By Peter Lindblad
Zane Lamprey is coming soon to a Wisconsin brewery near you.
Heading out on his “Glass Half Full” stand-up comedy tour, the one-time host of the popular drinking and travel TV series “Three Sheets” has made himself right at home is such settings, as he believes he’s done 627 brewery shows since 2021.
In a way, he’s bringing something back that was lost long ago.
“Breweries are the town square of 2026, where people and community meet up, and you can often bring your dog and hang out and you can bring your computer and get some work done, whatever it is,” Lamprey. “It’s like, there hasn’t really been space like that in a long time since like the pubs of centuries ago.”
The vibe is casual, easygoing even. Lamprey is in his element.
“And it’s just a fun night getting to bring a professional touring comedian from L.A. to smaller towns,” said Lamprey. “It’s a fun thing for everybody to be able to experience that, and it’s fun for me because it’s just such a more relaxed casual atmosphere and we have a lot of fun.”
Among the venues – every one of them a brewery – he’s hitting on this tour are Brewfinity in Pewaukee on Thursday, June 18, The Lone Girl Brewing Company on Friday, June 19, in Waunakee and The Fermentorium Brewery on Saturday, June 20.
Such places appeal to Lamprey, and his audiences, for various reasons, including the high-quality craft beer.
“I used to do downtown, and we’re talking downtown Atlanta, downtown Houston, downtown New York, you know, whatever,” said Lamprey. “It meant that everyone that wanted to see you needed to drive in from the suburbs, find parking and just deal with everything that goes along with heading downtown.”
It’s certainly less of a hassle for a lot of showgoers these days.
“So, when I changed it to me going out to the suburbs, it was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s 10 minutes from us. I know where that brewery is. They have great beer. They got plenty of parking. It’s going to be such an easy night as opposed to just having to figure out how you’re going to make it work,’” said Lamprey.
Necessity proved to be the mother of invention in going this route.
“The pandemic, early 2021, we were reaching out to start booking this tour, and the theaters and comic clubs weren’t sure they were going to even open at all that year,” explained Lamprey. “So, they wouldn’t commit to them and putting anything on the schedule. So, I just started reaching out to some of my friends that own breweries because I know that they were hit by the pandemic. They were excited at the prospect of having live entertainment plus something that could get people into the breweries.”
Growing in popularity, Lamprey’s been doing stand-up comedy for about five years. He’s also an author and world traveler, who also works with animals. At these upcoming shows, Zamprey expects to blend new and old material, while interacting with the audience.
“I have some stuff that I’m working in. I have some stuff that I’m phasing out,” said Lamprey. “It’s fun right now because every night is a little bit different. There’s some crowd work stuff. People don’t have to worry about that. It’s fun stuff. I’m not ripping people apart.”
Lighthearted, Lamprey’s style is energetic and ebullient, but also relaxed and relatable, engaging and observational, his material served up by a razor wit and a deep, abiding interest in just about everything the world has to offer. Touring the country throughout the year, he performs about 140 shows annually. He also boasts three specials on Amazon Prime.
“I don’t know if I set up any expectations [with the specials],” said Lamprey. “I can say that I started doing comedy seriously in 2021. So, if you watch my first Seattle special called ‘Tender Looks,’ and then you watch the second one called ‘Ski Patrol,’ which is a year later, and then you watch me in a medium club, which was a year later, I think you can see the style evolving, and you can see me maturing as a comedian. So, I think you watch them in order to be able to kind of see that and understand my process.”
The road for Lamprey has had many twists and turns, as he’s done his best to navigate the entertainment industry and adapt to change. Originally from Syracuse, New York, Lamprey majored in fine arts in oil painting, but that wasn’t for him. Then came a brief flirtation with pre-med, but his true love was theatre, which he studied in returning to school to finish his fine arts degree.
Moving to Los Angeles, Lamprey dove right into acting and comedy, working on projects for Nickelodeon, VH1 and Comedy Central, eventually landing the role of host for VH1’s reality show “Motormouth” and getting in with the cast of MTV’s “Damage Control.”
