3 Sharp Stand-Up Specials to Keep You Entertained This Holiday Weekend
Immersed in atmospheric lighting beneath three large chandeliers, comedian Hannah Einbinder delivers her jokes the way models strike poses: with dramatic pauses and flirtatious antics, always alert to the camera. While the fictional comedy writer she plays in “Hacks” feels palpably real, her stand-up persona sparkles with artificiality.
Einbinder tells us a lot about herself in “Everything Must Go,” her debut special (she’s bisexual, has ADHD, and is an ex-cheerleader), but her droll comedy doesn’t feel confessional. Nor is it primarily about intent and jokes. Her strange show comes across as a parody of Hollywood glamour and overconfidence. Directed by Sandy Honig with a visual vocabulary that’s as much David Lynch as a special, the hour alternates between tight close-ups and a long shot that makes the comedian look like the inhabitant of a dollhouse. You hear the audience but don’t see it as anything other than an undifferentiated mass. Einbinder breaks the fourth wall constantly, at one point looking away from the crowd, at the camera, and pulling a face as if to say directly to us, “Can you believe what’s happening?” Her idea of a transition from one joke to the next is to ask, “Would you believe That Did it remind me of something completely different?”
There’s a self-satisfaction to this knowing style that will alienate those looking for quick, familiar laughs. And her dramatic pauses can take on the rigid pace of a movie trailer. But there’s something thrilling about a young performer operating at her own comedic frequency. While some of the bits require her charisma to deliver, she does have a few standout jokes, including one that presents humanity as a toxic husband and climate change as planet Earth “recognizing its worth and filing for divorce.”
Einbinder has a shapeshifter’s talent for voices, illustrating the climate change metaphor in the film “My Cousin Vinny”; her impression of Marisa Tomei shows her acting range. Like the entire special, the humor comes from how unexpected it is. There’s nothing dark about her delivery until the end, when the curtains close and Einbinder, standing alone backstage, collapses as the credits roll.
After three terrific specials in three years (and a fourth on the way), Raanan Hershberg is one of the funniest, most prolific comedians working today. His dyspeptic delivery has the cadence of Gilbert Gottfried, but his joke writing evokes the craft of older comedians. In a nice modern update on the old Groucho Marx line about never wanting to be part of any club that would take him for a member, Hershberg says in his new hour, “Brave,” “If someone’s into me, I take that as a red flag.”
Why don’t more people like Hershberg? He’s self-published all of his specials and has a strong reputation in comedy circles, but he’s yet to break through. For one thing, he doesn’t have a gimmick. He doesn’t engage in attention-grabbing politics. And when he does string his jokes together into a coherent theme, it’s a pretty banal skepticism of dogmatic thinking of all kinds. But his jokes are trickier than they seem, more interesting in their form than in their content.
He comes across as hard and loud, but he can also be subtle and ironic. He has a knack for picking at small, familiar things and making you see them in new ways, like his riff on how the justice system punishes criminals by sentencing them to community service. After inviting us to think about that term, he concludes that you know we’re a “selfish country when the punishment for a crime is being a good person.” His joke about fear-mongering about trans people using bathrooms that match their identity is the best I’ve heard on the subject. He then goes on to say that concerns about transphobia are the reason he would never appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast — unless, of course, he was asked.
Hershberg repeatedly works himself up into a confused rage, specializing in two kinds of tirades: one in which he confidently takes something apart and another in which his passion itself becomes the butt of the joke. In the final 10 minutes, he deftly weaves both strategies into an intricate joke. On the surface, it’s a case against astrology. But his running commentary on the joke turns it into something formally adventurous that plays on the stand-up convention of telling the audience that what they’re about to hear is true. Most comedians end their sets with broad jokes, perhaps something sexual or a big act-out. But Hershberg tries a more creative callback, one that makes a sharp point about art while delivering laughs in the hazy space between truth and fiction.
Mo Welch, ‘Dad Jokes’
a nice shot opens this debut hour with comedian Mo Welch standing in the middle of a country road with no one in sight. Under a vast blue sky with a barn in the distance, she tries out some crowd work to the sounds of wind and insects. Then Welch tells a dark joke, explaining that the last time she saw her father, they were playing hide-and-seek. “That was 20 years ago,” she says. “So he must have found a really good place to hide.”
What follows is a hybrid of documentary and stand-up special, with Welch telling jokes for an audience (a more radical special would remain on the road) and talking about her father, who cheated on her mother, spent time in prison and remains a mystery to her. Dad jokes, as well as jokes about Dad, are a regular part of Welch’s career, adding an extra layer of soul-searching to this project.
It’s a quest to mend a broken relationship, but more specifically, to understand her own history. Along the way, she visits her mother and makes some dark jokes about her family, while the tension mounts as she gets closer to meeting him. Welch has a charming screen presence, with a shocking lightness about him. Her father, stone-faced and gray-haired, couldn’t be more different. Their scene together is a sharp contrast to the recent confrontation comedian Jerrod Carmichael had with his stoic father on his reality show.
While Carmichael seems in control, Welch presents something more absurd, unstable, and anticlimactic. She avoids conflict and even evades it. There is power in the unspoken. The jokes in their encounter are funny, but also brutal. The last image we see is of Welch riding with her father on his motorcycle. It’s a beautiful shot, but you don’t get the sense that they’re going anywhere.
