his humor is Midwest to the bone — the kind that’s sharpest when he’s messing with the crowd. He had the room.
But the part that stuck with us isn’t the act. It’s how he’s getting from town to town.
A thousand miles, stage to stage
Skyler is in the middle of a tour he calls Jokes & Spokes — roughly a thousand miles, pedaling from one town’s stage to the next, all building toward RAGBRAI in July. The bike isn’t a gimmick bolted onto the comedy. It is the tour. Eastern South Dakota at first, and now the wheels have rolled all the way into the Black Hills.
We talked to him after the show, slipped him a Stone Bicycle Coalition sticker, and told him to holler if he needed anything on the Hills end of the trip. What came back wasn’t road-grind complaints. He’s enjoying it — the plains, the small towns, the people and cultures strung between the stages.
That right there is the whole pitch we keep making. A bike turns the in-between miles — the part most people sleep through on the interstate — into the best part of the trip.
Our kind of journey
This is exactly the sort of trip we want more folks dreaming up: pick a direction, load the bike, go find out what’s out there. Skyler just added a microphone. And if a guy can make an honest living riding South Dakota and making people laugh, even better — we’ll be first in line to watch.
So — thanks for the show, Skyler, and good legs the rest of the way to RAGBRAI. What a journey you’re on. Anybody out there cooking up their own version (comedy optional): you know where to find us.
— Stone Bicycle Coalition