The film director Lars von Trier once said that to shoot a nude scene with Willem Dafoe, he had to hire a body double for the actor because Dafoe was so well-endowed it would distract audiences.
This is the kind of juicy Hollywood anecdote that draws attention from comedians looking for material to joke about, but what angle they take can be revealing. In his rascally new special, “Incorrect,” Sam Morril imagines the call from the double’s agent telling him he got the part. “You did it, buddy,” Morril said. “Everybody’s very impressed by how not big it is.”
Morril likes a dirty joke, but not as much as a precisely awkward phrase. In this case, “not big” is much funnier than “small.” Morril favors the seedier and overlooked corners of show business, small-time agents, trash-talking magicians and especially that much mythologized brand of standup: the hard-living road comic, that debauched loner, traveling from town to town, making drunks laugh.
Some versions, like, say, Doug Stanhope, adopt a renegade philosopher streak. Others pander for cheap chuckles or wallow in the muck. Then there are the joke merchants; Morril is one of the best and most prolific today. Making his life on the road a central part of his act, he tells jokes that pivot quickly, building to stripped-to-the-bone punchlines single-mindedly focused on belly laughs. He’s the kind of technician who responds to groans over dark material by asking the crowd to at least admire the structure. He usually has a point.
Constantly taking you behind the curtain of his process, he narrates his own jokes, reminding you he’s not the hero of one or putting on his critic’s hat to tell you that he has not grown as a person at all. The road is not great for moral betterment. A characteristically self-aware punchline from Morril: “The thing about a good miscarriage joke is that without a proper delivery, you got nothing.”
Morril, whose popularity grew when he released a rooftop hour on YouTube during the pandemic, has put out seven consistently funny specials of new material since 2015. The title of his latest one, “Incorrect,” evokes those edgelord hours in which a comic pats himself on the back for being transgressive. But Morril’s laid-back sets are absent of grievance. There’s an unflappable professionalism to his persona that feels connected to an older, disreputable showbiz, when comics followed crooners in nightclubs run by the mob. Morril has little interest in making a point, but he does want to create a mood.
Standing in front of yellowing posters and an illuminated sign that blares “Lounge,” he’s dressed in a suit and T-shirt like a character from “Miami Vice.” But Tampa, Fla., where he shot the special, better fits his vibe. Morril, based in New York, gravitates to the humiliations of success and the glamour of failure.
In the raspy voice of someone who stayed out too late at a loud bar, he tells stories about striking out with comedy crowds and bombing at one-night stands. While his many dating stories include gripes about girlfriends, they never come off as badly as he does. He will be the first to tell you he’s a bad listener, and sex at this stage in his life doesn’t last that long. When a disappointed woman he just slept with asks, “Is this a joke?” he responds, “No, my humor is much more layered and complex.”
Morril is self-deprecating, but not in a neurotic or brooding way. There’s a swagger to his lowlife stories. Getting no respect, to paraphrase another comic, is a noble comedic tradition. And Morril makes being a loser look like fun.
As unpretentious as he may be, you can also see hints of ambition. His work has grown over the years, less in its content than in its form. He increasingly layers punchlines into stories to create the feel of a guy at a party telling you what happened last weekend. You can hear the verbal strut of Dave Attell in the rhythm of his jokes. (Morril’s bit about the solution for school shootings could count as homage.) But the way he strings them together is slowly inching toward Mike Birbiglia.
You see a nice marriage of jerky standup and conceptual artist in his very funny forays into morning television. His goal is always to make the news anchors uncomfortable by, say, repeatedly bringing up sex trafficking to a chipper broadcaster and seeing how he handles it.
This special’s title refers to something a woman on a plane who took his seat tells him. This is part of a broader story about turbulence that got so bad it seemed as if the plane could crash. In the middle of this crisis, he tells a mean joke, then cackles wildly. In that moment, he says, he forgot about dying.
This leads to the closest thing to a thesis statement you will get from Sam Morril. “That’s all laughter is,” he says, a bit more grandly than usual. “Temporarily forgetting you’re going to die.”
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