Jason Zinoman

The most unsettling clown I saw this year was not the Joker or Pennywise, but a well-meaning jerk named Nate.

Played by Natalie Palamides in drag, with hair drawn on her exposed chest, Nate rode a small motorcycle onto the Bell House stage in New York City in June, stopping to chug beers, swing an ax, and wrestle and grope audience members — with permission. This was a prelude to the really confrontational part, a solo dramatization of a date, an acrobatic act of puppetry with a mannequin, that ends with a question for the crowd: Was this rape?

“Nate,” a hit at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, was a startlingly unusual creation — a clown show about consent that managed to be funny and ferocious, broad and nuanced, a prank on the audience that felt like a tickle. Though the show was recently filmed for a comedy special produced by Amy Poehler, it’s hard to imagine it will capture the daredevil energy in the room. I would have called it singular until last weekend, when I saw Courtney Pauroso’s “Gutterplum,” another anarchic show from Los Angeles, which was filled with spilled fluids and elegantly crass physical humor.

Pauroso and Palamides share a director (Phil Burgers, who goes by the name Dr. Brown) and a certain raucous aesthetic that proves that modern clowning can be not only scary and funny, but also disarmingly sexual. Call them carnal clowns.

“Gutterplum,” which runs for two more performances Saturday at Union Hall in Brooklyn, can seem like a companion piece to “Nate,” which sends up unhinged femininity instead of toxic masculinity. This show has a linear narrative that follows the sweep of the life of one woman, Dale Ravioli, from childhood to old age. But the story is not what you are going to be talking about afterward. It’s the aggressively bizarre collection of moments, the flights of ridiculousness that you can’t believe you are seeing.

In no other show this year will you see an elderly character wearing a wig of pubic hair at her crotch while playing air guitar or a younger one spider-walking topless while growling demonically. Did I mention this freakout of a performance also happens to be a tender romance?

Early on in “Gutterplum,” whose title is never explained, Pauroso invites a man from the audience to play kick the can. This begins a series of vignettes tracing a relationship and the awakening of a sexual life in a few inventive gestures. There’s a scene portraying puberty that resembles nothing so much as the transformation of a person into a werewolf, but the monster this time is a party girl who parrots sentences like “I actually like the taste of beer” and “Don’t tell my dad.”

And yet, Pauroso doesn’t sneer at its central character. The comedy comes from the juxtaposition of the outrageous and vulgar physicality with jarring notes of sentimentality. After doing a strip tease, which skewers objectification while taking part in it, Pauroso sings a heartfelt ballad.

At the start of the show, she picks up a blue exercise ball and gently tosses it into the audience; after encouraging a patron to throw it back, it hits her in the face, catapulting her backward. She plays this game again with similar results. But the third time the audience member tosses it back, her blank-eyed innocence falls and she grabs it, fakes throwing it back and says pointedly: “You think I can’t catch a ball?”

Over the next hour, Ravioli loses her virginity, falls in love, has an abortion, grows old, suffers loss and faces death. But the structure of the episodes follows the same pattern as that game of catch, inviting the audience to play, then shocking us with a trick. While she is always a step ahead, Pauroso pretends otherwise. Both she and Palamides are smart acts working hard to appear stupid.

The same week that “Gutterplum” had its New York premiere, Zach Zucker, another young Los Angeles modern clown, put on his own pratfalling, beer-swilling clown performance in the character of Jack Tucker, the world’s worst stand-up. Pumping his fists in the air, he strutted onstage, his fly undone, falling on his face, assisted by an intricate sound design that jacked up the energy. He is a familiar type: The comic with infinite confidence and no skill.

These are all shows about fools out of their depth. While Zucker and Pauroso essentially create character sketches, Palamides, who has a background in theater — first performing the character of Nate with the superb Philadelphia experimental troupe Pig Iron — builds a more layered world around her buffoons, her comic bits pushing the action not toward a point so much as a thorny question.

In “Nate,” she opens up a conversation about sexual assault in the #MeToo era, broaching the issue directly but also through the form of interactive theater itself.

Every time a clown asks you to sniff the flower in his lapel then squirts water in your face, the laugh rests on a minor humiliation. Comedy often depends on ethically slippery manipulation, misleading setups and disorienting punch lines. Palamides makes the coercion in audience participation more explicit, forcing some uncomfortable questions.

Along with “Nate” this summer, she presented another solo show, “Laid,” which began with her hatching out of a giant foam egg, only to then pull an egg out of her dress, crack it open and then, with a hot plate nearby, face a decision: Should I eat or raise it?

Over and over, she replays this scene, sometimes emphasizing absurdity, other times pathos. It’s a show about the anxiety of parenthood in which a fragile woman gets a huge amount of egg on her face. But it’s also about a mother murdering her children. Keeping both options alive and telegraphed to the audience with a minimum of language is a hell of a juggling act.

While these shows deal with dark subject matter, they somehow maintain a sunny optimism, perhaps a response to the stereotype of the sad clown, but just as likely, a reflection of personal taste.

The new vaudevillians, like Bill Irwin and David Shiner who emerged in the 1980s and ’90s, aimed to reinvigorate clowning by deconstructing or winking at classic tropes. These young performers seem less tethered to the legacy of bowler hats and giant shoes.

As artists searching for originality often are, they borrow from a variety of sources, including burlesque, circus, experimental theater and stand-up. And perhaps what makes them seem so thrillingly unpredictable is that they don’t seem to be reacting against a tradition as struggling to forge their own.

This article originally appeared in

Make Way for the Carnal Clowns of Stand-Up

(On Comedy)

TORONTO — In the middle of shooting a scene from the new biopic “Dolemite Is My Name,” Eddie Murphy went off script. Playing comic Rudy Ray Moore onstage, he needled a member of the audience, then asked where he came from. The man, an extra, improvised: “Your mama’s house!”

Everyone on set roared (“Awwwww!”) and Murphy lit up, in character, unleashing insults, telling the guy he was the type “who would fart in the tub and turn around and bite the bubbles.”

In an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie premiered to glowing reviews this month, Murphy, 58, described the scene, acting out all the parts, sounding delighted. “It was a line I had heard Rudy say,” he explained about the insult, “but still, it felt like a real moment with a heckler.”

