The Boston Globe
Rob Potylo’s rowdy alter ego has amassed a huge online following by trolling Trump supporters.
SOMERVILLE — It’s like AC/DC always said: “It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll.”
The April sun was finally breaking through, but Rob Potylo had been in a basement recording studio for the better part of a week. As a sound engineer fiddled with vocal tracks, Potylo, who’s risen to internet fame as his rowdy alter ego, Robby Roadsteamer, bopped his head to “Red MAGA Beret,” his cheeky take on the old Prince anthem.
The studio’s laid-back vibe — low-slung couches, dim lighting — was a world away from the Trump rallies and anti-ICE protests where he usually performs as Roadsteamer, accruing tens of millions of online views and notching several arrests.
But the quiet helped. Potylo was here to distill his acidic brand of political theater into something more lasting than a social media post: An album, maybe even a limited release vinyl, with photos from his arrests as cover art.
“I want to do it like a Jimi Hendrix estate release,” said Potylo, who wore a basketball jersey with the name “bias” on the back.
Sporting wraparound sunglasses, a bandana on his head, and a growing catalog of raucous songs, Potylo has spent the past quarter century as an artist in search of an audience. He’s chased fame locally as a comedian, a radio personality, and the frontman for a satiric metal band. He’s produced a low-budget web series, a slew of albums, and landed slots on a few nationally-televised talent shows.
For the most part, though, Potylo has worked the margins, living hand to mouth while nursing a break-out dream that seemed to dim by the year. Roadsteamer, an absurdist mash-up of pro wrestling swagger and Masshole rage, seemed increasingly out of step with the earnest liberalism of the past decade, an artist who’d missed his shot.
Then came the vibe shift. Now, amid the alpha male peacocking and personal beefs of Trump 2.0, Potylo is having a moment. His schtick — punking MAGA faithful then posting the chaotic videos online — has transformed Roadsteamer into a sort of extremely online folk hero for our divided digital age.
“We have to remember that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame,” Potylo, 49, said recently over lunch. “We do not fight absurdity with valor. We fight it with more absurdity.”
As Roadsteamer, Potylo has crashed Trump rallies and Proud Boy gatherings. He’s trolled Marjorie Taylor Greene and chased down Rudy Giuliani. More recently, he became a fixture at anti-ICE protests across the country, delivering gravelly-voiced, parodic lyrics, like: “Hey Mr. Tangerine Man, get rid of brown people for me.”
His rollicking social media feeds show Roadsteamer humping the pavement while dressed as a giraffe. He’s offered sea monkey starter kits to pro-life activists, promising they can “grow a useless clump of cells” on their own. He’s twerked in a Tesla showroom, crashed a MAGA boat rally, and been chased off a Saugus overpass by a mustachioed Trump supporter who menacingly described his biceps as “26-inch pythons.”
“Let’s storm Applebees!” Roadsteamer likes to yawp at glowering Trump backers. “No political violence!”
The internet can’t get enough. Many of Potylo’s videos have more than a million views. He’s been interviewed by Rolling Stone, he’s been invited to work with activist groups, and CNN recently featured him in a special on art and activism.
Rick Jenkins, founder of the Comedy Studio in Harvard Square, said Roadsteamer had an outsized voice when he began booking Potylo in the 2000s. It’s the political focus that’s new.
“That’s the major evolution,” said Jenkins. “He’s always had the voice, but now he has something to say.”
Still, Potylo’s not sure how long he can sustain the gig. The work can be dangerous. He’s been manhandled by authorities, threatened by Trump supporters, and detained three times at anti-ICE protests over the past six months.
He also has advanced-stage polycystic kidney disease, a genetic condition that causes his kidneys to swell. “It’s like carrying twins,” he said, and went on to drain a Shirley Temple and two orange sodas to “force function.”
The disease, which may one day require a kidney transplant, can cause debilitating cramps, and Potylo said he often must rest for several days after a performance.
But, he added, “my body doesn’t hurt when I’m out there.”
“The high of nailing one of these videos, it’s tantric,” he said. “I’m just like, ‘Man, I’m untouchable.’”
In some sense, Potylo’s been chasing that high since the early 2000s, when he debuted the Roadsteamer character as front man for his comic metal band, The Sweatpant Boners. The exposure earned him an on-air gig at WBCN, and he became an acquired taste at music venues and comedy clubs around town. Audiences either loved him or hated him — and quite a few really hated him. Some open mic organizers banned him from their stages.
“Robby always came so far out of left field,” said Jenkins, who left the Comedy Studio in 2024. He recalled that Roadsteamer’s antics — tossing food against the wall, berating the audience — left some patrons aghast and the stage in shambles. Jenkins learned to book Roadsteamer last. “I got more complaints and more fan input about Robby than anybody else.”
Rob Crean, who used to run open mic nights at the Middle East, said Roadsteamer was “like nothing that I’d ever seen — anarchic and chaotic, really fun, and a little bit scary.” But Potylo could sometimes take it too far, he said, recalling the comedian once compared a heavyset woman in the audience to a young Chris Farley.
That’s “too hurtful for someone that’s paid to see your show,” said Crean. “He’s a complicated guy. I have a lot of love for him, but I also don’t want him at my open mic.”
Potylo himself was beginning to chafe under the outsized Roadsteamer persona, a feeling he said intensified after he took LSD for the first time in 2006.
“It was a complete revelation,” said Potylo, whose heavily tattooed arms are an inky homage to Route 1, replete with landmarks like the orange dinosaur and the Kowloon sign. “I’m like: You can still be you. You don’t have to just hide behind this character.”
As a bullied art kid growing up in Danvers, Potylo had created Roadsteamer as a sort of artistic armor, fortified with pro-wrestling machismo and elements of his late father, a thorny Vietnam veteran he described as “the type of guy that would cheer on the Yankees to make his wife cry.”
