Bert Kreischer Toledo Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Bert Kreischer in Toledo — FAQ

About Bert Kreischer

Albert Charles Kreischer Jr. was born November 3, 1972 in Tampa, Florida, the son of a lawyer father and a real-estate-broker mother, and grew up between the suburbs of Tampa and the Florida west-coast Gulf belt. He attended Florida State University in Tallahassee, where he spent six years as an English major and racked up the underclassman lifestyle that became the subject of the Rolling Stone feature 'Bert Kreischer: The Undergraduate' — the 1997 Oliver Jones magazine profile that named Kreischer the top partyer at FSU, then the country's top-ranked party school, and turned him into a low-grade cult figure on the college circuit before he had ever told a joke on a stage. The Rolling Stone piece had a second life when it became the basis for the 2002 film National Lampoon's Van Wilder, the Ryan Reynolds vehicle whose central character is widely understood to be inspired by the Kreischer profile. Kreischer himself, by then, had already moved into stand-up — he started open-mic comedy in Tallahassee in his final undergraduate stretch, moved to New York City after FSU, and ground the NYC club circuit through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The first national break came on television, hosting Hurt Bert on FX in 2005 and Bert the Conqueror on the Travel Channel in 2010, an extreme-physical-stunt format that put him in front of a cable audience before the stand-up career had broken nationally. The first big stand-up special, 'Comfortably Dumb,' aired on Comedy Central in 2009, followed by a string of hour specials over the next decade and a half: 'The Machine' (Showtime, 2016), the special that captured the Russian-train story for a global audience and was the first hour to crack into widespread YouTube circulation; 'Secret Time' (Netflix, 2018), 'Hey Big Boy' (Netflix, 2020), 'Razzle Dazzle' (Netflix, 2023), and 'Lucky' (Netflix, 2025). The shirtless-on-stage move started early — pulled off the shirt to get a laugh in a club basement, kept doing it because the laugh kept landing — and became, alongside the Machine bit, the defining visual brand of the act. The podcast catalogue scaled in parallel: Bertcast began in 2012 as a long-form interview show, 2 Bears 1 Cave with Tom Segura launched in 2020 and became one of the most-listened-to comedy podcasts in the world, the Bill Bert Podcast with Bill Burr launched on All Things Comedy and runs as a co-hosted weekly companion piece, and Something's Burning is the Travel-Channel-turned-YouTube cooking-with-a-comic format that has run multiple seasons since 2018. The 2023 Legendary Entertainment film 'The Machine,' directed by Peter Atencio and co-starring Mark Hamill as Bert's father Albert Sr., adapted the train-heist story into a feature-film action-comedy that grossed over $20 million theatrically and pushed the brand from arena-comedy class into mainstream film recognition. The touring brand — Body Shots Tour, Berty Boy Tour, Fully Loaded Comedy Festival, the Tornado Tour — has scaled in step with the podcast and film footprint, and the arena routing is now the default for the bigger headline legs.

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