Next to him was the film’s director, Craig Brewer, who added that after the scene had ended and the star had left for a costume change, he looked around at his cast and marveled: “Do you know what we just saw?” Brewer paused, sounding more fan than collaborator. “We couldn’t believe it. We just saw it.”

What they saw was something that has been sorely missing from popular culture for more than three decades: Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest people to ever tell jokes into a microphone, doing stand-up. Over the years, Murphy has teased fans with talk of a comeback, but this time, inspired by “Dolemite,” he appears to mean it. He signed a deal with Netflix to put out a new special next year, and has a theater tour lined up, which means he could be in clubs working out jokes soon.

“I didn’t want to just pop back up,” he said. “I wanted a funny movie to remind them that they liked me. This movie turned out so strong that I figured this is a great way to come back.”

His return to stand-up will be part of a broader reboot of the decade that made Murphy a star. In December, two months after the Oct. 4 theatrical premiere of “Dolemite” (it moves to Netflix Oct. 25), he’s hosting “Saturday Night Live,” for the first time since 1984 (before that he was a cast member for four years). And 30 years later, Murphy is working on a sequel, also directed by Brewer, to his 1988 hit “Coming to America” with the original characters. “I’m kind of looking at this period as a bookend,” Murphy said. “I hadn’t been back to ‘SNL.’ Let’s fix that. Let’s do stand-up again. That way, when I finally just sit on the couch, then it’s good.”

Referring to his most recent movie, a sober, uplifting drama from 2016, he added. “I don’t want to sit on the couch after ‘Mr. Church.’”

It’s hard to overstate how big an impact Eddie Murphy made in the 1980s. In two specials, “Delirious” and “Raw,” performed, famously, in leather suits, he became the most influential stand-up of his generation. Besides entering the discussion of who is the greatest cast member in the history of “Saturday Night Live” and injecting a cutting racial consciousness into a show that lacked it, his dynamic presence arguably saved “SNL” from cancellation when it was struggling after the original stars left.

In the meantime, he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world after a string of blockbuster comedies (“48 Hrs.,” “Trading Places,” “Beverly Hills Cop”) fueled by his singular charisma. Replace Murphy with anyone else in “Beverly Hills Cop,” the third-highest-grossing comedy of all time, and it’s probably a flop.

But even these credits don’t entirely capture his singular success. It’s difficult for a comic to be funny and sexy or funny and sweetly innocent, but nearly impossible to pull off this trick at the same time, as he did in seminal bits like the one about kids excited over the ice cream truck. No one killed like Murphy did in the 1980s. When I saw “Raw” in Washington as a teenager, the audience laughed so loudly that the people running the theater actually turned the movie off and asked us to be quieter.

It’s an intimidating legacy to live up to, particularly when you feel a bit alienated from the cackling, strutting star who defined a certain kind of wiseguy cool. For when Murphy is flipping channels on television and stumbles across “Raw,” he cringes. The cocky jokes about women and relationships remind him, he said, of a breakup he was going through back then. “I was a young guy processing a broken heart, you know, kind of an asshole,” he said.

Wearing a plush zip-up jacket with sunglasses hanging off the front, Murphy leaned back and shifted from a cool monotone to a comic impression of himself watching “Raw” as a snooty prude. “That’s a bit much, my goodness,” he said, cracking up, then shifting again, taking his voice down an octave to register a hint of moral disapproval: “My word.”

With alacrity he returned to the measured voice of Eddie Murphy, unflappable superstar, recognizing that what is a portrait of a place and time for him means something altogether different to everyone else. “It’s forever,” he said quietly in what might be considered a verbal shrug.

Murphy describes himself now as a completely different person than he was back then, but spending an hour with him argues otherwise. He remains blindingly quick on his feet and an ingenious, hilarious mimic who can summon a big top of characters in seconds. With a soft voice and laid-back manner, he can seem remote, until he switches into a character, which he does often; raising his volume and intensity, he commits, firmly in the moment.

As is clear from his performance in “Dolemite,” one of his finest, Murphy’s star power is undiminished. But there’s a new tenderness and mature vulnerability in this role that also comes out in person. Asked how his sense of humor has changed, he conceded: “I’m mushier than I used to be.”

His new movie provides some evidence. Murphy — who came up with the idea, and the title, for the blaxploitation parody “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” which Keenen Ivory Wayans eventually directed in 1988 — takes a much warmer, more reverent approach to Rudy Ray Moore, a star of the blaxploitation era. “Ed Wood,” Tim Burton’s affectionate 1994 portrait of a B-movie auteur, was an inspiration. (They even hired the same screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski).

Murphy saw Moore’s 1975 cult hit, “Dolemite,” for the first time as a teenager, introduced to Moore’s comedy by his older brother Charlie (who died in 2017 and to whom the new biopic is dedicated). The younger Murphy was impressed by its audaciousness even though he recognized its artistic flaws. Murphy’s taste has always leaned toward the mainstream, and his heroes were Richard Pryor, Elvis and Bruce Lee. As a kid, he felt distraught when he was banished from watching “West Side Story” on TV with his family as punishment for misbehaving, he recalled, and imitated himself in tears listening to “I Feel Pretty” through the wall.

Yet he said he had always had a soft spot for blaxploitation stars because it was so rare to find African Americans on screen. “Flip Wilson was really the first black person we saw in the mainstream, and then Hollywood started making movies with us,” he said. “But they didn’t spend a lot of money on them, so they’re not these high-quality pictures. But black people, ourselves, we were just excited to see ourselves. We never felt like they were exploitation.”

While Murphy became a star as a teenager, Moore, in sharp contrast, was a struggling, overweight comic who needed to go outside the industry to find success, which didn’t come until middle age.

Dolemite was his rhyming alter ego, sometimes called the godfather of rap, who specialized in kung fu and oddball put-downs. (“You insecure, no-business, rat-soup-eating” so-and-so went one insult.)

His movies were filled with laughable mistakes (a boom mic enters the frame), and when he knocked out a bad guy with a kick, his leg barely got off the ground. This made “Dolemite” a perfect midnight movie, beloved by stoned college kids for generations.

Murphy views Moore as satirizing blaxploitation heroes in movies like “Superfly” and “Shaft,” not trying to be like them. “I’ve had this conversation with comedians all the time,” he said. “They’re laughing at him, saying: ‘Look how bad he is. He doesn’t realize how bad this is.’ I’m like: ‘No, no, he knows this is funny.’”

