Vanessa Bayer, the former Saturday Night Live cast member, and her brother Jonah Bayer, a music journalist turned therapist, are bringing their podcast home to Cleveland for a live taping at House of Blues on Friday, September 25 at 8 p.m. The siblings, who both grew up attending Orange High School, will be inducted into the school's hall of fame the very next morning, tying the concert directly to their hometown homecoming weekend.
The live show is a stop for their podcast, How Did We Get Weird?, which the two have hosted together and which, as reported by Cleveland Scene, focuses on Cleveland and the pair's shared childhood, complete with rotating segments and Cleveland-related material. Jonah Bayer told the outlet the podcast started about four years ago and grew out of the siblings' earlier work together in music and comedy. JD Samson, known for performing with Le Tigre and MEN, is set to guest on the House of Blues taping.
From Sketch Comedy to Saturday Night Live
Vanessa Bayer's path to national television ran through the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of Bloomers, described as the nation's first collegiate all-female sketch comedy and musical parody group. She later auditioned for Lorne Michaels and joined Saturday Night Live, where according to Wikipedia, she served as a cast member from 2010 to 2017, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2017 and setting the record at the time as the show's longest-tenured female cast member.
One of her recurring SNL characters, Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy, was based on her own brother's mannerisms, per Cleveland Scene's reporting. Vanessa has gone on to appear in additional film and television roles, and drew on her own experience surviving acute lymphoblastic leukemia, diagnosed at age 15, to co-create, executive produce, and star in the 2022 Showtime comedy series I Love That for You, according to a release from Paramount Press Express.
Jonah Bayer's Roots in Cleveland's Punk Scene
While his sister was building a comedy career, Jonah Bayer was cutting his teeth in Cleveland's punk and hardcore scene, an influence he traces to Coventry's music culture growing up. He took guitar lessons at Academy Music in Solon and at Mayfield Music, and went on to play in bands including The Lovekill and United Nations, the experimental hardcore group he formed with Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly. That band, according to Wikipedia, performed in Ronald Reagan masks and made headlines for a 2008 debut album parodying the Beatles' Abbey Road.
Jonah played local Cleveland venues including Euclid Tavern, the Odeon, and Peabody's Down Under, and once completed an eight-week Warped Tour stint on a bus with 22 people. Vanessa opened for her brother's bands during a stretch in Chicago, according to Cleveland Scene's account. After graduating from Ithaca College, Jonah became music editor at Alternative Press, and he later co-hosted the music interview podcast Going Off Track alongside Fuse TV host Steven Smith starting in 2012, producing more than 300 conversation-focused episodes, per Going Off Track's own site.
A Podcast Built on Sibling Chemistry
The Bayers' collaborative history predates How Did We Get Weird? by more than a decade. The two worked together on Sound Advice, a project that featured Weird Al Yankovic and Drake, drawing on Jonah's music-industry connections. That earlier partnership, per TEDxCLE, saw Vanessa play an obnoxious media coach dispensing unsolicited advice to musicians.
How Did We Get Weird? originally debuted in late 2021 through Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network in partnership with iHeartRadio before joining the All Things Comedy network, according to Paste Magazine. Guests on the show have included musicians Jason Isbell and Ben Gibbard. Jonah has said he now works primarily as a therapist and does less public-facing work than in his music-journalism days, having earned a master's degree in counseling and opened a private practice as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor offering therapy and band coaching.
Homecoming Weekend at Orange High School
The Friday night taping sets up a full circle moment for the siblings, both graduates of Orange High School in Pepper Pike, part of the Orange City School District serving Greater Cleveland's east-side suburbs. The Bayers will be inducted into the Orange School Hall of Fame on Saturday, September 26, as part of the district's broader Homecoming/Hall of Fame Weekend running from September 25 through 27. According to the Orange City School District, Orange High School serves grades 9-12 and maintains an alumni Hall of Fame.
The venue itself carries its own Cleveland history. House of Blues opened in 2004 inside a repurposed former Woolworth's department store building on East 4th Street, helping anchor the revitalization of downtown Cleveland's dining and entertainment corridor, according to Discogs. For a comedian and a musician who grew up in the suburbs just miles away, bringing their national podcast to that downtown stage, the night before their hometown honors them, closes a loop that started decades earlier in Orange High School hallways.
