Category Archives: Standup comedy

dark comedy, Netflix, Standup comedy

Adrienne Iapalucci on Netflix: What Does Dark Comedy Tell Us About Society?

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Adrienne Iapalucci
Adrienne Iapalucci The Dark Queen

In her Netflix special The Dark Queen, Adrienne Iapalucci lives up to her moniker. She begins by saying, “I’m not a good person,” and nothing that follows gives us any reason to doubt this. I have no idea if her misanthropic persona is her true self. But if not, she does a great job of making us believe.

Standup comedy is one of the hardest forms of entertainment to pull off. More so now, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s gotten so mainstream that the competition is fierce, and being original is nearly impossible. Even the best of them start to sound like they’re regurgitating the same stuff after you’ve seen them a few times. The other reason is that it’s hard to know what you can joke about nowadays. The amount of backlash comics like Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais get for their un-PC jokes probably discourages others from stepping out of line. That is not remotely the case with Adrienne Iapalucci.

Nothing is off limits it seems, as she jokes about 9/11, Muslims, disliking Puerto Ricans, and victims of school shootings, for starters. Nor does she do it playfully, like Russell Peters who specializes in roasting every ethnic group. She unleashes one inappropriate line after another without any backpedaling.

Unlike left-leaning bluish comics like Sarah Silverman or right-leaning ones like Gervais, Iapalucci seems like an equal opportunity misanthrope. I can appreciate this about her, as she doesn’t push any particular agenda, apart from pure nihilism.

I find her more entertaining than your usual standup routine, but then I’ve never been the genre’s biggest fan. At least you never know what kind of unhinged, inappropriate thing she’ll say next. Her deadpan delivery adds to the effect.

Maybe cancel culture is already moving into the rearview mirror. People are finally realizing the futility of trying to quell opinions (and jokes) that offend them. After all, the controversy attached to Chapelle and Gervais has profited more than harmed them. They’ve turned their most objectionable jokes, regarding trans people, into branding tools. I’m not sure if that makes them funnier -I’d put them both into the large category of comics whose material has gotten overly predictable. But attempts to “cancel” them have surely failed.

I searched for reviews of the Dark Queen show and didn’t see much in the way of outrage or demands to silence her. I’m talking about “professional” reviews now as I didn’t scour the web for every Rotten Tomatoes review. It seems to be sinking in that calling attention to a message you don’t like is only fueling it.

What Does the Dark Queen Say About Us?

I’m a little torn when contemplating the societal implications of someone like Iapalucci, along with Anthony Jeselnik and others whose style of comedy is pure darkness. On the one hand, I wonder if such blatant misanthropy isn’t part of an overall desensitizing, contributing to a world where empathy is an anachronism and utter self-centeredness is the norm.

On the other hand, her utter disregard for limits serves to undermine the overly sensitive tendencies of cancel culture. As Kat Timpf points out in You Can’t Joke About That, society has become unsettlingly humorless in recent years.

In a better, saner world, comics like Adrienne Iapalucci wouldn’t exist, at least in their current form. The conditions and atrocities they chuckle at shouldn’t be part of reality. But given that they are, we have a choice. We can approach them with grim seriousness, allowing only pundits, experts, and leaders to address them. Or we can let the dark comics do their thing, for better and for worse.

Broadly speaking, Adrienne Iapalucci is part of a lineage that includes Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and George Carlin (to name a few). They often cross the boundary into the offensive and tasteless. But they also hold a mirror to society, revealing uncomfortable truths that are present whether we look at them or not.

 

 

Netflix, Standup comedy

Bo Burnham: Inside on Netflix

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Bo Burnham is one of the most innovative stand-up comics regularly featured on Netflix. As he related in this latest special, Bo Burnham: Inside, he just turned 30 (something he celebrates during the special in a strange and sad way), and has positioned himself as a leading spokesperson for the social media generation. His material clearly sets him apart from the old guard of comics, who still tend to fall back on familiar topics such as airports, bad drivers, the differences between men and women, and their kids’ wacky antics. Nothing wrong with covering familiar yet universal material but Burnham inhabits a different universe, one that’s ultra postmodern and self-conscious. He’s always been this way, but Inside takes it all to a new level.

Inside is groundbreaking while testing the patience of his audience. Filmed over many months in 2020, it features Burnham’s endless hours of self-reflection and self-doubt during months of confinement. Of course, it’s doubtful that he literally never left his house as the on-screen scenario implies, but we can grant him this fiction for the sake of the performance. Not everyone is so generous. A reviewer for Slate takes Burnham to task for exaggerating his isolation and mental state, apparently causing some naive viewers to worry about him.


Another way this performance differs from those in the past is the emphasis on musical numbers. While Burnham always includes a few of these, Inside consists mostly of bizarre ditties, such as Welcome to the Internet :

Welcome to the Internet! What would you prefer?
Would you like to fight for civil rights or tweet a racial slur?
Be happy! Be horny! Be bursting with rage!
We’ve got a million different ways to engage.

This may be my favorite part of the special, as he really does manage to encapsulate the absurdity of social media and the internet, which he sums up in the chorus:

Could I interest you in everything all the time?
A little bit of everything all the time?
Apathy’s a tragedy, and boredom is a crime?

Bo Burnham, even with his more typical performances, is big on self-reflection and meta analysis. Here, devoid of an audience and free to play with his video cameras and special effects, he takes these tactics to an extreme. There’s a sequence where he analyzes himself analyzing himself, ad infinitum until he quits in exasperation.

In another skit, which could be seen as a microcosm for the whole show, he critiques his own performance saying “It’s boring, but that’s the point.” That’s the weird thing about Inside; it’s brilliant and thought-provoking, even as it taxes your attention span. I confess I watched it in two sessions and even then it seemed a bit long. Burham is certainly aware of the challenge of presenting a show meant to shine the spotlight on claustrophobia and angst and keep people’s attention. At one point, he sang about not wanting to know if people were paying attention or looking at their phones.

Bo Burnham is an artist who provokes criticism as well as adoration. He’s constantly walking a razor’s edge that borders on narcissism, if not solipsism. His self-awareness on this very tendency only accentuates the point, as when he says “And I think that, ‘Oh, if I’m self-aware about being a douchebag, it’ll somehow make me less of a douchebag.'” By the way, to remember that quote I referred to the transcript of the show, which is available in case anyone actually wants to read it through.

The absurdity of Burnham’s self-absorption is a microcosm of the world that’s emerging all around us. He’s not merely an astute spokesperson for the social media generation, he’s a kind of prototype. Much in the way Quentin Tarantino raised himself on movies, Burnham raised himself on YouTube. If nothing else, he knows this world inside out, creating a weird kind of sensibility that’s both brilliantly creative and morbidly insular.

Bo Burnham is definitely worth watching, as his finger is on the pulse of so much of what’s happening now, for better and for worse. Aside from that, he’s one of the most original comics working today.