Then, along came “Three Sheets,” part TV travelogue, part global bar-hopping adventure.
It ran from 2006-2008 on the now-defunct Mojo-HD TV network, sliding over to the Fine Living channel a year later, then joining the Travel Channel in 2010. It was also eventually picked up by Spike.
Ever restless, Lamprey also hosted “Have Fork, Will Travel,” which focused more on food and ran on the Food Network, and in the wake of the rollicking “Three Sheets,” he created “Drinking Made Easy,” which sent Lamprey on a traveling and imbibing whirlwind tour of American bars. For three years, it ran on AXS-TV. Oh, and don’t forget his show “Chug” on NatGeo.
Rousing, hilarious tales of TV life, his extensive travels and Hollywood adventures are found in his book “Glass Half Full,” an honest and uproarious account of Lamprey’s experiences on the road, meeting odd strangers and having ridiculously funny encounters. It’s a ripping yarn.
“I got a lot of great stories, and I didn’t want them to just disappear,” said Lamprey. “I mean, I’ve had some incredible, amazing experiences, and people are always kind of asking me about, ‘How did this happen and how did this happen?’ And rather than giving them an abridged version, I wanted to write that story out.”
Readers were certainly curious about his journey.
“A lot of people wanted to know, like, how one thing led to another,” said Lamprey. “And I intend to write more books. It was very difficult, as far as a laborious process, to do it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I’m excited, too, I’m already working on my next one. And it’s just a collection of stories that are chronological. And I think, you know, it’ll give people a glimpse into what I was going through at the time and shooting these TV shows and some things that happened behind the scenes.”
Stand-up has been an outlet that fills something that’d been missing for Lamprey since all the TV series went away.
“You know, getting ‘Three Sheets’ and then transitioning that into doing a show for Mark Cuban and then doing some others,” said Lamprey. “And then entering into the pandemic, these travel shows, they’re just not there anymore.”
Look at all that have gone by the wayside.
“They’re not making these shows like they used to,” said Lamprey. “I mean, travel shows used to be it. I mean, you talk about like Adam Richman and, of course, [Anthony] Bourdain and [Andrew] Zimmern and just like all these people out there doing these travel shows … I had a show on Food Network for a while, too. And then Travel Channel, they’re not even doing travel shows. They’re just doing paranormal stuff. I don’t understand. So, it was really time to reevaluate stuff.”
Stand-up comedy started to look better to Lamprey, so he made the switch and hasn’t looked back.
“And the good thing for me is that creatively I am just as fulfilled doing my stand-up as I was traveling and doing my TV shows,” said Lamprey.
Writing every day, he goes back and analyzes that freshly created material. He’s always evolving, with a big change in subject matter. His drinking days have been mostly pushed aside in favor of other topics, like family and something else that’s unique to Lamprey.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of travel stuff in there,” said Lamprey. “I mean, when I was coming out in year one, I was talking a lot more about ‘Three Sheets.’ This second year, I was talking a lot about my ‘Drinking Made Easy’ show to more current stuff, and now I’m doing something that no one else is doing. I don’t know how they could.”
That stems from another of his pet projects, no pun intended, which he covers extensively on his podcast “Zane’s World.”
“My material revolves around animals, and so, people have to come to the show to understand what that means,” said Lamprey. “It’s also the best work I’ve ever done. It’s a pretty amazing experience for the audience. It’s fun. So yeah, that’s my lane. Now it’s not really the drinking stuff. It’s animal stuff.”
That doesn’t mean he’s given up beer, either recreationally or as part of his content.
“I mean, I’m a huge fan of beer. I’m a huge fan of craft beer,” said Lamprey. “I get to take two things that I love. I love comedy. And I love breweries. And so, I get to marry the two together.”
Why stop there? Lamprey has his fingers in many different pies.
“Well, I mean, I have my apparel brand, which consumes my life when I’m back home, and on the road, which we’re launching in July,” said Lamprey. “So, I mean, my life is pretty much my apparel brand, which revolves around animals, and also, my stand-up, which is kind of the same thing. I’m basically the CEO of those two companies, and that’s kind of magic.”