2022 feels like the year that I've been playing catch up with pop culture. Arenas that I don't pay much attention to, like gaming and music, have changed completely while I wasn't looking, and I'm not just getting used to new faces, but realizing that a lot of these new faces aren't new at all, but have been around for ten years and have an entire body of work that I was totally unaware of until now.
Anyway, one of my pop culture blind spots is stand-up comedy. I have a lot of hang-ups when it comes to comedy in general, because I have a pretty low tolerance for vulgarity and scatological humor, and for years comedy films were dominated by frat house and man-child comedy. For most of my teens and twenties, it was the Farrelly brothers, Adam Sandler, the frat pack, "Jackass," and "American Pie." After a while, I admit that I largely gave up on the genre, only showing up for the occasional Judd Apatow movie, or broader action-comedy. The stand-up world was even worse for me, full of aggressive bad boys and garrulous middle-aged men griping about everything, and frankly they all sounded the same after a while. The few prominent female comics like Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer were often uncomfortably sexual. They made me laugh, but they also made me queasy.
So, for the majority of my life, I limited my comedy intake to sitcoms and late night talk shows. "SNL" was about the limit for my tolerance. And so, it took me a very long time to notice that things had started to change a little in stand up. After I got through the Bo Burnham hyperfixation a few months ago, I started watching other comedy specials. At first it was a lot of Tig Notaro, while I had HBO Max. I liked Notaro from her recent acting roles, but didn't know any of her work as a standup comic. She has a super deadpan, super even-keel style that I find very appealing. Her breakthrough came in 2012, with a set called "Live," where she shared her recent cancer diagnosis and a string of other terrible things that had happened to her with a rapt audience. There's an excellent Netflix documentary, "Tig," that uses the set as a framing device and examines this period in her life.
And then I found Hannah Gadsby. Pretty much any discussion of recent comedy specials will bring up "Nanette," the 2018 special where Gadsby discusses her painful experiences as someone LGBT in Australia. It slowly morphs from traditional setups and jokes to fiery activist cri de coeur, deconstructing and critiquing the format of standup comedy in the process. Ultimately, she concludes that being a comedian and being who she is are sometimes in fundamental conflict. "Nanette" is moving and it's challenging, and it's not particularly funny, but the standup context is absolutely vital to how it plays. For pure entertainment value, I like Gadsby's most recent special, "Douglas," even better, which shows that she is perfectly capable of putting together a hilarious show based on material totally unrelated to her activism. Her background is as an art historian, and I love the lecture-style material in her set, where she takes pot-shots at the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Louis CK.
I don't know why it is that I have been connecting to white LGBT comics lately, as opposed to comics who look more like me - Ali Wong and Margaret Cho, for instance. I think it's because Notaro and Gadsby aren't trying so hard to be transgressive. They talk about themselves, and how they perceive the world, and trying to get through tough times as best they can, with brutal honesty. Somehow, because they're so good at expressing who they are onstage without fear, that's plenty transgressive in and of itself. I love Ali Wong to bits, but her acts are so relentless and so aggressive that I can't take much of it at once. And I've never been as emotionally invested in her acts as I have watching Tig Notaro just talk casually about having a bad day. It's 2022, and we've all been having a bad day.
Let me be clear that the Bill Burrs and the Chris Rocks are all well and good, and I admire what they do, but it's been nice to discover that there are more laid back, more empathetic comedians that are out there providing an alternative - comedians who are more my tempo, and more my speed. I still tread very carefully in these spaces, but I'm also happy to be finally catching up on something I didn't even know I had missed.
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