I had the good fortune to see Spalding Gray perform at the Sanders Theatre at Harvard university in 2002, where he performed swimming to cambodia. He was able to spin a story for hours like few others, and is well worth searching out as a master of the craft.
I finally watched Hasan Minaj’s newer stand-up special King’s Jester on Netflix. It’s excellent, but less of a story-telling show than the one in the OP of this thread. Still, a great story that has some really wild changes of pace from funny to serious.
Marc Maron has a new special on HBO that I really enjoyed as well. It’s also more of a traditional standup show, but also tells the story of his girlfriend’s death.
We revisited this one last night after seeing Sarah Silverman live. When we saw The King’s Jester live, we were literally in the back row! :SadCryEmoji: The way it opens in the close up makes his presence so much bolder than when he’s the size of an ant.
I think Hasan Minhaj has only Hannah Gadsby as a peer for this kind of Serious Business™ storytelling. (Apologies to Mike Birbiglia, who we love, but his fare is lighter in tone, and only The New One has similarly singular focus.) They’ve both mastered the art of harnessing traumatic life stories to add real significance to their comedy, and they deftly control the tone of the crowd’s emotions, often turning on a dime as quickly and dramatically as In Bruges. A close runner up on this front would be Tig Notaro’s recent Drawn special on HBO, although she tends to dwell on horrible things with a constant levity, more like Trevor Noah, not a rollercoaster of emotions. What Hasan and Hannah bring to their material is an incredible control of tension and release.
Hannah Gadsby’s most recent set, yet to be released as a special, is closer in narrative form to her landmark Nanette than the lighter meta material of Douglas. Definitely keep an eye out for it if you love stories.
And while Jim Jefferies has markedly more misogyny than I care for—and I say that as an Eminem fan—he deserves a mention in a thread about storytelling standup. Also, shoutout to This Is Not Happening upthread. Go watch all of Roy Wood Jr’s sets if you have Paramount+.
Oh yes! I did watch that on Paramount+. Really excellent.
Jim Jefferies loves telling stories. But they’re usually other people telling him stories since he doesn’t have enough of his own! I do love all his sets so far, including the latest one that popped up on Netflix last week. So funny.
Is it coming to Netflix or should I try to find it wherever?
I thought Rothaniel was really good, and in this style.
An unrelated category that doesn’t really deserve an entire thread: comedy special intro scenes. They have blessedly become less of a thing in our bountiful era of comedy specials, but Eric Andre’s Legalize Everything really stood out in recent years, where he pretends to be a cop doing bong hits with people on the streets of New Orleans. The actual standup set is pretty one note and stupid (as a tone, not a judgment… but maybe also as a judgment, depending on your mood) but the intro is worth watching in isolation.
I don’t know how he flew under our radar this long, but last night we discovered Vir Das’s Landing, and he immediately earned a spot in our top tier. It’s not quite a whole show’s worth of story, as with Hasan Minhaj’s Homecoming King, but there’s a lot of storytelling built around a central theme.
It also highlights how whiny most of the comedians crying about free speech really are, especially when they’re given front page Netflix treatment for it. Boo fucking hoo.
I really liked Jen Kirkman’s latest and maybe last album, “OK, Gen-X”. I don’t think it was accompanied by a video special, but the album is available on some streaming services and for all I know for sale on disc at a record shop.
Check out OK, Gen-X [Explicit] by Jen Kirkman on Amazon Music
https://music.amazon.com/albums/B09THFKGFR?ref=dm_sh_Qux3vnUDTy1biMOi0xiVdN70u
I first became aware of Jen as a comedian from some of the earliest Drunk History shorts, but I’d probably unknowingly heard her as a voice actor on Home Movies and other projects first. In OK, Gen-X, when she starts on a story, she picks up momentum like a brakeless wagon heading down a steep hill. She also spends a lot of time discussing bullshit unfairness she and other people have had to suffer through no fault of their own. I think she generates a lot of empathy towards her as well as laughs.
In this clip, she starts talking about dudes who get creepy without soliciting that creepiness first. First is a story about a flasher, then about a famous comedian who also tried to flash her (and worse).
I think she’s a good storyteller, and can get behind some of her causes (like encouraging comedy clubs to not book abusers).
I’ve been kinda obsessed with Randy Feltface lately (I’m super late to the party on this). This story about buying a bookshelf was my starting point…
Thank you for this recommendation. I watched it this morning. The comedy is not as funny at times (as the other comedians mentioned in this thread so far), but I did enjoy the journey he took us on with his story. But after watching that, I’m kind of dying to know what the heck he said in his “Two Indias” video that landed him in so much hot water. I thought he would tell us over the course of the evening, but no, he doesn’t reveal it at all. Possibly because he doesn’t want to get into more trouble? His actual comment during the special was that he doesn’t repeat his jokes.
