Sean Flannery’s One-man show afoot with tales of a stand-up guy

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Sean Flannery’s “Lady Foot Locker moment” is recalled in his one-man show “Never Been to Paris.”

Updated: June 23, 2011 12:22AM

Comedian Sean Flannery has a lot of pretty unbelievable stories to tell in his one-man show, “Never Been to Paris.”

“It’s a show about the dozen or so times I nearly killed myself by not paying attention,” Flannery said. “I look at the day-to-day realities of living each day like it’s your last.”

The show starts with what sounds like a tall tale, but Flannery swears it’s true. One day in his native Cleveland, Flannery was driving in bad weather when the car suddenly careened off a bridge, down a ravine and onto another highway. At one point, the car was airborne. No one was injured.

Another story recounts the time he walked off a balcony while trying to sneak into a concert. He fell two stories and broke his back.

“People think I’m making this stuff up,” Flannery said, laughing. “It’s all true. I really wasn’t trying to do any daredevil stuff. I come from a long line of unattentive people.”

“Never Been to Paris” had a sold-out run last summer at the Lincoln Lodge in Lincoln Square. Flannery is reprising the 60-minute show at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts. The stories are augmented with audio, video and animation.

In the show, Flannery also jokes about what goes through your mind when you think it might all be over. During the airborne-car incident, he was on his way home from his job at a Lady Foot Locker and wearing the store’s requisite “fake referee” outfit.

“No, it’s not like the movies. You don’t see your whole life flash before your eyes; you think about what you’re wearing,” Flannery joked. “And this was particularly horrific since I was still dressed in my referee uniform. How weird would that look?”

Flannery, who has been working on the local stand-up scene for 10 years, doesn’t exactly remember if he was the proverbial “funny kid.” But when all his friends left Cleveland for distant colleges, he stayed at a local college. It was writing letters to his pals about his “crazy experiences” that brought him to the attention of others who wanted to be added to his mailing list.

“I realized I had a talent for making strangers laugh,” the 34-year-old comedian/actor said. “That planted the seed in my head about stand-up. But it took me a long time to build up the courage to actually do it.”

When Flannery finally decided it was time to give comedy a shot, he decided Chicago, with its vibrant stand-up and improv scene, was the place to be.

“Acts here are allowed to be a little idiosyncratic,” he said. “I was able to experiment with things, and I’m not sure how easy that would have been in another city.”

He says the stories he tells in “Never Been to Paris” were with him early on but he wasn’t “seasoned and confident enough” to pull it all together onstage. Instead, he honed a successful stand-up routine.

When Flannery decided it was time to work on something new and different, he found the one-man show format had its own challenges.

“I like to be reactive in my stand-up and that’s impossible with this show,” Flannery said. “That was a difficult transition for me, to trust that the format would work while also trying to stay in the moment, even though a one-man show is more rehearsed.”

After last summer’s run, Flannery, who works days as a software developer, took some time off to help his wife, Jessica, prepare for the birth of their second child, Declan, who joins older brother, Colin, 3. Flannery loves being a dad and looks at life differently now.

“Since I’ve had kids, I’ve become a lot more careful,” Flannery said with a laugh. “I still like to have a good time but I’m not a daredevil balancing on two-story balconies anymore.”

♦ “Never Been to Paris” opens March 4 and continues through April 29 at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, 777 N. Green. For tickets ($12), call (312) 733-6000 or visit theaterland.com.