Once Murphy decided to return to stand-up, he also settled on hosting “Saturday Night Live.” He had stayed away from it for decades, upset over some jokes made at his expense, including one by David Spade, although he seems no longer bothered by it. He returned for the 40th anniversary special in a brief appearance without telling jokes. This time it should be different. “I have to do Buckwheat,” he said, also mentioning Gumby and his Mister Rogers parody, Mr. Robinson, his best-known characters from that era.

The show has recently become the subject of controversy for hiring and then firing a cast member, Shane Gillis, after recordings of him making racist remarks on a podcast surfaced. Murphy, who has never owned a computer and describes himself “as close as you can get to a technophobe,” said he wasn’t concerned about new scrutiny of his comedy. He has been criticized for jokes on his specials that talked about fear of contracting AIDS from kissing gay men and used homophobic slurs; in the past, he cited such backlash as the reason he stopped doing stand-up.

He has also said stand-up stopped being fun. But now he regrets giving it up and once he returns, he said, he will never abandon it again.

“I went through all that stuff, so this is not scary,” he said about controversies over jokes. He pointed out that he had been picketed and had also apologized for material about AIDS that he now calls “ignorant” before adding, on the subject of anxiety by comics today: “All this stuff they are talking about: ‘Hey, welcome to the club.’”

Murphy said he never stopped generating material and has even been feeding ideas for jokes into a tape recorder for three years. He speculated that he had probably 15 to 20 minutes of material already but thought that he would need eight months to develop an hour and a half. Expect some bits about parenting from the man who has eight children.

“I now have a whole lifetime of experiences to draw upon. There was a time when I was at the center of everything, what I was doing, and how funny I was and how popular,” he said. “I’m not at the center. Now my kids are and everything revolves around them.”

One thing you can be sure of about his stand-up: Don’t expect him to wear leather again. “Nah, man, you can’t wear a leather suit at 58,” he said.

Jumping in, Brewer added that leather makes you sweat, to which Murphy said that he was an exception. “If you watched ‘Raw’ or ‘Delirious,’” he said, in the voice of a punctilious fact-checker, “I don’t sweat.”

Eddie Murphy still has swagger, that confidence which, as it happens, is a major theme of “Dolemite.”

“That’s his greatest talent and the one that’s hardest to nail,” Murphy said of Moore’s faith in himself.

Asked if his confidence ever flags when he thinks about returning to the stage, Murphy shifted his gaze to make direct eye contact, saying he’s as confident as he has ever been.

“I’m still Eddie,” he added. “The way I look at things and paint pictures with words, I’m still that guy. I’m still going to be what I was. And then some.”

Eddie Murphy Is Bringing Eddie Murphy Back

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Earlier this summer, comic Sebastian Maniscalco received a note from his father that expressed pride in his son’s achievements but also encouraged him to double down on writing more jokes.

“I appreciated the letter,” Maniscalco said with a sigh, sitting in a small, empty room at the Comedy Store. “But I’m 46 and he’s still on me. I called my sister and said, ‘This card is something you send someone who is struggling.’ ” Then he flashed a tight smile.

In January, Maniscalco sold out Madison Square Garden four times in two days; less than a year earlier, he sold out five shows at Radio City Music Hall. He made the Forbes list of the top 10 highest-earning comics three years in a row, and after appearing in the Oscar-winning “Green Book” last year, he plays gangster Joe Gallo in the most anticipated movie of the fall, Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.”

Maniscalco is far from struggling. He might even be the hottest comic in America right now. So why is it entirely possible you have never heard of him?

Partly it’s because he built his huge fan base gradually and under the pop-culture radar — not through a splashy movie vehicle or a television breakout, but via a hustling touring schedule and two decades of nightly performances. He isn’t catnip for the press, since he steers clear of the zeitgeist in his act, preferring to stick to evergreen subjects like his tense but affectionate relationship with his father, whom he regularly portrays, with dramatic hunch and gesticulations, as a classic Sicilian immigrant patriarch, old school, driven by a ferocious work ethic, casting a long shadow.

Maniscalco says his father’s notes can cause a little friction, but also motivate him, which may help explain his latest move: hosting the MTV Video Music Awards on Monday. It’s not an obvious gig for Maniscalco, who mulled over the offer for a month before signing on.

“I don’t know much about music, today’s music, and I don’t know musicians,” he said, sounding a bit nervous about hosting his first televised awards show. “Kevin Hart might know Drake or Jay-Z, so he can make fun of them. But I can’t start making fun of people when I don’t know who they are.”

His core audience is Italian families but has expanded in recent years, and his crowd is unusually multigenerational, including teenagers and grandmothers. He said that the MTV audience, which skews young, may not know who he is, but that’s also the appeal of the gig. “I want to introduce myself to a new demographic,” he said. The promotional ads made a joke out of him being a fish out of water, but he said that would only go so far in the show. “I’ve got to act like I should be there,” he said in a clipped voice. “I’m not going to come out and be like: ‘I don’t know you guys.’ ”

For those judging by first appearances, Sebastian Maniscalco is easy to underestimate. Partly it’s his cartoonish macho delivery, which can sound like a PG version of Andrew Dice Clay (whom he regularly opened for years ago). Maniscalco’s family-friendly jokes are middle of the road and warmly nostalgic. “I’m not about clever,” he said in writer Jesse David Fox’s comedy podcast Good One. “It works because it resonates with everyone.”

But his act is sneakily singular and deceptively ambitious. In a club comedy scene where it’s common to stand in place holding a microphone for 10 minutes, Maniscalco imbues his set pieces with flamboyant grace, acting out jokes with startlingly precise movements and theatrical flourishes. He gets laughs no other comic even tries.

For instance, during a recent short set at the Comedy Store, where he performs every night except Sunday and Monday when he’s not on tour, he somehow got a big response while setting a scene with a quick, offhand imitation of a butterfly. And he told a joke about dealing with a spider problem in the house, his wife encouraging him to use an eco-friendly spray. “When I hear eco,” he said, with an old-world snap in his voice, “I hear ‘don’t work.’ ” But he specializes in personal stories that have a cinematic structure with beginning, middle and end.

What might have been his longest bit was a work in progress about setting up a camera that lets you see, via a cellphone app, when someone rings your doorbell. It’s a sequel of sorts to a doorbell joke from years ago that is one of his most popular set pieces.

