30 Nov,2025 By Fake Travel News
Comedian Nate Larson is having an existential crisis and questioning his career. So, what does he do? He visits Baku, the land of fire.
The Thursday night I died on stage wasn’t supposed to be when I died on stage. It was supposed to be easy—a mid-week crowd at The Laugh Factory, my usual seven minutes of material that had been getting decent laughs for six months. Safe stuff. Observational. Nothing groundbreaking, but reliable.
Except this time, it wasn’t reliable.
The silence started thirty seconds in and never stopped. Not the good kind of silence where people are listening. The hostile kind where you can hear someone unscrewing a bottle cap in the back row. A woman in the third row actually got up and left during my bit about airport security. My closer about dating apps got one laugh, but it came three seconds too early, which meant the guy wasn’t laughing at the punchline—he was laughing at his phone.
Before that, I’d opened with my fire bit—the one about how dating in your thirties feels like a dumpster fire, except dumpster fires at least provide warmth. I did the whole thing: the setup, the miming of warming my hands over garbage, the callback about marshmallows.
Nothing. One person coughed.
I should’ve known right then the whole set was doomed.
When the host gave me the light at five and a half minutes, I actually felt grateful.
Back at my apartment, I made the mistake of checking my phone. Someone had posted a clip in the local comedy group chat. Forty-seven views already. Three crying-laughing emojis, but not the good kind.
I couldn’t do it anymore. I opened my laptop and searched for flights. Anywhere. The cursor blinked on the destination field and I realized I had no idea where to go.
Then I looked up at the wall map I’d bought in college, one of those big laminated ones with all the countries in different colors. I’d told myself I’d travel someday, do what real comics do—get out there, find material, live a little. The map didn’t have a single pin in it.
I stood up, closed my eyes, and spun around once. Pointed.
When I opened my eyes, my finger was in the Caspian Sea, just off the western coast. I squinted at the tiny print. Azerbaijan. I had to Google it to make sure it was a real country.
There was a flight the next afternoon. Eleven hundred dollars. I booked it before I could think about rent.
Three days later, I was standing in front of the Maiden Tower in Baku, Azerbaijan, staring at my notebook. Still blank. Still lost. But at least now I was lost somewhere nobody knew me.
The tour guide was explaining the legend in fragmented English. Something about a princess whose father built the tower to protect her. Or trap her. The details kept shifting. “…legend says she jumped from top… very tragic… very beautiful story…”
I wrote down: Tower. Trapped. Ancient. Suicide.
A real Hemingway over here.
Around me, a German couple took selfies. Some Russian teenagers climbed on the walls until their mother shouted them down. I was the only person taking notes instead of photos, which made me look either very dedicated or completely insane.
Inside, the stairs were narrow enough that my shoulders scraped both walls as I climbed. The stone smelled like centuries—cold and mineral, mixed with the jasmine perfume of whoever had been up here before me. Each step worn smooth in the middle from thousands of feet. I kept climbing because there was nowhere else to go.
At the top, I tried writing: My career is like the Maiden Tower—ancient, crumbling, and nobody knows what it’s for anymore.
I crossed it out immediately. Too obvious. Too sad. Also, not funny.
Day two. The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum sits on the waterfront and looks like a rolled-up carpet, which felt a little on-the-nose. Inside, there were carpets from every era, region, and style you could imagine. The plaques explained the intricate symbolism woven into each design. Centuries of craftsmanship. Generational knowledge passed down through families.
A security guard was yelling at a kid in Russian—the kid had gotten too close to one of the antique pieces. While everyone was distracted, I leaned in close to look at a 19th-century carpet from Shirvan. There were tiny figures woven into the border, so small I almost missed them. People. Maybe a dozen of them, each one maybe half an inch tall. Someone had spent weeks, maybe months, weaving in details most visitors would never notice.
I thought about that. All that work for something nobody sees.
That’s when it hit me: I was a comedian nobody was watching, getting mad that nobody was watching.
I wrote: My act is threadbare. I came to the Carpet Museum to feel worse about myself. Mission accomplished.
The guide overheard me talking to myself and asked if I was a journalist. “No,” I said. “Comedian.”
She looked confused. “You make jokes about carpets?”
“I’m trying to make jokes about anything,” I said.
She nodded like that made perfect sense and walked away.
Day three was Fake Venice, which is exactly what it sounds like—a shopping complex built to look like Venice, complete with canals and gondolas, except it’s in the middle of Baku and the gondolas are plastic.
The worst part wasn’t the fake architecture. It was the music. American pop—something by Ariana Grande—echoing off the Venetian facades at mall volume. The acoustics made it sound like she was trapped in there, bouncing off painted plaster columns and fiberglass balconies forever.
I stood there looking at this completely artificial thing and felt something crack open. I’d flown six thousand miles to find authenticity, inspiration, something real—and here I was staring at knockoff Italy in the Caucasus while “7 Rings” played on loop.
I wrote an entire page of angry material. Bitter stuff about authenticity, about trying too hard, about how we’re all just faking it until we’re not even sure what’s real anymore.
I crumpled the page and tossed it…I was forcing it. Trying to make Baku mean something instead of just letting it be what it was.
Day four, I took a tour out to Gobustan, about an hour outside the city. There’s an archaeological site there with petroglyphs—cave drawings—that date back 40,000 years. Just stick figures and animals and boats carved into rock by people who wanted to say: I was here. I saw this. This mattered.
I was disappointed at first. I’d expected something grand, museum-sized. These were smaller than I’d imagined. You had to crouch down to really see them.
