Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
From St. Paul to 30 Rock
What do we know about Tommy Brennan, the 32-year-old St. Paul native who's one of five new cast members joining Saturday Night Live this year? From his social media accounts, we can determine that he has halfway decent politics, wears a lot of '80s track jackets, and sounds kinda like Aziz Ansari if you listen to his videos while you're doing work in another tab.
For more, we turn to the ever-local-angling Neal Justin at the Star Tribune, who writes that while Brennan came up through the Chicago comedy scene, he "earned big laughs" at 2023's 10,000 Laughs Comedy Festival (how many of the 10,000, we'll never know) and performed at Comedy Corner Underground (RIP) during its New Years Eve show later that year. Justin scoured Brennan's LinkedIn and determined that he once worked at the Wehmann Talent Agency in Hopkins and tended bar at Companeros Mexican Restaurant in Park Rapids. He also has upcoming shows scheduled for October 3 and 4 at Sisyphus Brewing, which he seems unlikely to make given that SNL's new season also starts October 4. Brennan is perhaps the only Minnesotan other than Al Franken to ever make the cast.
And... this exhausts our current Tommy Brennan local angles. Stay tuned, we'll try to get the SNL-er on the horn—and perhaps on the pod. You can meet all the new season 51 cast members here.
Fair Attendance: Fair!
As our blood pressure returns to its normal levels and we scrape flattened Sweet Martha's cookies from the soles of our shoes, it's time to look back on the attendance totals from the 2025 Minnesota State Fair. This year's total attendance was 1,940,869, up from 1,925,904 the year prior, with just one record-setting day (Monday, August 25, with 145,022 people).
Is that cause for concern, given how gorgeous the weather was? Nick Halter at Axios Twin Cities posits that it could be sticker shock: "University of St. Thomas associate professor Tyler Schipper told Axios that overall prices on 30 State Fair items he indexed were up 7.7% this year," he writes, with admission prices increasing 11% and food and bev prices going up 8.7%. But Schipper says "general angst around the day-to-day economy" is likely to blame more than fair prices.
My vibes-based two cents? These numbers ain't bad! Especially considering that, unless you're as big a Lilith Fair fan as the guv or really into Nelly, there were no real Granstand draws this year. It's still the fifth-most-attended State Fair, behind the record-setting 2016-2019 fairs, and attendance has continued to climb every year since 2021, when the Great Minnesota Get-Together returned after taking a pandemic year off. I think most places would be thrilled to say they've seen that kind of post-2020 turnaround, but we'll see what happens next year...
Twins Attendance: Abysmal!
Now, as for an organization that really does need to worry about attendance numbers? That would be your Minnesota Twins. The shit-sucking, trade-deadline-selloff-decimated squad played for a paid crowd of 11,721 on Tuesday during a Bark at the Park promotion. (As Twins writer Aaron Gleeman notes, those "announced attendance" figures are always misleadingly ballooned compared to the number of fans that actually showed up to see our 62-76 squad.)
Just get a load of the outstanding Carlos Gonzalez photo that accompanies this Star Tribune story. And while we're at it, check out this line from Strib Twins reporter Bobby Nightengale: "There have been smaller crowds for Twins games at Target Field during April and May, when cold weather is more of a factor, but Tuesday’s game brought the second-smallest crowd of the season, even if it included the announced 300 dogs in the crowd."
Oh, and they lost Tuesday, in a 12-3 blowout, to the Chicago White Sox. Just arf-ul. Really ruff stuff.
Best of Luck to the Minnesota Mommies
A few weeks late here, but please enjoy the following video of this adorable almost-two-year-old guessing the names of NFC North teams:
And then, while you're at it, go ahead and check out some of her other predictions.
In fact, while we're all at it, have we highlighted Drew Magary's 2025 Vikings edition of his "Why Your Team Sucks" series? Here are his latest roasts of "football’s Best Supporting Actor winner for the 65th straight year," the "fucking frauds" who seem destined to stink this year. Or are they... (For way more Vikings prediction chatter, Friday's RacketCast episode features the most fun Vikes writer we could book.)
Football season starts tomorrow everyone! Best time of the year!