In the new bit, his biggest laughs are all from act-outs, none more raucous than when he turns on a light by the camera. “It’s like the Luxor Hotel at Vegas,” he says as he taps his leg with the microphone, then pivots his arm up, swiveling to the sky like a young John Travolta. He’s been working on this move for weeks, and while it began in the moment with intuitive choices, his analysis of the physicality suggests someone who thinks rigorously about his craft.

“I’ve noticed noises that are not coming from my voice get laughs, whether it’s a slap on the leg, a microphone tap, so that move is a tap and a twist and a corkscrew up,” he said. “It’s an explosive move that people are not expecting in a description as mundane as a light going on.”

Adam Eget, the Comedy Store manager and booker, pointed out that “it’s so difficult to do that type of physical comedy that if you’re not one of the best, it can come off hacky. But Sebastian is the best at it right now.”

Among comics, Maniscalco is highly respected, although more as a performer than a joke writer. “I’ve heard comedians, the purists, frown upon physicality,” he said. “But for me, whether it comes out of my mouth or from acting it out, it doesn’t matter. If I’m getting the laughs, I’m getting the laughs.”

In his comedy, Maniscalco alternates between strutting confidence and silly hamming, but offstage, he is sober and self-critical. He sounds disappointed in his performance at Madison Square Garden, saying he was tired, disconnected. He is similarly harsh about his recent appearance on “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” opposite Jerry Seinfeld. “I was too passive and I looked like hell,” he said.

Now that he has two children, Maniscalco said, he doesn’t socialize much with stand-ups, even calling himself a bit of a loner. As he talked about his set, our interview was interrupted by a surprise entrance from comic Anthony Jeselnik, at the club to perform. “I’m avoiding a stalker,” Jeselnik said, walking right past us, a glint in his eye.

The interview stopped; we both went silent. In this awkward moment, the style of both comics came into focus: Jeselnik cheerfully transgressive, Maniscalco all muffled irritation. Then Maniscalco leveled with him: “If you’re here, I’ll know you’re here and adjust my answers.”

Jeselnik flashed a mischievous smile and left. He messaged me later about his prank: “I’ve never seen him so uncomfortable. Made my night.”

The next morning, Maniscalco was sitting in the backyard of his Hollywood home, holding a yellow fly swatter. “I hate flies,” he said, while discussing his childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. “There was no divorce, no abuse, no drugs: It’s not a Richard Pryor story,” he said.

Around a decade ago, however, his parents did get divorced. “My mom told me over the phone and I bawled my eyes out,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. Divorce, whether you go through it at 10 or 40, it’s not an easy thing.”

Many of Maniscalco’s bits begin, he said, as stories told to family members, who always were his first audience when he was doing impressions at dinner. His imitation of Christopher Lloyd’s Jim Ignatowski from “Taxi” killed, though the sitcom actor he revered was John Ritter from “Three’s Company.” In high school, he would go home during lunch to watch reruns of the show, then drive back to class.

“You don’t hear people talk about him anymore but he was one of the greats,” he said, describing him as a smooth leading man who would erupt in pratfalls or physical comedy out of nowhere. “Not until later on, when I looked at what I was doing, did I realize this is a lot of John Ritter there.”

His mother was a housewife and his father worked in a salon, and still does, cutting hair in between holding court. “He was a comedian in his own right, with a captive audience,” Maniscalco said. “I saw him making people laugh. It definitely rubbed off on me.”

As his career has taken off in the past few years, his work has focused increasingly on family, but he said he couldn’t really dig deep about the divorce. “Dark is not where I live,” he explained. “I get more humor on the Ring camera than my feelings over my parents’ divorce.”

Earlier in the day, he had a productive call with one of the writers helping him generate jokes for the VMAs, and he sounded more optimistic than the previous day. “We worked on making the set more personal, more my own,” he said, mentioning that they had come up with a few bits for the opening monologue.

He tried one out about the culture of participation trophies that his father might like: “Not everyone will get a trophy tonight,” he said. “If you don’t win tonight, I got a suggestion for you: Work harder.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/arts/television/sebastian-maniscalco-comedian.html" id="5e4df874-15cd-3e27-aa85-91f051f5cd9c">The New York Times</a>.

How Is the Hottest Comic in America Still Under the Radar?

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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/movies/david-cross-oh-come-on-review.html" id="d8fbb755-f5ef-35e8-ab54-b873007a7302">The New York Times</a>.

The sentimental take on having a child is that it pushes you to look beyond yourself and place the needs of others over narrow self-interest. But in his latest special, “Oh, Come On,” David Cross, a new parent, describes it as pure narcissism: “It’s this subconscious thing in the back of everyone’s head, this idea, you know, ‘I like me. I think there should be more of me in the world.’”

'David Cross: Oh, Come On' Review: Muffled Anger Over Sentimentality

In November 2017, stand-up comic Nacho Redondo told a joke at a university about the Paralympics that upset some audience members and drew controversy online, which he promptly used to promote his next shows. It may sound like a common, even mundane story.

But in Venezuela, where Redondo, 32, developed a following for his brash, dark humor, the price for a joke that offends can be much higher than online outrage or a boycott. After politicians harshly criticized him on state-run television, Redondo received death threats online, and the government sued him. He fled the country on the day the lawsuit was filed, and he hasn’t returned. “I was terrified and then paranoid and scared for my life,” Redondo said by Skype from Mexico City, where he now lives, adding that he didn’t want to leave his aging mother and other family members but felt he had no choice. “You get jailed there because of tweets.”

American comics often complain about the chilling effect of political correctness and social media mobs. Or about the damage done when the Trump administration targets Kathy Griffin or “Saturday Night Live.” But in an era of rising authoritarianism around the globe, the threat to comedians in countries without a tradition of freedom of speech can be much more severe.

In the fascinating series “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy,” which debuted in February, Charles, the director of “Borat,” visited comics in some of the most repressive countries in the world, including Somalia and Iraq. “Comedians have been murdered in broad daylight in both countries,” Charles said by phone. Then he added, referring to Ahmed Albasheer: “The Jon Stewart of Iraq, who I profile in the show, can’t do his show anymore because he would be killed.” A Saudi Arabian comic has been jailed since he talked to Charles.

With platforms like Netflix increasing their presence around the world, the policies of regimes that crack down on comedy are not as remote as they once were. When Hasan Minhaj criticized the Saudi regime on his show “Patriot Act,” that government asked Netflix to take the episode down in that country. The streaming service agreed, saying it needed to “comply with local law.”

