School board meetings are supposed to be about education. Increasingly, they resemble political theater, with one important difference: the people running the show don’t always realize they’re the punchline.
Enter Shamgar Connors, a former public-school teacher who has decided that if officials insist on defending policies he considers absurd, the least he can do is give those policies the characters they deserve. One minute he’s Shamgarita, a WNBA hopeful and captain of the Pronoun Protectors. The next, he’s Wolfgar, a furry taking his case to the public-comment podium. The costumes change. The questions don’t: Who gets to decide what happens in our schools, and why are parents so often treated like the problem?
Connors joined me on Dangerous Laughter for an episode that proves political comedy gets a lot more interesting when the comedian is willing to become the spectacle. Shamgarita’s basketball credentials are impeccable by the standards of her fictional league: her only tryout was identifying as a player, so she’s already made the team. Her game combines layups with manifestation, and her team is ready to take on anyone foolish enough to ask what, exactly, qualifies someone to play in the WNBA.
I couldn’t resist pointing out that Connors had once been annoyed with me for putting a different bearded lady on the cover of my latest book, The Curse of the Bearded Lady: How the Trans Mafia Whacked American Sanity. Apparently, there’s room for more than one bearded lady in the cultural circus. Mine made the cover; Shamgarita brought her own jersey. Either way, the joke points toward a serious question running through both the book and our conversation: what happens when institutions demand that people accept claims they believe contradict reality?
Then there’s Wolfgar, whose appearance at a public-comment podium brings gender-identity debates into the kind of setting where officials would usually prefer carefully managed remarks and a quick adjournment. Connors has also appeared as a drag queen, a Pride Pool Party Princess, an Islamic imam, and even Lobotamus Prime, a data-center identity. This is not a man who believes in doing the same routine twice.
But the wardrobe changes are more than a gag. Connors spent 14 years teaching in public schools and coaching, and he says his characters grew out of frustration with what he saw as institutional hypocrisy and policies that leave parents struggling to get straight answers. In his account, school policies in Stafford County, Virginia, have raised serious concerns about access to bathrooms and locker rooms based on asserted gender identity. He says parents have approached him with worries about their daughters’ privacy and safety, while teachers feel constrained in what they can say.
These are contentious issues, and Connors is not interested in dressing them up in the language of a school district press release. His approach is to take the logic of a policy, push it toward its most uncomfortable conclusion, and see whether the people defending it are prepared to stand by it when the consequences become impossible to ignore.
That is the point of Shamgarita. That is the point of Wolfgar. The joke is not simply that the characters are ridiculous. It is that Connors believes the policies they dramatize are already asking the public to accept contradictions that would be obvious if the same logic were applied somewhere else.
His performances have also targeted school-library controversies and the rules governing public comment. Connors and I discussed accounts of parents being cut off when they attempted to read passages from books they considered inappropriate for children, with officials invoking decorum or other meeting rules. There is something revealing about an institution that can make room for almost any bureaucratic euphemism but suddenly becomes very concerned about decorum when a parent reads the actual words aloud.
Connors has also used his characters to draw attention to the public activities of school-board figures, including a Pennsylvania board member he says was associated with drag performances. He credits political comedian Alex Stein with inspiring his approach and says he has spent the past four or five years making videos. His method is deliberately theatrical, because another politely phrased complaint can disappear into the minutes. A character in a ridiculous costume is harder to ignore.
Of course, not everyone appreciates the performance. Connors says radical-left critics accuse him of mocking people’s identities. His answer, in essence, is that satire has always tested the limits of acceptable opinion, especially when powerful institutions declare certain ideas beyond criticism. The point is not to win a popularity contest with the people he is challenging. It is to make the public look at the argument rather than merely admire the official standing behind the microphone.
And behind the costumes is a personal story that gives his activism a more serious dimension. Connors says he was removed from the University of Virginia’s kidney-transplant list after refusing a COVID-19 vaccination requirement, despite seeking a religious exemption.
He describes the ordeal while living on dialysis, and says the resulting controversy brought doxxing and death threats against him and his family. Those are his allegations, but they help explain why he sees questions of institutional power, religious conviction and individual liberty as much more than material for a routine.
His Christian faith is central to his outlook. The name Shamgar comes from the biblical Book of Judges; Connors says his father chose it after hearing a sermon. For him, defending children and challenging institutions he believes have lost their way are moral obligations, not just a content strategy.
That mix of provocation and argument is also at the heart of The Curse of the Bearded Lady. In a chapter pointedly titled “I’m the One Who Knocks, on the Girls Bathroom Door, and My Name Is Gary,” I take aim at the collision between gender-identity ideology, women’s spaces and institutional deference. Connors approaches similar disputes through live performance, forcing officials and audiences to confront the implications of the policies under debate. Different formats, same conviction that comedy can expose what polite conversation often leaves untouched.
Connors isn’t asking anyone to believe a wolf costume can settle a school-policy dispute. He’s betting that satire can expose a contradiction more vividly than another committee hearing, another carefully worded letter or another round of public comments that go nowhere.
That is why I think comedy can be a civic duty. Satire is a public audit: it tests the claims powerful people make, checks whether their logic survives contact with reality, and gives ordinary citizens a way to challenge the self-serious. A bureaucratic explanation can bury a contradiction beneath six layers of jargon. Put that contradiction in a costume, give it a microphone, and suddenly everyone is looking.
When institutions become too self-important to laugh at themselves, somebody has to do the laughing for them. Connors has volunteered for the job, and he has brought an entire wardrobe. I’ve brought a book. We believe in the equal distribution of mockery. School boards included.
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