Daniel Kitson called them dumb. They were mocked by Dave Chappelle and pranked by Aziz Ansari. Pete Davidson insisted they sign NDAs. This was the year stand-up comedy turned on the audience. Is this a response to cancel culture or a backlash to the democratizing influence of social media? I suspect some of the hostility was always lingering under the surface. It’s good manners (and smart business) for comics to praise their fans and express gratitude toward ticket-buyers, but if spending years in comedy clubs teaches you anything, it’s that the wisdom of crowds can be highly overrated. The same of course can be said of the judgment of critics, but ignore that for that a moment while you read my annual highlights.
Best Bit
In a year when complaining about the sensitivity of young people became hack, Gary Gulman offered a full-throated defense of millennial snowflakes, hidden inside an indictment of his own generation that reached its zenith in the most unlikely comedy territory: The water pressure of fountains in 1970s public schools.
From his virtuosic HBO special “The Great Depresh,” this intricate bit, impossible to do justice to on the page, had a little bit of everything: Comedy of language, character comedy, comic dialogue, absurdist argument. It’s a clinic from one of the best joke writers working today.
Best Sex Joke
In “Get on Your Knees,” a meditation on oral sex that married Attell-like punch lines to poetic musings and oddball physicality, Jacqueline Novak riffed on the femininity of the penis. “They’re so sensitive, they’re always reacting to things. They’re needy, they nag you, they poke in the night,” she said. “One minute the life of the party, and the next flopped over on the fainting couch that is the inner thigh, just waiting for someone to notice that frankly she’s upset.”
Best New Terrain in Sex Jokes
In the beginning, there were blow up dolls, and comedians made jokes about them. Progress marches forward and thus, this year stand-up tackled sex robots. In a sweeping riff, Bill Burr predicted they would displace human sex partners. “Hipster spawn” would be the only survivors of this dystopian future because, what do hipsters like more than something retro? In another Netflix special, Whitney Cummings offers a rebuttal, trotting out a robot that looks like her to tell jokes. If the day comes when computers replace comics, this double act — an inspired gimmick — may be the turning point.
Best Closer
Comedians generally end their sets with a surefire joke that gets a big laugh, not a provocative question that stuns the crowd into silence. In his HBO special “Feelings,” Ramy Yousseff does both, but his abrupt query sticks with you. After carefully explaining how the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center increased the amount of hate in the country, and how the new climate of anxiety toward Muslims cemented his own identity as one, he asks: “Did 9/11 … work?”
Best Direction
Of the many shamed men returning to comedy this year, none addressed their scandal with as much ambition as Aziz Ansari did in Netflix’s “Right Now.” Much credit must go to the director Spike Jonze, whose on camera presence hinted at a stripping away of artifice, while his stunning compositions suggested the opposite.
Best Talent Cluster
Not since the days of Colbert and Carell has The Daily Show had such a robustly talented core of correspondents. In this year alone, Jaboukie Young-White made a debut splash on Comedy Central, where Roy Wood Jr. also produced a savvy hour; Dulcé Sloan put out a strong half-hour, and in “Asian Comedian Destroys America!” on Netflix, Ronny Chieng, a sharp social critic with a magnetic delivery, produced one of the most assured comic hours of the year.
Best Career Transition
In her most skillfully frank special yet, Amy Schumer, who shot Netflix’s “Growing” while pregnant, finds jokes from avoiding sex with her husband as easily as she once did from having sex with single men. And yet, her punch lines, about tampons, porn and periods, among other things, remain just as visceral and raunchy.
Best Scene-Stealer
Connor O’Malley is one of those comedians who pops up on shows or podcasts or viral videos, injects a frenzied dose of derangement and then exits, leaving behind a giddier mood. On a sketch in Netflix’s terrific “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson,” he played a maniac who saw a bumper sticker reading “Honk if You’re Horny” and he couldn’t stop beeping. When finally confronted at a funeral, he stomps and spins like Leatherface at the end of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” It’s the kind of lunacy that puts you in mind of Chris Elliott cameos in the golden age of “Late Night With David Letterman.”
Funniest Online Character Comic
This has become a competitive field, with a small army of comedians regularly posting quick hit monologues that go viral. But for consistency of wit and performance, Alyssa Limperis has stood out, making quirky and finely observed portraits of women on the verge of repressing a nervous breakdown. My favorite is her performance of the distinctive anxiety of a person actively listening to a mechanic describing what’s wrong with her car, trying (and failing) to pretend like she has any idea what is going on.
Best Experimental Comedy
This is a good time for comics toying with form. Larry Owens and Catherine Cohen had breakthroughs blurring the lines between cabaret and stand-up; the inspired surrealist Julio Torres embraced abstraction, doing jokes about geometric shapes on an HBO special. On Adult Swim, Jena Friedman merged #MeToo comedy and prank shows, and downbeat loons like Joe Pera and Jo Firestone turned banality into hilarity. But the boldest avant-garde comedy I saw this year were two solo shows by Natalie Palamides — “Laid” and “Nate” — which co-opted the spirit of 1980s performance art in service of existential clowning.
Best Transgressive Humor
Anthony Jeselnik’s “Fire in the Maternity Ward” (Netflix) generated more belly laughs than any special this year, with punch lines about baby-killing, abortion, racism and murder-suicide. He didn’t just make a rape joke; he paused after the punch line and asked: “Did everyone get that one?” What he didn’t do, refreshingly, is pose as a brave truth-teller or hype that his button-pushing jokes might get him canceled. He just wrote punch lines that snap like mousetraps, spread them throughout a special dominated by a clearly defined point of view and when blowback came, he laughed it off.
"best" - Google News
December 17, 2019 at 05:00PM
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Best Comedy of 2019 - The New York Times
"best" - Google News
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