In Venezuela, a country in economic and political turmoil, laboring under national blackouts and punishing economic sanctions, President Nicolás Maduro has aggressively targeted comedy for years. Using the same broadly defined law that it employed to sue Redondo, the government arrested two firefighters for posting video online poking fun at Maduro.

Mayda Hocevar, the director of the human rights observatory of the University of the Andes, said many comics have been forced out of the country because the government, as she put it in an email, “has been criminalizing satire.”

The most significant comic to leave Venezuela might be Luis Chataing, who was the popular host (4.7 million Twitter followers) of a “Daily Show”-like program. The show was taken off the air in 2014, the day after he made fun of the government. Chataing said the government pressured the TV station by threatening other companies it owns. Maduro denied playing any role, but when Chataing, who now lives in Miami and broadcasts online, took his show on a live tour, he helped radicalize a large segment of the fairly young standup scene.

“Before 2014, comedians in Venezuela steered clear of political content because they didn’t want to alienate their fan base,” said Emiliana Duarte, a writer and editor for the website Caracas Chronicles. “But when Maduro clamped down on dissent, that’s when comedy became more confrontational.”

Redondo said comedy in Venezuela has become a rebellion. “The radio station I worked at, we had a meeting where they said you can’t use Maduro’s name. So comedians did the opposite onstage,” he said. “That was the only place no one can regulate you.”

Redondo, who grew up a fan of the HBO specials of Chris Rock and Katt Williams, has used the lawsuit against him to promote a new show that sold out in Miami last year, and is planning a tour of the United States this year where he will refer to the controversy over his Paralympics joke. The title of his show, translated from Spanish, is “Disabled.”

He is an unlikely champion for comedy as a tool of dissent; his material normally steers clear of politics and makes light of dark subjects like cancer. Redondo said he became a target when he started commenting on protests and the government on the radio and online. To him, the lawsuit was merely a pretext. “They don’t care about disabled people,” he said, adding in an email: “The ‘disabled joke’ facade was the perfect way to hide the fact that I was targeted just for being influential with young people.”

Duarte, the Caracas Chronicles writer and editor, said that far from being the standard-bearer for freedom of speech, Redondo was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “His joke happened right in a tense, inflammatory moment when over 130 people were killed in protests,” she said. “He was made an example of.” The message was, she said, “Look what we’re doing to him. Stay quiet or it might happen to you, too.”

In fact, Redondo thought the controversy over the joke — a long bit in which he imagines a 100-meter race between people with different disabilities including a man with one leg, a man with no limbs and a communist — might blow over. But then he was attacked on the television show of Diosdado Cabello, the politician widely viewed as the second-most powerful person in Venezuela.

“If Cabello calls you on the show,” Redondo said, “it’s a sign: Go after him. If he pronounces your name, you have to leave, basically.”

Charles said he began his series with the question of whether comedy could survive governments like that in Venezuela. He came away convinced of the ultimate resilience of the art form. “Laughter is as important as breathing, eating and sleeping,” he said. “Comedy will survive if humanity does.”

There’s no better example than a weekly bar show in Caracas that had been canceled twice because of the blackouts that have crippled the country. The loss of electricity did not stop comedians from putting on a standup show on March 30, albeit one without light. It was called “No Nos Vamos a Rendir” — we will not give up.

Lit up by cellphones from the crowd, headliner Gabo Ruíz went onstage with a microphone, joking that the state’s ideology had defeated him “because I’m talking into a microphone like it’s working,” he said, to a big laugh.

Speaking by phone last week, Ruíz recalled, “Every joke worked because people wanted to laugh.” He added, “They needed to laugh. They’re suffering and just want to get back to normal and so do I. People called it a show of resistance, but I just want to tell jokes.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/arts/television/venezuela-protest-comedy-maduro.html" id="3a4501bc-4cf8-3602-ac32-88b4ee09b8cf">The New York Times</a>.

In Venezuela, Comedy Is Protest. Until the Government Finds Out

Keeping his eye on the road, Fischer calmly handed her a bag, and she lowered her face, emitted a guttural sound and threw up chunks of shrimp and grits. With hardly a pause, the couple, married for a year, started to banter. “That smells bad,” he said. Schumer shot back, “You want me to go outside?”

Feigning embarrassment about a marital dispute, he motioned toward me in the back seat: “We have a guest.” The car stopped, Schumer, who is due in May, got out, vomited again in front of a church, tossed the bag in a metal trash can and immediately started joking with her husband again.

This is not mere morning sickness. Schumer, 37, suffers from a condition called hyperemesis that makes her feel persistently, relentlessly nauseated, including nearly every time she travels. She has been hospitalized four times. Because of the physical obstacles, Schumer calls her new special, “Growing” (starting March 19 on Netflix), the most difficult challenge of her career.

I first interviewed Amy Schumer in 2012, and her position since then has changed radically, from relatively unknown club comic to one of the biggest, most polarizing names in comedy. She still talks onstage about throwing up, but now it’s because she’s pregnant, not because she’s getting blackout drunk. What also remains constant is a commitment to revealing imperfections and vulnerabilities that others prefer to hide. She has always cared deeply about not caring too much, a contradiction that has fueled her entire career but that has become increasingly tricky to sustain.

Before the drop-in show, she told me that she expected the local comics to hate her because of typical disdain for any successful comedians. “Then there’s internet rumors and just the hate out there,” she said. “They hear my name and think whatever, you know. So it’s kind of fun to go in with the deck stacked against you.”

One question I often ask artists is what clique they belonged to in high school, and perhaps because it invites no sympathy, no one has ever said the popular crowd, except Schumer.

In show business, she said, she now knows what it’s like to be cool and not cool: “Being cool is powerful in this industry, but there’s nothing more powerful than not giving a” — and here she used a word that rhymes with truck.

She is spending two months in New Orleans while her place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan undergoes renovations in preparation for the baby. “Our home is kind of stupid,” she said. “It looks like Tom Hanks’ in ‘Big’ — karaoke machine, jukebox.”

Over the past decade, New Orleans has been a beloved getaway. She visits several times a year and often holds a New Year’s Eve party with actress Jennifer Coolidge. She has developed a Bill Murray-like reputation around town for goofy, news-generating appearances, like crashing a couple’s engagement photo shoot, joining Mardi Gras practice or painting her face with beignets.

