Everyone catches strays in Chris Fleming’s buzzy new special.
Seth Meyers is lightly roasted. Same with Zach Braff and Mike Birbiglia (“He looks like he sells Wordle spoilers to the F.B.I.”). Even the president of Skidmore College is not safe. But no one is abused as vigorously as Thomas, a fictional stand-in for a genre of guy who strains to come off as eccentric. Fleming takes this personally.
In one of the five or six elite bits in the comic’s new HBO special, “Live at the Palace,” the funniest and most fully realized comedy hour so far this year, Fleming puts together an absurdly specific portrait of this person: mustache, thick thighs, under the delusion he’s the life of the party at weddings. Fleming’s friends insist he’s great. “You’ve got to meet Thomas,” they say. “He is so fun. He wears a kooky sock.”
Dressed in a purple jumpsuit with a plunging neckline and sparkly red shoes that would fit right in in Emerald City, Fleming levels with the girlfriends of these so-called quirky men: “Ladies, if he’s only comfortable squeaking out the kook in the sock,” he says, beginning a long, truly unpredictable punchline with a note of contempt.
Chris Fleming is a singular comedian for many reasons: his dynamic physicality, hopping, trotting, even moonwalking through jokes. The absolute finesse with which he delivers an insult so that it barely makes a mark. The unpredictability of his digressions and the deadly seriousness he applies to subjects like the art of leading a conga line or Paul Dano’s smile. (Though it’s worth noting that comics like Billy Eichner who raged about showbiz nonsense as if nothing were more high stakes are an antecedent.)
What really distinguishes Fleming are his prickly, word-drunk sentences. They are ornate, densely descriptive and veer in all kinds of surprising directions. His verbs are as active and unexpected as he is. His friends are “popping up with a mustachioed fiancée.” People are “fastened” to their beds. There’s a propulsion to his stream-of-consciousness-seeming rants. Comedy tends to be an art of concision. But Fleming proves that verbosity can be hilarious in novel ways.
The magic trick of his act is that Fleming marries a wild improvisational sense of constantly flying off the handle with a writerly precision with language. Usually, you get one but not the other. In a detour exploring his own gender-fluid presentation, he singles out middle-school tuba players as the ultimate in masculinity, a typical hot take. He delivers a conventional comparison that Dennis Miller might come up with (“These guys make Dave Bautista look like Bernadette Peters”), then moves into more satirically literary descriptions that complement his act-outs (“the wind-worn visage of a ferry worker”).
His debut special on Peacock, “Hell,” tried to gussy up that show with overtly surreal costumes and props, characters and special effects. He makes one joke about that hour (“I released a special two years ago and it sparked a nationwide manhunt for my pronouns”) and says that he wants to expand his audience now (“I’m trying to grow my fan base beyond women who brought a knife to prom”).
This special smartly strips down the production and lets the jokes do the work. The director Bill Benz doesn’t cut to the audience laughing but does place a camera in the wings, which Fleming periodically stares at, creating intimacy with the crowd.
Fleming is as likely to be obscure as relatable and is comfortable making references that might go over heads. But this production proves that his comedy is not niche. He finds the universal in the specific, and builds a virtuosic joke about a Terry Gross interview with Adam Driver out of solid storytelling and an infectious love for the musicality of words. You get the sense that the origin of one of his most elaborate bits — about shopping for hats in Saratoga Springs — was delight at hearing an employee refer to a customer who browses and leaves without buying anything as a “bebacker.”
While you don’t hear the term “alt comedy” much anymore, there are plenty of oddball comedians flourishing outside clubs and confessional solo shows. Sarah Sherman has turned splatter and gore into a winning aesthetic. And Julio Torres relies on flamboyant costumes and the abstraction of evoking colors and shapes. Then there is the booming clown scene.
Fleming can somehow come off as both more alien and more accessible. His work tells you very little about his life, and yet it feels personal. In a recent profile, he discussed avoiding clubs because someone like him “would have to demean yourself to survive.” And yet, in his energy and flair, you can see that he reveres Robin Williams’s stand-up work, and he has said that this special was inspired by Williams’s 1986 “A Night at the Met.”
The one time Fleming mentions Williams in “Live at the Palace” is when he compares him to Thomas. You don’t need to work too hard to see some self-deprecation or even projection in Fleming’s rage at the guy who tries too hard to be quirky. Watch enough of Fleming and you can see traces of Thomas, the guy who got his start expressing himself by donning wacky clothes and commanding the dance floor at weddings.
There is a sweetness and relatability at the heart of his act, even when he’s taking shots at the commercial work of Eugene Levy. There’s also an affection for show business that someone who takes so much time mocking it must have. After all, this is a comedy show that ends with a song.
At another point, in a perfect metaphor for evading pigeonholes or the glare of stardom, Fleming tries to outrun his own spotlight, speeding from one side of the stage to the other. It’s an amusingly goofy image, like something out of Bugs Bunny. In that spirit, he adds a knowing wisecrack: “I want to applaud the spotlight operator who was on the team that got Osama.”
Jason Zinoman is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times and writes a column about comedy.
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