Nikki Glaser, ‘Good Girl’
Nikki Glaser has reached a career status that means she can begin her specials more like a pop star than a comedian, with glamour and flash.
In “Good Girl,” which displays the chops of an assured showman, she emerges from below the stage on a platform, striking a dramatic pose with one hand flipped in the air, evoking Bob Fosse. She wears a stylish coat, miniskirt and over-the-knee boots. She grabs a gold microphone, leaning back and soaking up the applause. “Before we begin,” she says, a picture of earnestness, “I just want to say that every single person here means so much money to me tonight.”
This well-delivered misdirection earned a loud laugh from me because I had just finishing watching several specials in which comics open by spending more time expressing gratitude to fans than entertaining them.
Glaser would never make that mistake. She remains ruthless about getting laughs quickly and often. Now a veteran Golden Globes host with a busy touring schedule, she is entering dangerous territory for a star comic when you can coast on celebrity. Performing in her hometown, St. Louis — where crocs are called “the St. Louis stiletto,” she quips — Glaser doesn’t coast. But she also isn’t exactly breaking new ground with jokes about plastic surgery, women’s beauty standards and the body horrors of aging. While the lines are delivered with panache, there do seem to be more puns than usual. It’s an hour that will satisfy fans more than challenge them.
Ryan Hamilton, ‘This Just Hit Me’
With rigid giraffe legs, wide eyes that look perpetually in awe and a gaping smile that shows off a hint of his gums, Ryan Hamilton can look like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon come to life. He’s used an innocent, Idaho-born persona to build a polished clean career that evokes the style and smooth professionalism of early Jerry Seinfeld.
You can still hear the influence in the squeaky notes of Hamilton’s exasperation or the graciousness with which he hosts the audience. But his new hour is a breakthrough, not because this one has a serious-sounding narrative to tell, about facing possible death after getting hit by a bus. It’s the way he shifts gears.
Once he flashes that gleaming smile, a severe look hits harder. Hamilton has always told great observational jokes that display meticulous attention to language and a gift for making the familiar seem alien. He likes alliteration and describing common objects from skewed angles, including the way things of today will sound once they are long obsolete. Newspapers? “Huge, poorly bound books published every morning for yesterday’s news.”
But most of this special includes unexpectedly funny bits about being hit by a bus. The focus benefits him. It allows him to play to his strengths, digging deep on small things, like turns of phrase. He muses about how often we use the language of being hit by a bus. No one saves their reputation by saying they were thrown “under the car.” Then he imagines the physicals of actually throwing someone under a bus. Have you ever considered how that would work? He has.
Hamilton doesn’t get maudlin or emotional. He’s too light a performer to find lessons, but he does use darkness to his advantage. After discussing the accident for a few minutes, he has a confession. It was actually a shuttle bus. His expression transforms. His eyes dim and his smile straightens. “Are you disappointed?” he asks. “Do you wish I was hit by a bigger vehicle?”
Ali Siddiq, ‘My Father’
“My father was not bad,” Ali Siddiq says in his latest and most focused hour of sit-down storytelling, then wryly adds: “He was not ideal.”
This is, of course, a matter of perspective. And some viewers might disagree. But it is one of the strengths of this riveting comic performer that he never gets didactic, allowing room for audiences to see his tales from different perspectives. In self-released hours, Siddiq has always delved into areas of his personal life (drug dealing, prison fights, police encounters) that could be rife with tragedy but come off with an almost offhand sense of fun. It’s his gift, really.
This new special feels like an origin story of sorts, even though he doesn’t present it as such. But he’s showing you where he learned some of his first lessons, from a kid’s eye view of a drug-dealer father who is not the most reliable husband or payer of debts. But Siddiq is also funny, full of swagger, odd bursts of poetry and a sneaky kind of hustle. He doesn’t tell us “attention must be paid” but as in “Death of a Salesman,” this is a story of a son’s inheritance.
The comic high point is when he serves his father divorce papers and describes being stuck between warring parents with a sense of farce but no anguish. What could be a dark story is instead a heartwarming love letter flush with gratitude.
Siddiq is an unusual figure in the culture, churning out highly personal (and popular) hours with emotional heft and distributing them himself. It’s become clear that he is a big-hearted sentimentalist, a DIY artist with the sensibility of an old-school Hollywood mogul.
Ophira Eisenberg, ‘I Used to be Nicer’
Parenting humor is such a crowded field that you see the same premises over and over again. Ophira Eisenberg, a wry, sharp-eyed observer who moves nimbly between taut punchlines and short stories, isn’t above indulging familiar topics for a good laugh: “I don’t think I’m a bad mom,” she says in a bit about how mothers are judged differently than fathers. “I’m an average dad.”
But when she gets personal, her material becomes weirder, more original and resonant. A fed-up New York mother living in a cramped apartment, she describes with no sentimentality the challenges of raising a small boy, considering where to find relief. After outlining the shortcomings of therapy, she discovers that what she wants most of all is not escape, but an escape room. Exhausted, she goes to one by herself and, as she puts it in a deliberate cadence: “I did not try to escape.” She stays there, enjoying the bliss of doing nothing — until an employee of the establishment interrupts to tell her, “You’re not trying.” Exactly. The cinematic way she crafts this encounter and the emotions it evokes, might make you think: I may have to try this sometime.
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