A funny walk can go a long way in comedy. The stand-up Chris Fleming has elevated his to an art form; specifically, he has turned it into dance.
“My leg brain will take over,” he said. “If I’m in front of an audience and I’m struggling, my legs know how to get a laugh.”
Fleming, 39, whose first HBO special, “Chris Fleming: Live at the Palace,” arrives Friday, cuts a different figure from just about anybody else in the comedy world. Partly this is because of his fashion sense: blindingly bright jazz shoes, plumage as an accessory and jewel-toned flares, which accentuate his lanky frame.
But mostly it is because he marries the idiosyncrasies of his writing — one bit has him pretending to be a dirty cast-iron skillet — with a delivery that leans heavily on his training in classic modern dance. He is probably the only working funnyman who cites Isadora Duncan as an influence.
“Chris is one of the most exciting comedians to watch right now,” said Mike Birbiglia, the veteran comic who has hosted Fleming on his podcast. (Conan O’Brien, another fan, produced his special.) Fleming’s physicality and style are “so deeply himself” and original, Birbiglia said via email. “Plus his material is very uncensored. He’s like Kathy Griffin meets Lenny Bruce meets Cirque du Soleil.”
He lives near Los Angeles but mined his upbringing in Stow, Mass., in an early video series about an extremely New England woman named Gayle. His breakout came from carefully edited and captioned social media clips of his club shows, which find him prancing, pirouetting or crip-walking across the stage, curly hair floofing, as he discusses, say, the snacks at Trader Joe’s that only women can see. The comments on his posts are filled with other comics losing it at his routines. (“Omggggggg” — Alex Edelman.)
To watch Fleming perform an absurdly long, knee-buckling conga line or throb as a kombucha scoby, is to experience a punchline as choreography. Here, he breaks down some of his favorite moves.
Obsessed with movement and moonwalking since childhood, Fleming studied theater and dance at Skidmore College, where what he lacked in technical precision (“I played comic relief in ‘Swan Lake’”) he gained in confidence and context. His teachers were disciples of originalists like Duncan, a dance foremother who pioneered an expressive style, and the more angular Martha Graham. Modern dance “is all about accepting gravity,” Fleming said. “I’m really good at it” — meaning surrendering himself to the space.
This may also be why he spends a lot of time near the floor, squinching around in modified Pilates poses. “My dad, when he saw me, he said, ‘Chris, within two minutes, you were on the ground. That’s early, Chris. It’s the theater!’”
Fleming got his start doing standup, and finding his exaggerated style, in a club above a Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square. At a bookstore next door, he pored over rock star photo tomes. “Mick Jagger, Prince, Stevie Nicks, Freddie Mercury — big pictures of these people rocking out,” he recalled. “I was like, how do I bring that to this 100-person-cap room?” Wearing hoodies was out. “I gotta wear bird armor.”
He sometimes choreographs routines by drawing them, loosely working out turns and jumps in a studio. But he doesn’t watch himself; he needs the audience to find peak humor. “A lot of what I put out on social media, I’m doing it for the first time,” he said. In improv dance class, he learned, “Don’t do something unless you feel the impulse to do it. It has to be organic.”
And when you’re planking as a frying pan, “you need the laugh to die before you scurry really quick.”
“I do the crip walk a lot, that’s one of my go-tos,” Fleming said. One bit of footwork has the legs almost glued together at the ankles. “I studied Ice Cube in 2004. He did the smoothest C-walk.” Onstage, this becomes an excitable crip-walking librarian.
In one setup, Fleming pokes fun at a guy who thinks he’s a blast at weddings, the buffoon boyfriend. Except in Fleming’s version, it’s in “the cadence of Al Pacino, when he’s doing his final monologue in ‘Scent of a Woman.’”
“And I thought, what is the showiest, cockiest way to end this? The moonwalk.”
(It kills.)
“I do so much contraction,” Fleming said, referring to the Martha Graham-like concaving of his torso. It’s useful when he’s pretending to be a motorcycle, or a baby boomer witchily fluent in Bitmoji.
And it’s in contrast to an outstretched arms-yearning move borrowed from Duncan. “Isadora has this very folksy optimism that my improv teacher loved,” he said.
Fleming’s routines are densely layered confections of references — space movies, college life, animal encounters, the economy — confettied with digressions and bonkers turns of phrase. One song-and-dance routine is about why “a young professional in a tasteful Madewell sweater” was the most terrorizing thing at a haunted house. Add a skyward reach, and “people are always laughing.”
Fleming has an almost competitive bodily fearlessness. “I love putting as much weight as I can on the stool,” he said. “I love drop-kicking and falling different ways.” But he doesn’t follow an athlete’s training regimen or work out, he said, almost proudly. “To this day, I leave every performance completely bruised.”
Depending on the springiness of that day’s hair curl, he is somewhere between 6-foot-1 and 6-foot-3, he said, with a long-legged hip swivel that can make him appear even taller. When he frog-leaps or tumbles over a chair, pliés or laps around the stage, there is an element of controlled danger: a glam firecracker on the loose.
That is where the heart of his comedy lies. “I do believe that if you’re physically exerting yourself, it’s a completely authentic performance,” he said. “If I’m physically struggling,” it’s real, “and that makes me laugh.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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