But then I noticed one figure that looked like it was dancing. Or celebrating. The arms were slightly too long—like whoever carved it 40,000 years ago got excited and messed up the proportions. An ancient mistake, preserved forever in stone.
I related to that more than I wanted to admit.
Our guide said scholars still debate what some of them mean. Forty thousand years later and we’re still trying to understand the joke.
I stopped trying to write clever material and just described what I saw: Stick figures dancing. Boats on water. Someone 40,000 years ago thought this was worth recording. They screwed up the proportions and did it anyway.
Something shifted. I wasn’t performing at the material anymore. I was just noticing things.
After Gobustan, the tour went to the mud volcanoes. If you’ve never seen one, imagine a volcano, but instead of lava, it’s just… mud. Burping mud. Angry, geological mud that occasionally explodes for no reason.
The edges were dried and cracked like old skin. When a bubble formed in the center and popped, it sent up a little spray of gray sludge and I had to step back. A drop hit my shoe anyway.
I stood there watching mud burp from the earth and started laughing. Not at a joke I’d written—just at the absurdity of it. Here I was, a failed comedian from Minnesota, watching mud burp in Azerbaijan.
I wrote: Mud volcanoes. Not lava. Just mud. Nature’s way of saying “not everything needs to be dramatic.”
On the bus back, I noticed the mud on my shoe had dried gray and crusty. I tried to scrape it off but it wouldn’t budge. Physical evidence of the weirdness, coming home with me whether I wanted it or not.
Day five was all about fire, which makes sense because Azerbaijan is called the Land of Fire.
I stopped at Bibi-Heybat, where they drilled the world’s first industrial oil well in 1846. There’s a weathered plaque and some rusted equipment behind a fence. You could drive past it and never know it changed everything.
The guide said they drilled for months before they found anything. Just kept going deeper, believing something was down there.
I wrote: They didn’t know what they’d find. That was the point. The faith wasn’t in knowing—it was in the drilling itself.
Then Yanar Dag—the eternal flame. It’s this hillside where natural gas has been burning continuously for at least 4,000 years. Four thousand years. Longer than any empire, any form of entertainment. Just fire, burning.
I stood there in the heat shimmer and wrote: 4,000 years of commitment. This flame has better work ethic than I do.
Next was the Ateshgah Fire Temple, a Zoroastrian pilgrimage site built around natural gas vents. For centuries, people came here because they thought the eternal flames were sacred. Fire as proof of the divine.
I started seeing the pattern. Fire kept showing up. In the landscape, in the history, in the architecture. It wasn’t a metaphor I was forcing—it was just there.
Day six, back in the city. The Flame Towers are these three skyscrapers shaped like flames, covered in LED screens that make them look like they’re burning at night. During the day they’re just glass. At night, the whole city watches them flicker. I’d seen them every day since I arrived but hadn’t known what to do with them. Too obvious. Too touristy.
But now I had three other fire bits. The eternal flame. The fire temple. The oil wells. The Flame Towers weren’t the point—they were the punchline.
I wrote: Baku is obsessed with fire. The eternal flame that’s burned for 4,000 years. The fire temple. The towers that look like flames. I came here to reignite my career and the whole city was already on fire.
On my last day in Baku, I went to the Zoroastrian History Museum. Spent three hours reading about the ancient religion that started here—the whole concept of light versus darkness, good versus evil, the eternal struggle.
The placard explained that Zoroastrians believed fire was the purest element because it couldn’t be corrupted—it consumed everything false and left only what was real. That’s why they built temples around eternal flames. Not to worship the fire itself, but what it represented: the burning away of everything that wasn’t true.
I stood there thinking about the bits I’d been trying to force in Baku. The clever metaphors. The bitter rants about authenticity. All the stuff I’d crumpled up and thrown away.
I wrote: Maybe comedy works the same way. Keep burning until only the truth is left. Everything else is just fuel.
It wasn’t a joke. But it was the most honest thing I’d written in months.
I’m at The Laugh Factory on a Saturday night. Weekend crowd. The host gives me ten minutes.
I do the Baku set. The bits have been refined now—tighter setups, cleaner tags, better rhythm.
The mud volcano bit kills. When I get to the eternal flame, I pause—let them sit with it. “Four thousand years,” I say. “This fire has been burning since before stand-up comedy existed. Before theater. Before the first person said ‘So what’s the deal with…’ and ruined everything.”
They laugh, and I can feel it building.
“Meanwhile, I’m standing there, career in flames—the bad kind—looking at actual flames thinking, ‘At least somebody’s got their shit together.'”
The room breaks. Real laughs. The kind I’d forgotten existed.
When I get to the Flame Towers callback—how Baku is obsessed with fire and I came there to reignite my career and the whole city was already burning—the whole room goes.
After, an acquaintance comes up. “Nate, brother, that was great. No way Baku is real. You just made that up for the bit, right?”
I pull out my phone, show him a picture of me in front of Yanar Dag, flames burning behind me.
“Holy shit,” he says, then laughs. “Man, you should write for Fake Travel News or something.”
I smile. “Yeah. Maybe I should.”
The thing is, I went to Baku to find material. What I found was what Richard Pryor knew all along: “The truth is funnier than anything you can make up.” I just needed to be far enough from home to see it.
The non-fake disclaimer: Fake Travel News is a satire travel blog. We have fun creating and exaggerating travel stories from around the world, but we also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For non-fake information on Baku, Azerbaijan, you can visit the following link: What’s it REALLY like to travel to Baku, Azerbaijan? – Adventurous Kate
