Why isn’t there a stand-up special equivalent of a beach lecture? I would not recommend sunbathing with a smartphone in hand, but it is certainly possible. As more comics release their first specials developed during the pandemic, a new crop of hours of seasoned acts are ready to complement your summer break.
Nikki Glaser, ‘Good clean dirt’
Wearing thigh-high white boots and a short yellow dress, Nikki Glaser looks like a Bond girl as a stand-up. She doesn’t sell sex so much as teaching, explicitly advocating her own bawdy jokes that fill the niche left by the pathetic work of sex education and porn. She’s long taken on the role of an older sister who equalizes with you, getting closer and closer to a modern comedy update on Dr. Ruth or even old-fashioned women’s magazines, and speaks prescriptively about everything from anal sex to how to get a man.
She is a cunning and skilled joke writer, she knows sex jokes are easily laughed at, so she makes cross-border jokes that look hard to pull off. She throws punchlines with an agile voice that goes from eerily deep to squeaky sweet. She enjoys puns. She jokes about her vagina, saying, “I talk about it so much I don’t call it my genitals. I call it my audience.”
And then there’s this gem about male rationalization for dating younger women. “According to all my 40-year-old friends, there is an epidemic of young people with old souls.” Her hour can feel a little familiar, going over terrain she’s already mastered. On the other hand, there’s her closer, a silent act-out that works as a recall, an innovation, and a big laugh.
Bill Burr, ‘Live at Red Rocks’
Early in the pandemic, Bill Burr went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and went into masks. Rogan ridiculed them as feminine and weak. “You’re so tough with your open nose and throat,” Burr snapped back, with an extra curse, prompting Rogan to turn a medical problem into something about masculinity. “Why does it always get like this?”
This viral moment revealed a rift between the two popular comics. On his podcast, Rogan sells a certain ambitious take on masculinity, while in his stand-up Burr presents a more haunted portrait, giving a haunted voice to male resentments and phobias and expressing their destructiveness. Together with one of the great performances in stand-up comedy, this complexity makes Burr an immersive performer.
His messy, disjointed, often hilarious new special lures the audience at every turn. Like Bruce Banner, Burr is concerned about his mood, but it’s what we’ve come to see. And it could fuel some daring riffs digging on both sides of the culture war, even if it’s more animated and funnier to go after liberals. None of his many colleagues does this either. No cliches about lattes and kale here. He describes a privileged white tweeter signaling and imitating virtue, typing, “My heart breaks on my L-shaped couch.”
Burr repeats himself, and for the second special in a row he speculates that they are running out of men to cancel. His pieces are more intricately organized than his act. He closes with one that isn’t as strong as the previous one. The emotional climax sits uncomfortably in the middle as he chokes on describing the self-loathing of losing his temper in front of his daughter and discovering that he’s making the same mistakes as his father. Leaning forward with a hunch, Burr is unexpectedly emotional, the roar disappearing and the anger turned to tenderness. It’s a series that makes you think there’s a starring role in a great movie in its future.
Fahim Anwar, ‘Hat-trick’
The pun in the smooth, low-concept “Hat Trick,” in which the flamboyantly silly comic wears a retarded cap while performing in three different rooms of the Comedy Store in Hollywood, is the only strenuous part. Otherwise the atmosphere is relaxed, awkward, just another night at the club. You will see introductions, shop talk with comics and part of the ride home. In between are jokes about the most stand-up topics of meat and potato: dating, the pandemic, weed, porn.
There’s something pleasantly comfortable about the style here, a style that Anwar can perform because he’s one of the best physical comedians working in clubs today. His act-outs rival those of Sebastian Maniscalco in grace and outshine them in craziness, whether it be a deer, a dancing emoji, or a Taliban member using hand sanitizer. Any of these work well with the joke. The only risk is that you look a little tense, which is why the underexposed style works so well. If you want to have a laugh but don’t have time to go to the club, this will do.
Cristela Alonzo, ‘Middle Class’
When Cristela Alonzo tells a story, she has a specific, if ambiguous look on her face that somehow creates tension: a laughing kind of wonder that doubles as an annoyance. It’s somewhere between “Can you believe this crap?” and “What a world.” You want to know where she lands.
It’s part of the fun of her first special in five years, the highlights of which are sensitively observed jokes explaining the transition from growing up poor to finding some success. Keep an eye out for a virtuoso story about her first visit to the gynecologist. Her upbeat comedy has a dark side, which can be seen in the subtext on the edges of jokes. “I’ve laughed so much and I’m not even happy,” she says halfway through. “I just had my teeth fixed.” Blinking radiant dental work, she says it was expensive in a spiky way, making that happy look on her face seem like a setup for this payoff.
After saying that he never hears queer women complain about their inability to reach orgasm, Joel Kim Booster abruptly stops a round of applause with a look and a raised hand. “I won’t let this sink in” banger‘ he adds emphatically. For years, Booster — who has a moment between this special and his new Hulu movie, “Fire Island,” has brought an impressive club-comedy energy to altrooms: spiky, aggressive but clear-cut buildings that set up hard punch lines.
His stylish and funny debut is split into three acts, one that leans on his identity as a gay Korean-American comic, the second that doesn’t, and the third that focuses on sex. Throughout, he uses a straight white man in the crowd as a foil to explore issues of relatability and universality. He regularly talks directly into the camera to address the director where to focus the camera, a fun tactic that evokes shows like “Fleabag.”
His formal devices are smart and nicely integrated into the set – even if it turns into an argument that ends up being quite traditional. The strength here is its powerfully seductive presence, one that understands that politics or sex are among more powerful tools for putting down punch line. After discussing the racism of Asian fetishes, he says, “I think it’s doubly racist if you have an Asian fetish and you’re not specifically attracted to me.”