It hasn’t been a quiet pregnancy. She has been touring theaters and shot her special in Chicago. She herself contacted the booker at “Saturday Night Live” the night before to see if there was a host slot open. There wasn’t, but she still had new ideas to work out, so she headed to a dive bar that holds a weekly standup show.

While she is an actress, screenwriter and author, Schumer remains a comic at heart, always hustling for a laugh, writing notes for jokes in restaurants and processing the world from the stage. “That doesn’t change,” she said, “if you don’t let yourself become crazy from being a famous person.”

She loved acting in Steve Martin’s play “Meteor Shower” on Broadway, for instance, but said it was frustrating to go onstage and not be able to respond to the news. “I like all the things I’ve done, but my favorite is when I’m in control,” she said. Then, referring to “Snatched” and “I Feel Pretty,” she added: “The last two movies I didn’t write. I didn’t really have anything to say. I now do.”

Her new special catches fans up with her life, her hellish pregnancy (within the first few minutes, she raises her dress to show her belly) and her marriage to a chef. It’s jarring (and funny) to see the comic who released the special “Mostly Sex Stuff” now joke about not wanting to sleep with her husband. She also uses motherhood to jab at the backlash to the #MeToo movement. “I hope it’s a girl,” she said, a sarcastic hint in her voice, “because it’s such a scary time for men.”

Schumer’s breakthrough came in 2013 with the Comedy Central series “Inside Amy Schumer,” a sneakily smart show whose viral sendups of gender double standards and misogyny featured some of the funniest feminist humor in the history of sketch comedy. Then came her hit movie “Trainwreck” (2015), and she was a movie star, flying in private jets to shows and hanging out with Jennifer Lawrence. (The movie they had been planning is on the back burner; instead she intends to shoot a big-screen adaptation of the play “The Humans” in the fall.)

“Young me thought this would bring some other level of joy,” she said, shaking her head at how she pictured being wealthy and famous. “I think I will experience that with a baby. But other than that, it doesn’t exist.”

Success did, however, bring another level of scrutiny. Being a famous comic in 2019 means a stream of criticism every day. If you are a woman, double that. And if you are Amy Schumer, it never stops. She has become a lightning rod, taking criticism from all corners of the internet, periodically finding herself at the bottom of a pile-on.

There were accusations of appropriation and insensitivity when she made a video paying tribute to Beyoncé's “Lemonade.” Then there were the YouTube clips of her jokes juxtaposed with the same or similar ones from other comics, suggesting she was a joke thief, and charges of racism about early jokes delivered in the persona of a bigoted fool. (“I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”)

“I think people may have been laughing for the wrong reasons,” she said of her early standup, which she now cringes at. “I played a Republican fool, kind of racist, homophobic, everything. Once I started being myself onstage, some felt I lied to them. They felt duped.”

A similar sense of betrayal exists on the left. In the same week that Breitbart ran a story arguing that her comedy fell into “the woke trap,” The Ringer questioned what happened to the progressive comedian of “Inside Amy Schumer.” The title of the article: “Did We Get Amy Schumer Wrong?”

While her comedy has, if anything, become more political — her new special has to be the only Netflix standup release this year to include a joke about Sen. Chuck Grassley — Schumer’s work has changed, and those who got to know her through her bruising jokes on “Last Comic Standing” and Comedy Central roasts have different expectations from those who were fans of the feminist satire of “Inside Amy Schumer.” And in shifting from the sketch television tradition of “Chappelle’s Show” to that of big-budget Hollywood movies, her comedy has broadened, with some edges softened. (She is still under contract for another season of the show but hasn’t wanted to shoot it until recently.)

“I Feel Pretty” grossed nearly $100 million worldwide, making it one of the top-selling comedies of last year, but it was harshly criticized for its handling of body issues, including the idea that looks don’t matter if you are confident in yourself. “Inside Amy Schumer” covered similar territory (particularly the perverse effect of systemic objectification on the psyches of women) but without as much of a believe-in-yourself message. While some critics found it glib, Schumer stands by this prescription in part because it worked for her.

“As someone who has been told a million times they are fat and ugly, it does not matter!” she said.

Schumer has always been anchored by a core of confidence, as a photo of her running naked across a park demonstrates. She said she always knew she would be famous and once gave back a $1 million book advance because she believed in herself and figured she would get more money when she was more famous in a few years. She was right.

Comic Rachel Feinstein, who has been friends with Schumer for more than a decade, recalled being on a conference call pitching a pilot with Schumer when an executive outlined what the company was looking for. Schumer responded bluntly that they had no interest in doing that. Feinstein couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Then I get a text from Amy saying: ‘Don’t panic. I know what I’m doing.’ She sold the pilot.” Feinstein added: “She has always encouraged me to ask for things I never would have. I am in awe and try to channel her.”

Even when it comes to her romantic life, she is fearless. A month into dating Fischer, she texted him asking if he was serious about her and if he wanted kids. His response: “I do want kids, and I want them with you.”

But what about those who lack this self-assurance, who can’t shake off the insults that women deal with every day online? Schumer pauses here. “I want to think on that,” she said: “How do you rise from that?” Less than a minute later, she returns to the question: “Therapy, meditation, weed.”

Given the volume and vitriol of the criticism, it’s remarkable how rarely Schumer gets defensive about it. She agreed that her handling of the Beyoncé video was naive. And while she denied she ever stole jokes — parallel thinking is far more common than you might think — she conceded that if she had seen those YouTube videos, she would have thought she was a thief, too. She said that when she asked John Mulaney to give her notes on the special, he kept an eye out for overlap with Ali Wong, who also performed pregnant.

“Comics say we used to be able to say this, and it was funny,” she said. “That’s over, so evolve! I’m down to evolve.”

Yet it’s a difficult balance to remain a comic who doesn’t care how she comes off while also changing with the times in response to criticism of the way she comes off. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with my special — what’s the thing people will be furious about?” Schumer mused aloud. “It sucks to have everyone mad at me. But I’m not too careful.”

