Tom Papa, ‘Home Free’
If the scroll of election news has you in the mood for some light distraction and cheer-me-up laughs, Tom Papa’s latest special arrives just in time. The ultimate escapist comedian, Papa has built a soothingly funny body of work with a persona that stands out in these anxious times: a sensible optimist who thinks you are too hard on yourself. The title of his last special sums up his message: “You’re doing great!”
Papa — the perfect name for his brand of middle-aged dad comedy — tells well-crafted jokes about family secrets and hot-dog-eating contests with the spirit of a self-help guru. Even his complaints come out as gratitude. “A good day is any day I don’t have to retrieve a username and password,” he once joked.
In his new special, he opens with an unexpectedly sunny take on being an empty-nester. It’s set up with an unshowy deftness that lets you know you are in good hands. His delivery is lilting and subtle. When one of my daughters was getting a little weepy about the prospect of her sister leaving home, I showed this joke to her and the mood lightened. Papa shot the special in Washington, D.C., and nods to Americans’ exhaustion with politics, before suggesting we take a break from the news now and then. “You can know too much,” he says. “Ignorance is bliss” is a theme.
He loves that therapy is popular, but it’s not for him. “I’m having a good time,” he says. “If I go to therapy, they’re going to stop it.” And yet, Papa can sound like a therapist — or at least a comedian version of one.
He asks questions that reframe your perspective to something healthier. Is there some “power of positive thinking” hokum here? Sure. But there’s also an entertainer’s ethos that the job is to make you forget your troubles — come on, get happy. This doesn’t mean avoiding darkness. In fact, Papa understands that grim news is necessary to find the incongruity that will make you laugh. In explaining to a child what “nuclear Armageddon” means, he gives it as rosy a slant as one could. “We’re all going to die someday and there’s a way we can all die on the same day.” Then he smiles and does a little dance.
James Adomian, ‘Path of Most Resistance’
James Adomian is one of our greatest comic impressionists not because of the accuracy of his versions of Bernie Sanders, David Attenborough and other larger-than-life personalities. Although, they are feast. It’s what he does with the characters once he captures their voices, stylizing them with comic gusto, zeroing in on an eccentricity, placing them in a new context and steadily increasing speed and volume. He’s a comic whirligig whose imitations hit levels of funny matched only by Dana Carvey.
In his new hour, Adomian’s imagining of the conspiracist Alex Jones as a punctilious grammarian is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen all year. But it’s topped by a magnificently constructed character who deserves his own show. He’s a self-regarding over-the-hill writer who after failure turns conservative and starts his own Substack. You know the type: Being thrown out of a Vanity Fair party for refusing to use correct pronouns was the last straw. “Why should a man of letters be burdened with pronouns?” he intones with the bravado of someone who probably dreamed of breaking up a fight between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer.
Adomian’s impressions can be stinging but also affectionate, specific while abstract. And more so than in previous work, he integrates them into jokes, albeit they’re occasionally shoehorned in. You won’t mind though. Around a dozen years ago, I wrote an essay wondering if he would become a transformative superstar. It didn’t happen. After two decades as a widely respected comedian, this is — stunningly — his debut special. It’s not being produced by a major streaming service like Netflix. He put it out himself.
It’s a reminder that show business is not fair and attention is not doled out on merit. Look hard enough and you can find this idea in the subtext of some of the jokes here, from a discussion about how our culture ignores Armenians (like him) to another about the parts that gay actors over 40 (like him) can play (the adviser to the king, never the king). But this is not a bitter or self-serious special. It’s a funny one. After boasting that he produced and edited it on his own, the familiar spiel of the do-it-yourself comic builds to a righteous climax: “And then when it’s all done,” he says, “I can pass on it, just like a network.”
Emily Catalano, ‘Unspecial’
Steven Wright. Tig Notaro. Todd Barry. Add another name to the family tree of hilarious deadpan comics whose slow, precision delivery leans on long pauses and punchlines that come from nowhere. Dressed in black with braids hanging down from a brown winter cap, Emily Catalano is the opposite of flashy. Her voice is steady, soft and so dry it’s parched. In front of a brick wall, she barely moves, unveiling killer jokes one clause at a time.
There’s a spectacular biblical line that echoes off another about her evangelical parents, who told her that she was going to hell. “And this was even after I told them I didn’t want any spoilers,” she says.
In less than 40 minutes, Catalano wastes no words and, despite an understated style, finds belly laughs. While coming across as introspective and awkward, she delivers jokes that go for the jugular. After a section about growing up naïve about sex, she describes with a sense of earnest curiosity learning about penises, first through Wikipedia, then in real life. Likening the endowment of men she dates to their bank accounts, she adopts a thoughtful pose. “To me, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “No matter what you’re working with, I’m going to completely drain it.”
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