2 hours Ago
Tim Sample at his home in Portland in 2022. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer Maine humorist Tim Sample has decided to stop performing on stage, while he’s still able to stand on one. Tim Sample’s last two scheduled shows: Nov.
15 – Colonial Theatre , Laconia New Hampshire, 7 p.m. Free show.
June 26 – Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, 7:30 p.m. Tickets scheduled to go on sale in February.
“Is there any rule that says you have to keep performing until your grandchildren wheel you out in a wheelchair?” said Sample, 73, of Portland. “My shows are doing great. People are enthusiastic.
I’m having a great time. But it’s something I’ve been doing for 50 years, and I’m ready to step back. ” Sample has decided to stop performing regularly to concentrate on his art, especially pen-and-ink drawings, a passion he pursued before his career as a humorist took off.
His last scheduled show this year is Nov. 15 in Laconia, New Hampshire. He’s also scheduled one last Maine show, on June 26 at the Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, the town where he grew up.
During his long career, Sample has established himself as one of Maine’s best-known humorists, which is somewhat different than being a comedian. He’s taken the state’s storytelling traditions to a national audience through live shows, albums, books and his “Postcards from Maine” segments, which aired on the TV show “CBS Sunday Morning” from 1993 to 2004. Tim Sample being filmed in Maine for a CBS Sunday Morning spot in 1997.
Photo by Robert Mitchell He’s been a bridge to the work of past Maine storytellers and humorists, including Marshall Dodge and Bob Bryan, who gained national fame in the 1950s and ’60s with the “Bert and I” recordings and stories of Down East life, complete with thick accents. Sample later worked with Bryan, including on the 1982 album “How to Talk Yankee.” Among his books are the Maine classic “Saturday Night at Moody’s Diner,” published in 1985 and featuring stories inspired by the famous Waldoboro eatery.
He’s also done voice-over work, including narrating Stephen King’s 2015 audio book “Drunken Fireworks,” about a man arrested for his role in a Fourth of July fireworks competition on a Maine lake. “He’s a Maine treasure. I think that says it all,” King wrote in an email, when asked about Sample’s retirement.
Sample has not only preserved Maine’s storytelling traditions but also expanded and updated them for new and younger audiences, said Cathy Sherrill, who has been executive director of the Opera House at Boothbay Harbor for 19 years. Sherrill said Sample’s show at the Opera House is currently “penciled in” for June 26, and she expects tickets to go on sale in February. “Few (performers) connect with their audience as quickly as when Tim steps out on the stage.
The comfortable laughter begins and swells throughout the show,” said Sherrill. “I hope the next generation of storytellers has been able to listen to Tim. He’s an absolute master of the art.
” Sample has described Maine humor, in interviews over the years, as being rooted in the tough times Mainers endure, while keeping a gentle, soft-spoken approach to life. It’s humor that can “puncture pomposity,” he told the Press Herald in 2016. Sample says he’s been doing about 15 shows a year lately, including private and corporate appearances.
Though that’s not a lot compared to the 120 a year he did at one time, he says the amount of time he spends setting up gigs and traveling add up. And he’d rather spend that time creating art, especially pen-and-ink drawings. Sample was a student at the Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art and Design) in the late 1960s and also played in local rock bands, before starting his career as a humorist around 1974.
He continued creating art over the years, illustrating his and others’ books and calendars. Sample and his wife, Kevin, split their time between Portland and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Last year, while visiting the town of Marfa, Texas, known for its artists and galleries, Sample showed a portfolio of his abstract pen-and-ink drawings to staff at Wrong, a store and gallery.
The gallery agreed to host a show of Sample’s work next spring. Before turning to humor and performing in the mid-1970s, Sample had used his art skill to work on animation at Neworld, a studio for artists and musicians in Blue Hill started by Noel Paul Stookey, the Paul of the 1960s folk music group Peter, Paul and Mary. Stookey saw that Sample had a unique talent for humor and storytelling, and he encouraged Sample to pursue it.
One Tim Sample’s drawings, which will be part of an exhibit of his work next year at a gallery in Texas. Image courtesy of Tim Sample “He confided in me over lunch a couple of weeks ago that his greatest enjoyment was to feel that he was connecting all the folks in his audience. Not just connecting with the members of the audience, you understand, but connecting them with each other,” said Stookey, 86.
“He did this so seamlessly with tales woven through his comedy, routines that would invariably surprise the listener with the often sly and modestly presented wisdom of the Down Easterner.” Though Sample says he won’t do a regular schedule of shows any more, he’s not completely ruling out performing again. Besides his art, he said he might write more, as well.
But he knows he’ll miss the thrill and connection of a live audience. “There is no better experience for me, no more joyful experience than an entire room full of people laughing at the same thing at the same time. I’ve been blessed to have that experience hundreds, if not thousands of times,” Sample said.
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