Schumer has become close with Lena Dunham in part because of the shared experience of being celebrities on the receiving end of torrents of online criticism. (They were even jointly pilloried for a conversation in Dunham’s now-defunct newsletter, Lenny; some called it tone deaf on matters of #MeToo and race.) “It’s a pretty specific experience,” Dunham said by phone about what bonded them. “Most people don’t know what it’s like to open social media in the morning and hear you are physically, socially and politically worthless.” Dunham added that Schumer handles it better than she does. “She’s titanium, and part of her skill is the ability to make it look easy.”

But there are signs that being in the fishbowl of fame has taken its toll: a certain caution in her voice, a sighing acknowledgment that people can grow tired of you. She has been attending filmmaking classes at New York University and is looking at a future in the director’s chair.

For her standup, she has recently asked the camera operators shooting her shows to send her clips of crowds laughing at her jokes, proof that people are enjoying themselves. “It’s a good thing to be reminded,” she said, saying that audience members can become abstract, like lab rats in an experiment.

A few years ago, she explained, she started to shy away from the public in reaction to the criticism, but an exchange with Dave Chappelle at a Cleveland Cavaliers game helped her out of it. “I was kind of retreating a bit in general after years of getting beaten down, and Chappelle was like: ‘There’s a lot of love out there for you, Amy. I don’t know why, but I heard it.'”

Despite her fears before the drop-in show, Schumer was treated warmly by the emcee that night. (“Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and now the Hi-Ho Lounge,” he told the audience.) Backstage, she spoofed herself, playing the part of the diva sarcastically demanding more bottled water. When she slowly walked onstage, the crowd roared. One woman yelled: “Is that really you?” Some chuckled. “Why are you laughing?” Schumer asked. “Because my career has led me back to this place?”

After telling a few jokes about her husband and New Orleans, and adding some random thoughts (“Do you think Jeff Bezos looks like a referee?”), she quieted the crowd by confessing: “I threw up on the way over here because I have this disease.” She paused. “There’s no research on it because men don’t get it.”

After leaving the club, Schumer and her husband walked past a space that showcases standup and burlesque. She had considered performing there, but glancing at it now, she said, “I don’t want to be that cool.”

Then she walked to a parking lot to find that their car had a yellow boot on a back wheel. As her husband looked to call a ride, two men approached. Schumer stayed in the car. One offered to remove the boot for $90. Fischer gave him the money, and they were on their way. Schumer cackled with delight: “We are being scammed.”

This was a potentially dangerous situation, but she didn’t act like it. “I get very relaxed in such times,” she said, adding that she respects a good con. “It was the most civil mugging ever.”

Back in New York, I received a text from her that caught me off guard: “When you first wrote about me, you described me as melancholy,” she texted. “I had never seen myself that way, but when I read it, I knew it was true. Am I still melancholy?”

It was characteristically direct, more blunt than the usual interview subject and difficult to answer. She seemed both incredibly happy and in love, but also a bit haunted. I said yes.

She agreed, and then expressed the most earnest expectant-motherly sentiment I had heard from her: “I’m ecstatic and furious,” she wrote, then: “And pleased and peaceful and manic and hopeless and so hopeful it’s crazy.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/arts/television/amy-schumer-growing-netflix.html" id="9dcf5f36-dcdd-3877-a139-c27ae9e504ac">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — Since comedian Amy Schumer became pregnant, she had vomited, in her conservative estimate, 980 times. So on a Monday evening last month, when she told her husband, Chris Fischer, she was going to throw up, sitting in the passenger seat of a compact SUV on her way to perform a drop-in set, what followed had the blasé feel of routine.

Amy Schumer Doesn't Care What You Think. Honest.

Amy Schumer Doesn't Care What You Think (That Much)

Portraying the final days of the remarkable partnership of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the greatest double act in the history of movies, the tightly focused narrative finds these comedians past their prime, not just in their career but also in their relationship. (They are on a theater tour to raise money for a film comeback.) Like a married couple that stopped fighting long ago, their exchanges hint at buried resentments, muffled irritations and an abiding love.

Director Jon S. Baird’s observant and genial portrait includes many scenes where these master comics are performing, but the primary purpose doesn’t appear to be to convince you of their comic genius, but rather to display their ease with each other, the charge and excitement of a connection. Doing their gentle dance routines or farcical double-door bits, they are perfect together. Once they go offstage, they have chemistry — but it’s complicated.

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly deliver dynamite performances that capture the expressions and physicality of the star comedians without ever descending into caricature. They never strain for laughs, but are consistently amusing. As Laurel, who wrote the comic bits and was the more tortured star, Coogan communicates a tremendous amount of anxiety and discord in a slight downturn of the lips. Equally subtle and emotionally grounded, Reilly portrays Hardy as a big man with a light touch, so laid-back so as to be almost reckless.

Both men had difficult relationships with women, which are alluded to, but not explored in any complexity, though Nina Arianda makes a meal out of a snack, playing the formidable Russian wife of Laurel, perpetually skeptical of the comics’ promoter, Bernard Delfont (a wonderfully oily Rufus Jones).

But the focus here never strays far from the prickly friendship at its center. There are a few knowing jokes, such as when Laurel and Hardy push a trunk up stairs, in an echo of their famous comic bit from “The Music Box,” in which they move a piano, but this time, when it slips out of their hands, Hardy just stares at the fallen object at the bottom of the stairs and says: “Do we really need that trunk?”

Such nods to their comic triumphs are few, and as the cracks in their relationship begin to show, the movie builds to a major blowup between the two in a party scene when they exhume old grievances and fight like bitter siblings. Laurel says he did all the creative work and was repaid by a lack of loyalty, while Hardy cuts even deeper, calling his longtime partner a hollow man fueled by jealousy for Charlie Chaplin. When Laurel angrily tosses a piece of food at Hardy’s head, the crowd observing this dispute mistake it for a bit, laughing and shouting, “Bravo!” It’s a funny and dark moment, one that comedians would understand.

But this movie is not a dark portrait of the expectations of a fickle audience. This loud dispute is necessary for the reconciliation that follows, one that tips over into sentimentality. Most movies about comedians present them as harsh and brooding collectors of neuroses, but Coogan and Reilly even at their most contentious present Laurel and Hardy as gentle, flawed figures.

Their signature bit here is not a knock on the head or grappling with gravity while pushing a piano, but a delicate dance, one that leaves the crowds roaring in laughter. You might wonder why people back then found these moves so hilarious — and some of the comedy of Laurel and Hardy ages better than others — but one should never underestimate a charming duet between equally matched partners.

