Perfection isn’t funny. Flaws are. Triumph never makes people laugh the way struggle does. More than any other standup today, Rory Scovel understands and exploits the daredevil humor of courting disaster.
It’s why he titled his initial Netflix special “Rory Scovel Tries Stand-up for the First Time.” And performed 10 nights in a row at Brooklyn’s Union Hall with no material, improvising hour after hour. (I saw two of the shows and they were terrible and wonderful and never boring.) One of his funniest impressions is of a guy who doesn’t know how to play the piano faking his way through it.
His hilarious new special, “Show Must Go On” (Netflix), his best one yet, begins with him onstage at a complete loss, in trouble, trying desperately to remember the joke he is supposed to tell, before announcing with a mix of swagger and self-regard that he’s just going to wing it.
Whether this was planned doesn’t matter. The appearance of unpredictability combined with the possibility of catastrophe is riveting, maybe more so than the reality of it — an idea he hints at in his next beat. In a characteristic quicksilver shift of perspective, he imitates the thought process of someone in the crowd: “I like that he winged it, but I don’t like that he had to.”
Scovel doesn’t have to. A prolific and relentlessly self-parodying performer, in the vein of early, white-suited Steve Martin, he has made me laugh harder than any other living stand-up over the past decade. He has the goofy charm to be funny just by leaning back, palming his belly and preening. But his ambition leads him to aim for bigger, messier, more explosive comedy, the kind in which comedians dig themselves into a hole and create spectacles out of seeing if they can claw their way out.
Focusing on the big-ticket subjects of religion, sex, politics and family, Scovel defends eccentrically provocative hot takes. (“What if the Proud Boys had beautiful singing voices?”) He skewers stand-ups who pander to right-wing audiences. “Us comics,” he says in the voice of an opportunist. “We have to go red if we want to go a little green.”
Scovel likes his relationship with his audience to be tempestuous. Every time he makes a point that gets applause he erupts in anger. “I don’t need teammates,” he chastises his fans, before mocking himself: “My new drug is yelling at anyone who agrees.” (At the end of one of his previous specials, the audience carried him outside and threw him into a dumpster)
Scovel’s need to alienate extends to his slippery persona as the worst family man, a terrible husband, a preposterously petty father. Insisting his child call him “Papa,” he tells her: “I want to hear those P’s pop.”
His specials never entirely translate the barreling, freewheeling momentum of his live shows. But this one comes close. It has a larky spirit, but also a new conviction. It’s his most bleakly topical and poignantly personal hour but smothered in enough layers of self-deprecating silliness that you might not notice.
His longtime director, Scott Moran, keeps the mood spare, starkly lit and tensely uncomfortable. For a middle-aged married comic, Scovel does a huge amount of material about sex, much of it designed to make him look bad at it and terminally frustrated. There is of course a long history of comics complaining about their wives, but Scovel practices an elaborate version: One of his longest, funniest bits imagines his own death and how he would haunt his wife. This turns into a novella-like portrait of her new life after she remarries a guy named Todd. What begins as a terse revenge fantasy comes off as a very humane portrait of a kind man who replaces him.
In a typically absurd moment, Scovel, as a ghost, yells at Todd in the manner of a person losing an argument: “Jokes built this house.” Then he immediately clarifies: “Yes, we rent, but what I’m basically saying is that jokes pay for the mortgage for that other family to own this house.” Struggling, he adds: “It’s not nothing.”
There’s humor in the subtext but also the emotional performance. Scovel is a fine actor, and he uses that skill in his jokes. The special starts with a quote about loss. Many comics talk about tragedies or trauma to add a new dimension, a heft to their act. But there’s no divide between light and dark in Scovel’s autobiographical material. He knows that bigger laughs are in the incongruity between gravity and superficiality.
His closer is a long set piece that is an absolute master class in craftsmanship. It’s the least sentimental bit about the death of a parent that you will see. And while he likes to put himself into positions that make him look like an amateur, this performance reveals Scovel is an assured, highly skilled pro who knows how to pace a joke, hide misdirection and weave multiple narratives into one punchline. Winging it, in the end, takes a lot of work.
The post Rory Scovel’s New Netflix Special: Winging It Never Sounded So Funny appeared first on New York Times.
