At Denver Fringe, a hilarious takedown of American history then and now

Do you want to have an orgy with a founding father? Then Sarah Knittel’s one-woman show, Ben Franklin’s Sex Party, is the experience for you.

It is a raucous, bawdy time at Rise Comedy as part of the sixth annual Denver Fringe Festival. This is my third show of the second day of the Fringe, and it is by far the show with the most discussion of bodily fluids to date — by a mile.

To partake in this historic sex party, I ventured downtown to Rise Comedy near Coors Field the same day as a Rockies game. As you might imagine, it was a zoo downtown, but let me tell you, it was well worth fighting the traffic to attend Ben Franklin’s Sex Party.

The show starts with Sarah coming out and riffing with the audience, asking if anybody here feels they have the ability to kill another human being. After someone in the audience raises their hand, she presents them with a crossbow and tells them they’ll know what to do when the time is right, and thus begins our show.

We jump into a prophecy that explains that Ben Franklin was there at the beginning of time and will be there at the end of time. It’s a little bit of a slow sequence in which Sarah is portraying Ben Franklin’s mother. Eventually, the script gets to a funny bit in which she’s riffing on D words that sound bad and then slaps the person who has her captured and says, “Ben Franklin will never forgive you for what you did to his mother.”

Then we get into the meat of the show — the big, juicy meat of the show, to indulge in this show’s sexual language, and it is very raunchy.

Ben Franklin appears out of a portal in 2025 here in Colorado and starts going through a list of queries to see if we are better off than when we founded the country. And what do you know? 2025 has been a hell of a year, and the citizens here in Colorado were feeling pretty desolate about the state of America. That made Ben Franklin very discouraged until he remembered the prophecy. He was here at the beginning of America, and now he’s here at the end of America.

After briefly reminiscing about the glory days (“the summer of ’74”) with his founding bros: George Washington, Paul Revere, and, of course, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who does a little rap, Ben realizes that he can’t just sit around and do nothing. So Ben, with the help of all of us audience members, decides we are going to form our own country within the four walls of Rise Comedy since America is such a doomed state.

Through an extended conversation with the crowd, Sarah, as Ben, is able to get us all to agree that our country should be called Birdlandia. This leads into a discussion about what we want and don’t want in our country. The most contentious topic in Birdlandia? Olives. It got the audience into a very heated debate as to whether we liked them or not. Eventually, we just decided we better not legislate that measure at all in Birdlandia.

Command performance

Sarah is absolutely hysterical as Ben and commands the stage. Sarah’s in this amazing costume. She’s got this wig on that is balding in the front and then has these long gray flowing locks in the back that are just bouncing around as she runs all around the venue. She’s also got this ridiculous fat suit on that has these gigantic man boobs with pepperoni nipples that are just stuck on with tape and frequently fall off through the show. I don’t actually know if that was planned or improv.

In fact, I don’t know how much of this show was planned or improvised. The description says it’s a “devised work,” so it was created through an experimental, improvisational practice, and that spirit clearly still lives on in the show, with Sarah very frequently riffing directly with the crowd.

Her comfort with crowd work is what really makes the extended conversation about our new country, Birdlandia, work so well. Following the establishment of Birdlandia, Ben invites us all to participate in a massive dance party that eventually devolved into an orgy with Ben Franklin, who becomes erect and uses a giant prop penis that he passes around the audience to come on everybody and hopefully get everyone to cum.

Uh-oh

After this exchange, we then get a breaking news update from Caroline Cocksucker: there’s a syphilis outbreak. Ben Franklin does not know where this possibly could have come from. (Cough, cough — he’s a guy who famously had hella syphilis.)

So Ben is now attempting to shift the blame for infecting the colony with syphilis and truly becoming a bad dude. Then Ben Franklin, Terminator version, jumps out of the portal to stop him, but then Ben Franklin kills him with a katana. Then J.Lo and Ben Affleck come out of the portal to try to stop him, but then they get killed with the katanas.

Only the real Ben Franklin, when he comes out of the portal and says this person is an impostor, can stop him. They get into a fight, which is when the crossbow comes out. We realized that the only way to save the country was to kill the leader. Ben Franklin was shot by an audience member, and the crowd went crazy. Sarah then comes back out dressed as a bald eagle with her flaccid penis hanging below and dances around as this bald eagle, saying she wishes she had more of an answer but she has nothing.

This show had me laughing so hard that I spit my drink out of my nose at one point. The audience I was with was so into it, and that’s because this satire is so razor sharp. It’s pointed about the disastrous state our country is in while being consistently hilarious and creative.

Though Sarah may say she doesn’t know what the country needs right now, Ben Franklin’s Sex Party filled me up in all the right ways and is absolutely the comedy America needs right now.