Nick Offerman will talk about Gordon Lightfoot, marriage and more at comedy stop In Windsor

En route to Scotland by way of Savannah, Georgia, Nick Offerman is talking by phone from an airport about several topics, including his missing mustache and beard.

“Yes, that is the headline, I’m afraid: ‘Whiskerless carnivore comes to town,” says the actor, author, skilled woodworker and all-around decent fellow who’ll be performing live Thursday night at the Colosseum at Caesars Windsor.

Although he usually sports rugged facial hair, Offerman has a new look at the request of his wife, actress Megan Mullaly. “Meghan finally got sick of it after 23 years together and has asked me to be clean-shaven for the time being,” he says genially. “I want to keep this gig as Mr. Mullaly.”

With the actors strike still ongoing, the multitalented Offerman is busy being himself as he crisscrosses the country with his comedy tour. After his stop this week in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit, he is off to Minnesota, California, Maryland and more..

“Join Nick for a night of deliberative talking, mirth and music,” his website invites. “An evening that compels listeners to chuckle while also causing them to honestly countenance the aspects of humanity about which we have to laugh so that we don’t attack one another with shovels.”

So what specifically might such an evening entail? “I’ve got a bunch of material at the moment about Gordon Lightfoot, actually,” says Offerman, mentioning the late Canadian folk music legend beloved by Michiganders for 1976 hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

He continues: “I have some material about my wife and marriage, musing on the fact that comedians, from what I can gather, are supposed to score points by insulting their spouses, which I’m ill-equipped to do because I love and respect my wife. I try to make people laugh using the excessive amount that I love my wife as fuel instead of leaning on misogyny as so many lazily do.”

And he will perform a song inspired by a well-received episode of a recent TV series that he declines to name because “we’re still on strike and we don’t want to cause any income to be steered in the way of the people we’re striking against at the moment.”

Loyal to his wife, loyal to his fellow actors. If anyone can keep an audience engaged with a one-man show, it’s Offerman, he of the sonorous voice, subdued Midwestern charm and a vocabulary that would make a thesaurus green with envy.

Offerman is best known for portraying Ron Swanson on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” the sitcom about small-town local government in Indiana that ran from 2009 to 2015. Swanson became an icon (and a lovable parody) of old-school masculinity for being stern and unemotional on the outside, tender and caring on the inside. The show itself was recently the subject of a book in the TV Milestones series published by Wayne State University Press.

Since that breakout role, Offerman has been sought after for roles in TV shows and limited series like Hulu’s “Pam & Tommy,” Amazon Prime Video’s “A League of Their Own,” Peacock’s “The Resort” and  FX’s “Fargo” and movies like and “Hearts Beat Loud” and “Dicks: The Musical” (opening this week in metro Detroit). He has been nominated for four Emmys, three times as a reality or competition series host for NBC’s “Making It,” which he co-hosts with his “Parks and Recreation” colleague Amy Poehler, and once for guest actor in a drama series for HBO’s “The Last of Us.”

He also has written five bestselling nonfiction books, one of which, “Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside,” came out in paperback this month. In it, he explores the importance of celebrating and conserving the outdoors and shares insights he has gained from treks to national parks and road trips in an Airstream trailer with Mullaly.

Michigan’s forest-laden Upper Peninsula is on Offerman’s list of places to go next. For him, his travels are one way of coping with the anxieties of contemporary life. “I want to remind everyone there’s more to life than Twitter and video games and DoorDash,” he says. “If we can find our feet back on actual healthy terra firma and remember we are participating in the life of that ecosystem, I find great solace in that. It makes me feel much less important. It reminds me that I’m just the gravel in the road.”

If the world were somehow deprived of smartphones and online connectivity, would Offerman be prepared? You bet. “In a lot of ways, I’d throw a party if that were to befall us. I’d call that good luck,” he says when such a scenario is posed. “If Elon (Musk), who has proven to be a pretty lousy player and a sort of, I don’t know, sophomoric brat, if he decides to take his satellites and cry and leave the party …  we would all simply remember that we can grow a garden and raise our own chickens and have a pretty good time with a deck of cards and a book to read.”

Despite all that, Offerman has achieved a level of online fame that few celebrities can boast. Whether he’s giggling, glaring or uttering a classic line of dialogue, Offerman in character as Ron Swanson has become an extremely popular meme. Does he ever send someone a GIF of himself? “Megan and I, sometimes you’ll type into the search whatever you’re looking for, and quite often one or both of us will come up in the first handful of choices and we find that amusing and gratifying,” he says (and there are numerous memes of Mullaly's hilarious portrayal of Karen in another NBC classic, “Will & Grace”).

But he stresses that he would only send those memes to someone who understands he is using them ironically.  In general, he tries not to milk the Ron Swanson character for fun or profit. As he says, “If I were to endorse a brand of charcoal grills, I would happily do that, but I would not want to do that with a mustache and a J.C. Penney shirt tucked into my pleated pants.”

Offerman credits his hometown, the village of Minooka, Illinois (where his father is now mayor), and his family with playing a big role in shaping his life. He says his family members are all schoolteachers, paramedics, librarians, nurses and farmers who lead lives of service and humility.  “They taught me how to work hard … and to be decent to everybody, treat everybody with the same respect, and it’s made for a very happy life.”

Although comedy has become a cornerstone of his career, Offerman started out as a theater actor focused on drama. “People mistakenly think because I came through Chicago that  I was involved in Second City with all the comedy people. But actually, I was trying to do Chekhov and Harold Pinter plays at the Steppenwolf and other regional theaters,” he says. According to him, performing for a live audience onstage has always been “the most rewarding and edifying recompense” in the acting world.

”To make them laugh and to orchestrate the good time — or lack thereof — that they’re having, the evening with which they’ve entrusted me to be their cruise director, it’s my favorite thing of all,” says Offerman.

Although he says he rarely is asked to advise younger generations , the actor does have a message for the would-be influencers of Instagram and TikTok.

“Even before social media, I would say if you want to be on the cover of magazines, then you should double down on superficiality  and get a lot of plastic surgery and butt implants and whatever else. But if you want a rewarding life that makes you happy and can last, that has substance, then find what you love to do and just do it. … Just work as hard as you can.”

Spoken like an actor who has cultivated his craft like a Midwesterner.

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

Nick Offerman Live

8 p.m. Thu.

The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor

377 Riverside Drive E.

Windsor, Ontario

Ages 19 and up; valid ID required

Tickets start at about $69 Canadian and can be purchased at Ticketmaster.ca.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Nick Offerman: 'There's more to life than Twitter and video games'