The Davenport House Museum has spent more than six decades teaching visitors to tell the difference between what happened in early nineteenth-century Savannah and what we merely imagine happened. On Thursday, October 22, 2026, it will ask a room full of adults to do the opposite: to listen to three comedians tell stories about real objects from the museum's collection and decide, round by round, which one is telling the truth.
The program is called A B.S. in History: Historical Fact or Hysterical Fiction, and it runs from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the museum, 323 East Broughton Street. Comedian J. Steinbrunner hosts, with a panel of Bob Aneshansel, Shaylyn Mackey, and Matt Hogan. Six curious objects from the collection are in play. Each comedian knows the true story behind exactly one of them; for every other artifact, the comic has to invent something convincing on the spot. Audience members choose which objects come up, then hear three competing versions of each object's past. Only one is rooted in fact. After each round, the audience votes.
It is a format that depends on a particular kind of nerve. Stand-up comics are used to selling a joke; here they have to sell a fabrication as scholarship, in a room where the real scholarship is standing by. The museum's own description promises "surprising artifacts, outrageous stories, plenty of laughs, and the reminder that sometimes the truth is stranger—and funnier—than fiction." General admission is $20 per person, with table seating at $30 per person, five seats to a table.
Steinbrunner, who performs under the handle @weakinrevue, was billed as headliner at a July alumni comedy night for a Savannah recovery organization alongside Savannah comedians Sam Siamwala and Bret Rorabaugh and live music from Sam Daniel. The other three panelists are Savannah performers as well, and the show's premise leans on the fact that a city this saturated with tour guides, ghost stories, and lovingly embroidered legend has no shortage of people practiced at making the invented sound authoritative.
That is part of the joke, and part of the point. Savannah's tourism economy runs on narrative — some of it carefully researched, some of it embellished for effect — and a museum built on documentary evidence is an unusually good place to poke at the difference. The Davenport House's interpretation covers 1820 to 1827, the years for which it holds the strongest evidence about the people who lived there, anchored by two inventories: one taken when Isaiah Davenport died and another at the sale of his estate. Objects from that record are precisely the kind of thing that can sound absurd until you learn what they actually were.
The house itself has a story that would strain credulity if a comedian made it up. The Davenport House was built in 1820 by master builder Isaiah Davenport with the work of his enslaved laborers Ned and Davey. The house is situated on Columbia Square at the corner of State and Habersham Streets, and its period of interpretation runs from the year it was first listed on the tax rolls to the time of the builder's death.
By the mid-twentieth century the house was slated for demolition to make way for a parking lot. In 1955 a group of seven women halted the demolition, bought the building, and founded the Historic Savannah Foundation — the act from which Savannah's preservation movement is usually dated. The house opened as a museum in 1963 and is still owned and operated by the foundation. The "Seven Ladies," as they are known, included Anna Colquitt Hunter, who organized the group after the Second World War, and Nola McEvoy Roos, among others.
So the evening sits at an odd and appealing intersection: a museum whose founding act was a rescue, in a city whose identity was largely invented by preservationists who refused to let it be paved over, hosting a show in which professional liars compete to explain the collection. The audience is asked to trust its instincts about evidence — the same instinct the Seven Ladies exercised when they looked at a worn brick house and saw something worth keeping.
A B.S. in History is one night only, and seating is limited by the size of the room rather than by any lack of interest. Anyone who has ever walked a Savannah house tour and wondered which of the guide's details were documented and which were garnish now has a chance to find out, in public, with a vote.