Kind of funny that it’s the focus of his whole story, but you never learn what’s at the heart of it. I’m guessing he advocated for a secular India somehow and got in trouble with Mohdi’s Hindu Nationalism sect, or perhaps said something favorable about Muslims? Or perhaps said something favoring liberal values? I guess if I want to find out, I have to go look up the Two Indias video.
Edit: I guess without looking up the actual 7 minute video (which is hard to find), here’s a BBC story about it.
Edit2: Found it. Two Indias.
I would offer that, much like the Hindi jokes (which are translated in the subtitles if you’re that kind of millennial :EmbarrassedLaughEmoji:), the very context of this special isn’t really for you if you weren’t already aware of the Two Indias incident. You can glean a sense of the impact from the context of the jokes, but without prior knowledge, it’s a bit like watching The Daily Show without any knowledge of US politics.
For me, part of the fun is that it put my partner, who speaks Spanish natively, in the same seat I’m usually in, where someone has to fill me in on the other half of the conversation/context. Watching things that aren’t really written for you can be a bit like turning to a movie that’s halfway thru (back when live TV was a thing), but comedy especially offers great insight into how other cultures view the world. Before monogamy & marriage, I loved standup on a first date, because it tends to reveal, even inadvertently, someone’s positive traits and unpleasant biases. When you watch comedy from new places, it has big first date vibes.
Also, thanks for finding the original video! We’ll definitely have to revisit Landing with more context down the line.
Well, I’m from the subcontinent, so I understood the Hindi jokes. :)
I think I tried to watch his first comedy special on Netflix and couldn’t make it very far, as I didn’t think he was very polished, and I didn’t find him funny at all. He’s gotten a LOT better, and I appreciate your recommendation, or I wouldn’t have given it a second try without one.
Ah, well there you go! You probably connected with the material a lot more than we did.
It’s good to know to brace for up & comer delivery in his earlier material. Some comics arrive in popular culture fully formed, and others you can watch grow and become funnier. Mae Martin fits the latter mold, getting better every single time. While not a comedy special, Feel Good is definitely a semi-factual autobiographical story. (I realize I’m just shooting off recommendations in every direction.)
I enjoyed Marlon Wayan’s latest comedy special on HBO called God Loves Me.
It answers the question, “Wait, can Marlon Wayans really do an hour long special on Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars?”. Yes he can. I didn’t like a lot of his actual punch lines, but boy he has a lot of energy and can bring that audience around even when something doesn’t work. Good story-telling.
*With one minor little difference, I suppose, in that he didn’t fucking tell his own stories!
For those who haven’t heard over the past few weeks:
No doubt he has mastered the delivery of storytelling comedy. It’s just that he didn’t so much create narrative coincidences by blending his life stories so much as he made it all up. How much is all? I dunno, but I’m skeptical enough to dismiss the vast majority of it as, at best, him stealing real stories from friends, centering himself instead, or at worst, simply pretending to be the victim of hate crimes that never happened. It verges on Dolezal territory, where she wasn’t satisfied with fighting for a cause—she had to pretend she was directly impacted. By contrast, in Nanette, Hannah Gadsby is in dialogue with the artifice of joke telling and deconstructs how she changed the story of an actual hate crime she experienced to deliver the punchline, which makes the truth of it all the more impactful.
All of this reminded me of how I had originally considered whether Hasan stole Donald Glover’s Home Depot/Toys R Us joke. I figured maybe it was one of those universal experiences, where parents tricked you with the promise of Toys R Us, but now I’m pretty sure he outright stole the joke.
Yeah, I’ve been paying attention over the past few weeks, reading editorials and discussion on various NPR shows. I’m a little disappointed for sure, but at the same time, I don’t think this brings Patriot Act into question (though they did have a questionable incident in the writer’s room on that show). I still wish he’d get the permanent Daily Show gig, but that’s looking pretty unlikely due to this incident.
Roy Wood Jr would be a much better choice as Daily Show host at this point. The whole point of the show is to have someone you can trust cut through the bullshit in the news. Hasan left his trustworthiness behind from the beginning, it turns out.
Great response video by Hasan. He explains things and brings receipts.
That could be cross posted in the apology thread, though while it’s a very effective one it really doesn’t need to be. Meanwhile, the New Yorker does not come out of that looking good.