“Stan &amp; Ollie”

Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/movies/stan-and-ollie-review.html" id="7b41e45f-23c1-3da2-ab0a-6ff03144c30c">The New York Times</a>.

Replace flirtation and sex with pratfalls and comic repartee and “Stan &amp; Ollie” is a heartstrings-yanking Hollywood romance.

'Stan & Ollie' Review: Laurel and Hardy, a Double Act as Romance

What does it mean that the most talked about comedy special of the year offered a biting critique of comedy itself? And that the most memorable talk show rant took aim at talk show rants? Maybe nothing — after all, comedy has long looked inward — but for an art form, tough criticism is one sign of health. Here are a few more.

Most Essential Special

When I asked the heads of comedy at Netflix about my theory that Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” is less popular than its extensive media coverage made it seem, they declined to answer. Truth is: It doesn’t matter. The impact of this arresting performance cannot be accurately measured in clicks, subscriptions or even rave reviews. It’s the most important comedy of the year because it challenged the form, and in so doing, expanded the idea of its possibilities. The criticism often leveled at “Nanette” — it’s not standup, but a solo show — is an unintentional compliment. Solo shows have a venerable, and funny, tradition (see Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Spalding Gray), and the fact that comedy has co-opted the genre from the theater is a coup.

Funniest Special

With “Kid Gorgeous,” John Mulaney made the leap from highly respected writer and comic to elite A-list standup. This slick production had range. Mulaney told a top-tier Trump joke comparing his presidency to a horse set loose in a hospital, shifted gears with a vividly nostalgic story about an elementary school safety assembly and also thundered a nice polemic against colleges asking alumni for money. But it also has enough oddball touches, including its David Lynchian introduction walking through Radio City Music Hall, to convince the audience that this clean-cut comedian is much more eccentric than you thought.

Best Direction

This was the year when ambitious direction of comedy specials became the norm, with artists trying conceptual flourishes like taking away the audience, as Jerrod Carmichael did on Drew Michael’s experimental hour, or adding an inner-voice narration to punctuate punch lines with meta-jokes, as Jay Karas did in Demetri Martin’s unfortunately overlooked “The Overthinker.” But Steven Brill’s excellent direction of Adam Sandler’s “100% Fresh” was not flashy. What distinguished it was how effortless he made the complex editing together of a multitude of shows appear. Not only did he create a cohesive standup set out of appearances in both vast and intimate spaces, along with a few oddball clips of Sandler mugging outside theaters, but he also made sure this special had the emotional arc of a well-made romantic comedy.

Best MC

When the superbly curated weekly Brooklyn standup show “Butter Boy” started in late 2017, Maeve Higgins had the least standup experience of the three hosts (Jo Firestone and Aparna Nancherla are the others). But she has emerged as a natural master of ceremonies, quick with banter, charming and biting, and if a comic indulges in hack stereotypes, there’s a chance she might call it out.

Best Talk Show Evisceration

It was a big year for Michelle Wolf. In April, that dependably funny standup comic broke into the national consciousness with a scathing set at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, which was so cutting that it may have ended a venerable tradition (since they didn’t invite a comic for next year) that was probably better off gone. But then things took an unfortunate turn when her new Netflix talk show, “The Break,” was abruptly canceled before it had time to find its footing.

It still had enough time for a marvelous spoof of political rants behind desks that articulated a criticism of contemporary talk shows better than anything else. “Writing jokes is hard,” she said, commenting on talk show polemics. “You know what’s easier? An earnest plea.”

Best Counterargument to Michelle Wolf

Hasan Minhaj’s “Patriot Act” seemed like the last thing the culture needed: yet another sober talk show centering on highly researched progressive monologues punctuated with quips. Yawn. And yet it’s somehow proved to be addictive viewing because of its charismatic and energetically curious host, some solid jokes and smartly chosen topics that are somewhere between topical and evergreen. (What other talk show host would do 20 minutes on the streetwear giant Supreme?)

Funniest/Saddest Breakup Story

Prolific British comic James Acaster put four specials out on Netflix this year but nothing in them is as riotous as the story he told in his new stage show at SoHo Playhouse about his girlfriend leaving him for Rowan Atkinson. Being replaced by Mr. Bean is apparently brutal. Keep an eye out for a special with this sad tale next year.

Most Unexpected Superstar Comeback

Ellen DeGeneres spoofing her “be kind” image in “Relatable” (her first special in 15 years) was a departure, but not as much as seeing Chris Rock get personal in “Tamborine,” (his first in a decade) talking about his addiction to porn and his divorce. Both specials, however, were sharp returns to form for masters of the setup and punch line.

Best Impressions

If you’re looking for funny spoofs of pop culture mega-celebrities, forget “Saturday Night Live” and try the Instagram page of comic Kyle Dunnigan, who has been putting on a crowd-pleasing one-man digital sketch show. Using an app called Face Swap, where he subs in his lips to photos of stars, he creates conversations with, among others, the president, Kim Kardashian and Louis C.K. His impersonation of Bill Maher is especially uncanny. A standup and writer for shows like “Inside Amy Schumer,” he has long been more respected than famous, but these quick character sketches have represented something of a breakthrough, moving him from 15,000 followers in January to 419,000 by the end of 2018.

Most Underrated Political Comedy

Surprising everyone with a collection of new loony characters on his show “Who Is America?” on Showtime, Sacha Baron Cohen tricked Dick Cheney into autographing a “waterboard kit,” coaxed a series of Republican lawmakers into filming a political ad advocating giving guns to kids and somehow convinced a Georgia politician that to protect himself from terrorists he needed to drop his pants and chase Cohen across the room, rear-forward. And yet these remarkable political pranks that exposed the raw, uninhibited ugliness of our politics better than any joke this year did not pierce the public consciousness and create indelible characters the way that Borat or Ali G did. Perhaps Cohen set too high a standard. Maybe the humiliations here turned off too many people. But make no mistake: Cohen made the most thrillingly unpredictable comedy of the year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/arts/best-comedy-of-2018.html" id="9a65108c-b080-39c2-a285-27a540e4a1c2">The New York Times</a>.

Best Comedy of 2018

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — On a Saturday night this month in a cavernous theater in a casino, an Aziz Ansari I had never seen before strode onstage. Wearing a black leather jacket and skinny jeans, he looked the same, but the old swagger was diminished, replaced by a certain world-weary exasperation.

Jason Zinoman

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