In the afterglow of that acid trip, Potylo decided to make a go of it without the Roadsteamer persona. He would appear as himself, performing songs from the heart.
The results were disastrous.
“I used to be able to sell out the Middle East downstairs,” Potylo said. “I couldn’t bring 20 people when I started doing my acoustic, serious songs.”
Before long, he lost the BCN gig, too. Potylo was determined to make it in his own right, but it was hard to outrun Roadsteamer. In 2009, he began enlisting hundreds of Boston-area performers to appear in “Quiet Desperation,” his self-produced mockumentary web series about trying (and failing) to succeed as an artist in Boston.
One of the show’s many performers was Vermin Supreme, a perennial activist and presidential candidate best known for campaigning with a boot on his head and his promise of a free pony for every American.
Supreme spotted a kindred spirit. He knew immediately that Potylo “would be a natural out in riot world,” his term for the tumultuous performance space that can emerge during protests. “He had the chops, the improv skills, and the bravery.”
Supreme, who lives on the North Shore,invited Potylo to join him at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in North Carolina. It was Potylo’s first real taste of political performance art, and over the next decade he appeared as Supreme’s sidekick on a series of tours and political events.
But Potylo still harbored more traditional ambitions. He moved to Los Angeles in 2015 to work on a documentary about Joanie Laurer, the professional wrestler known as Chyna. He also tried to make it as an actor, picking up work as a film extra and appearing on an episode of “The Gong Show.”
None of it went particularly well. Laurer died in 2016, and Potylo, at perhaps his lowest point, ended up living in an unfurnished room in Pasadena while trying to help finish the film, which was released in 2021.
He finally returned to Boston in 2023, to find a chilly reception from some in the comedy scene.
“He’s been banned from a bunch of open mics,” Crean said. “He did some aggressive stuff towards young ladies from the stage that crossed the line.”
Potylo said he wouldn’t make some of those jokes now “in such a brutal fashion.”But he added that Roadsteamer is, ultimately, just an act.
Should we put “the actor that played Archie Bunker up on a cross because he played a misogynistic Masshole?” he asked.
But Potylo’s big breakthrough came that fall, when he accompanied Supreme to New Hampshire the day Trump filed to be on the state’s presidential primary ballot.
Unlike previous outings, Potylo didn’t go as Supreme’s sidekick. This time he went as Robby Roadsteamer.
“It was game over,” Potylo recalled. “I got three videos that day with over a million views, and I’m like, ‘What the [expletive] am I doing?’” He decided to take his act solo, heading to a series pro-Trump demonstrations.
Potylo kept it local to Greater Boston at first, trolling MAGA rallies on suburban bridges and in strip mall parking lots while dressed in a furry vest and a floppy headdress, like a bootleg QAnon Shaman.
In one early video from Wakefield, Potylo was twerking in cheetah-print leggings and a thong.
“Why are you doing that,” asked a woman holding a Trump flag. “You look like a fool.”
“What are you doing?” he shot back. “You got a flag. You’re screaming for a felon. We’re all doing ridiculous [expletive] today.”
But the real turning point came in the late summer of 2024, when Roadsteamer crashed two local appearances by wrestling legend and Trump supporter Hulk Hogan.
“What are they gonna do when we drop the big boot on trans?” Roadsteamer asked a clearly confused Hogan. “Does that work for you, brother?”
He followed that by crashing a press conference Steve Bannon gave following his release from prison on contempt of Congress charges.
“When’s the next insurrection?” Roadsteamer asked from the audience. “And can we storm the Burger King after this?”
The stunt earned him an awkward smile from Bannon, a security escort out of the room, and some 10 million views across platforms.
“That blows me up beyond just the hive world,” Potylo recalled. He was starting to make real money from his social media accounts, and by the spring of 2025 he decided: “Let’s treat this like it’s rock ‘n roll. So I buy a ticket to LA in June, and I start hitting places around the country.”
In the months since, Potylo has been on a national tour of one, traveling to protests in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Portland, and Minneapolis. He says his social media presence has grown to about 1.1 million followers across platforms.
Perhaps best of all: Potylo, who’s spent much of his adult life couch surfing or living in sparse quarters with roommates, could finally afford a place of his own, a one-bedroom apartment in Belmont, though he saved some money on the furniture.
“I decked it out with the best from Bob’s,” he said. “I’m living the dream.”
After a quarter century of struggle, Potylo has found an audience, and maybe even his voice.
“Joy and art have to be part of protest,” said Russell Ellis, a fellow activist who’s better known by his online handle, Jolly Good Ginger. “There’s this powerful juxtaposition of armed, masked [ICE agents], who are wearing full tactical gear and AR-15s, and then a guy in a giraffe costume opposite of them with thong underwear.”
That contrast was on full display when authorities detained Potylo in Portland last October, and then again in Minneapolis. In January, officers with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office arrested Potylo while he sung a satiric version of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” during an anti-ICE protest and held him for 27 hours.
The experience was grueling on his body, and laid Potylo out for more than a week.
“I couldn’t function. I couldn’t think straight,” he said. “It’s hard to maintain a life like that.”
Potylo, who has amassed a legal fund of nearly $200,000 through multiple GoFundMe drives, plans to sue over all three detentions. But his legal issues, along with the physical toll his performances take on him, have Potylo thinking twice about his future.
“I’m not 24,” he said. “I’m gonna have a heart attack out there.”
Then again, the rush of the protests, to say nothing of the dopamine hit of a good video, may be too much to give up. The detentions, hard as they are, just take it to the next level.
“It feels like you’re breaking through to this new part of the art form,” he said. “It’s like lighting the guitar on fire.”
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