Will Abeles
23 episodes listed below
Comedy road miles, sobriety warning lights.
Wilaker follows Will Ables through a chaptered stand-up run where practical road problems become emotional evidence. Car sleeping, bar shows, drinking anxiety, old dreams, and brief kindnesses all sit in the same messy travelogue.
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Wilaker is a chaptered road memoir about comedy, sobriety, and the strange arithmetic of trying to make a life from stage time. Will Ables is the center of it, moving from place to place with a bag of clothes, dates, loose plans, and mounting pressure. The show often starts with logistics. Venues get named. Towns stack up. Someone offers a feature spot, a headline chance, a place to crash, or a last-minute room. Then the real story begins. A Portland comedy night opens into a comparison between local scenes and Nashville’s unrealized bar-show potential. A morning after sleeping in the car becomes a study in money panic, anxiety, and the dangerous idea that one drink might make the day manageable. A canceled event in Westport turns into a cold plunge, fresh ceviche, dockside characters, and a door left cracked open for a future show. The tone is funny because the details are funny, not because the pain is softened. There are karaoke nights, beer-pong memories, comedy festivals, small-town bars, handsome strangers in a Journey cover band, and the constant need to turn travel into money. There is also a darker current. Drinking, relapse, loneliness, and fear keep returning, especially as the highs of good sets begin to balance against lower and lower mornings. The show does not treat sobriety like a finished achievement. It catches it mid-process, while ambition, shame, hope, and exhaustion are still arguing in the same room. Comedy fans get the road texture: rooms, money, favors, local scenes, and the difference between a real comedy setup and a rough bar crowd. Listeners drawn to personal storytelling get something more vulnerable than a polished career recap. Wilaker works because it trusts the long route. It lets the detours explain the damage, and sometimes the kindness, without forcing the trip into a neat moral.
Made for: For listeners who like intimate comedy memoirs, road stories, and sobriety-adjacent storytelling with blunt humor and emotional spillover. It fits fans of personal narrative shows that value messy process over polished self-help.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its practical honesty: venues, car sleeping, tight cash, cravings, and comic networking are treated as part of the same survival map. It feels less like a recap and more like a field recording from inside a risky reinvention.
Wilaker: A Journeyer's Podcast is a limited series podcast from and about comedian Will Abeles. Newly sober, Will put together a six-week nationwide comedy tour in May and June of 2025 to reclaim his identity. Ironically, the stress of putting it together contributed to his first relapse. But Will went anyway, touring from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, living out of his Subaru while opening for some of his comedy heroes and headlining, or trying to anyway, throughout the Pacific Northwest. But Wilaker isn't a just sobriety podcast. It's a people podcast dedicated to all the conversations and experiences he had...
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A road comic's candid account of uncertain gigs, hard-earned connections, and sobriety under pressure.
Will Ables turns life on the road into a candid comic travelogue, moving between sets, uncertain bookings, sleeping in his car, tight money, and the strain of drinking again. Wilaker: A Journeyer's Podcast uses the comedy circuit as both setting and pressure test.
Will Ables wakes in his car short on cash; you get the road story with its nerves intact.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A road diary that finds its heart in the grind between shows.
Will Ables gives Chapter 11 its clearest shape once the road work settles into the Portland stop, where favors, room differences, and the people holding a comedy week together all come into view.
A rough morning on the road turns into an honest, uneasy chapter with a dark sense of humor.
The chapter keeps things grounded in a rough morning on the road: he wakes up in his car, money is tight, anxiety is high, and beer keeps edging into the picture.
A road comic's date run turns into a strange, tidy night in a fishing town.
The episode moves like a touring comic's notebook: dates, detours, and the small frustrations that fill the miles between stops. Its best stretch lands in a fishing town, where a cold plunge, a hot tub, and an empty bar give the scene a sharper edge and a more specific kind of…
A road chapter that turns karaoke, strangers, and a rough stretch into blunt, easy laughter.
Chapter 8 stays anchored to the road, and that practical shape gives it its rhythm. Will Ables starts with a tidy travel update from Denver, then lets the night open up in Seattle: karaoke, four unusually handsome men in their late 40s, and a roadside detour that makes a…
A loose, honest chapter that turns outage chaos and whiskey shame into something plain and human.
Chapter 2 starts with Kenny Sharp's new intro, and that small change gives the podcast a more finished feel. The chapter still has to work through Nashville's half-city power loss, a host with houses and dogs to juggle, and a long run of drinking, guilt, and the need to finally…
Will Abels closes Wilaker: A Journeyer's Podcast with Chapter 20’s practical account of sobriety and the advice to “do what works for you.” He says AA gave him community, but hearing drinking stories sometimes made him want to drink again.
Will Ables opens by laying out a packed week of road dates.
Will Ables starts by rattling through the next stretch of shows and appearances, from Dallas to Nashville, Louisville, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Rapid City, before the road story narrows to the day at hand.
Will Ables opens by laying out the road ahead.
Will Ables opens Chapter 8 from outside in Denver, posted up by a big lake and already warning that the wind could ruin the whole thing.
Will Ables announces his upcoming comedy tour dates across the US.
Comedian Will Ables announces his upcoming tour dates across the US.
Will Ables recounts a low-stakes chapter of his journey, describing his stop at the Bar Barn in Whittington, Illinois, and his plans to travel to Omaha and Bozeman for comedy shows.
Comedian Will Abels announces his upcoming tour dates and venues across the US.
Chapter 2 opens with a new Kenny Sharp intro and the sense that the show finally sounds like a real podcast.
Comedian Will Ables introduces his podcast about his first relapse while on a nationwide comedy tour.
Will Ables introduces his limited series podcast about a transformative trip and his sobriety journey, blending past and present experiences.