In his long, pioneering stand-up career, Cross, who helped build the alt-comedy scene in the 1990s and made some of the most significant Bush-era polemics of the following decade, has always exuded a certain self-regard, if not smugness. His salvos against political opponents or people of faith (he’s an atheist) can operate like an articulate sneer, and a hallmark of his acidic comedy is the muffled anger of someone exhausted by the stupidity surrounding him.
This kind of comedy can be pulled off, but it’s tricky, and can easily fall victim to self-indulgence. With the possible exception of his jokes about fatherhood, which are sharp, unsentimental and more economical than the rest of his digressive 70 minutes, Cross’ labored new special picks easy targets: Grateful Dead cover bands, hippies, Southerners with thick accents, and Twitter memes (although he does have a good self-deprecating joke about his own failures at tweeting).
Wearing ripped jeans and a baseball cap that sometimes casts a shadow over his eyes, Cross moseys back and forth over three rugs that give the stage the feeling of a sparsely decorated room in a bed-and-breakfast. In a time when the direction of comedy specials is increasingly ambitious, the camerawork is rote, using old-fashioned cutaway shots of people laughing, but not always bothering to find different audience members.
His big set pieces are a scatological story about getting a colonic with his wife, the actress Amber Tamblyn, and an inevitable broadside against President Donald Trump. (Even before Trump’s election, Cross had a tour called “Making America Great Again!”)
After explaining how difficult it is to find comedy in mocking the president, he mocks Trump supporters who only recently have become disillusioned and then pivots toward revenge fantasy, a genre of comedy that has in the past been a vehicle for self-parody or virtuosic verbal or imaginative displays. But when Cross describes actor Ron Perlman beating up Trump, he leaves any trace of wit behind. By this point, he’s doing more punching than punch lines.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.