Charlie Sanders has a great, only-in-America story. The writer-comedian’s hippy parents converted to Islam and moved from radical San Francisco to white-bread Minnesota, inadvertently endowing Charlie with a rich store of tragicomic material. The experiences of his unique childhood heightened his sense of the absurd.
As happens so often with artists, Charlie draws on the anger his father aroused, his feelings of camaraderie complicated by alienation from his friends, of not quite belonging and not always knowing how to deal with the predicaments his father’s whims and convictions engendered.
I’m writing a profile soon to be published at ComedyBeat.