Making David Cross Great Again

Barely a week after Sarah Silverman addressed the Democratic National Convention for a few minutes, joined onstage by former Saturday Night Live writer and current U.S. Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken, here comes David Cross with a sincere, sarcastic and sometimes strident 73 minutes that’s above all else timely, if not always laugh-out-loud funny.

Cross named his 2016 stand-up comedy tour and new Netflix special, Making America Great Again!, as more than a nod toward Donald J. Trump’s far-fetched bid for the Republican nomination. By April, when Cross filmed this tour stop at the Moontower Comedy & Oddity Festival in Austin, Texas, his target had outgrown the cartoonish narcissist his tour name lampoons, as his pointed humor took him toward gun control and the NRA, and even back to religion.

But first! Cross opens his Netflix special with a few light-hearted minutes of Reddit-meets-real-life, sort of, as a TV monitor in the foyer of Austin’s Paramount Theatre allowed audience members to interact with Cross and ask him anything. Sometimes he offered an honest answer. Oftentimes he’d mock the process. When a young man asked him simply, “How are you?” Cross launches into his FAQs, as if he’s not truly interacting. “I get these a lot. They get sent to my Facebook page. So, in no particular order, what Beatle am I? Ringo. Friends? I’m Ross. What apostle? I’m Luke…What percent milk? I’m 2 percent milk. What Jonestown Massacre victim am I? Yanetta McCrea.” (NOTE: That’s not a real person.)

How many comedians have their own theme song and entrance music? A customized version of “The Underdog” by Spoon greets his audience, alerts them to not heckle, turn off their cell phones and welcome Cross to the stage. That’s both real, and really cool.

Is Cross really an underdog, though? Has he ever been? Can we even take him seriously?

It’s long been part of his push-pull with audiences. Even back in 1999, when Cross made The Pride is Back for HBO, his pride included losing the attention and affection of his audience with prolonged jokes about religion. And when he opens Making America Great Again! with a story from his current tour, about a “You Get What You Get” policy from a tattoo parlor in Northern California, he follows an act-out imagining the parlor’s tattoo policy in action with two tattoos he could imagine getting for himself. One silly. One real. Maybe. Who knows. His approach straddles the line, almost as if he’s delivering answers in an episode of Hollywood Squares — even if you could never picture Cross agreeing to appear on that game show. Can you even picture him on the revived edition of Match Game? Perhaps he is the underdog. Then again, see Alvin and the Chipmunks.

The first half-hour of Cross’s latest effort follows slightly silly, slightly real tangents to their most unusual conclusions. From his own annual family gatherings in Atlanta for Thanksgiving, to wondering how and why there’s a luggage store inside the airport terminal, to the passing fad of vape stores, to following a pedestrian in New York City whom he overhears interrupting his stream of profanities with shouts of “Hi, Hitler!”

But a crude joke about pleasuring himself to the Statue of Liberty leads Cross to the meat of the matter of what’s the matter, in his mind, with why America and the world might be kept from achieving greatness.

Case in point: The Statue of Liberty itself, which includes that classic poem inviting the huddled masses to immigrate to the United States of America, and how Republicans aren’t in sync with it any longer. “What is the cognitive dissonance for those people?” Cross asks. “Their heads must explode. I don’t know how they deal with it.” The GOP must look at the statue’s motto now and think it weak. And politicians who align themselves with Ayn Rand are in for a rude awakening when they learn how she spent the final days of her life.

Trump exudes no mystery, no enigma, no riddle for Cross to solve, by contrast. “At least 25 percent of this county has always been ignorant, racist xenophobes who are easily appealed to on an emotional level. That’s it. That’s always been the case!  They didn’t just pop up once Obama was elected.” Cross goes in deep for a few minutes to explain how Trump became the Republican standard-bearer, and what his followers mean when they say “he’s telling it like it is.”

It’ll only be a mystery to me if his chunk on Trump doesn’t become a viral video hit like Jim Jefferies found with guns. Probably will earn Cross the same intense level of hatred backlash, too.

Especially since Cross also has opinions on gun control, which he prefaces by invalidating the argument that anyone anywhere is coming to confiscate a gun owner’s arsenal. Instead, Cross simply wonders why guns cannot employ the same fingerprint ID technology that we already allow to access our cell phones. On that point, most sane people can agree.

But Cross takes it farther, further.

His ideas tying Blue Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter without saying the latter, truly effective, despite alienating those who believe only the former.

And yet, Cross continues to push all the buttons to prove his point about the need for rational gun control, figuring that if the Sandy Hook massacre couldn’t change the hearts and minds of an NRA-lobbied Congress, what about a fantasy scenario in which a gunman takes out a Congressman’s daughter? It’s dark, heavy stuff. You’re not expected to applaud or laugh. Cross then spins his hypothetical forward toward prayers, imagining a religious person asking God why He’s taking so many children. At which point, the camera deliberately cuts to a woman standing up from her seat and walking out. Sure, she could have merely had to visit the bathroom or the bar.

But Cross wants you to know that he knows his material and his decisions on what needs to be said onstage will not only provoke thoughts, but also derision and desertion.

“For those of you still here,” he says, acknowledging that a few audience members leave during every one of his shows. Although he wonders why they showed up in the first place. “In 2016, at this point, I have literally eight-plus hours of my stand-up available to peruse, check out, maybe see if we’re on the same page about what subject matters I may broach,” he says. And yet, Cross realizes a handful of fans haven’t done due diligence, instead thinking: “Oh, Tobias is in town!”

When it comes to religion, Cross self-describes as an atheist, acknowledging that religious organizations do good work, charitable deeds, lift people up and give them purpose, while also being responsible for horrible misdeeds. Even if we now have a “cool Pope,” Cross adds: “The bar for being a cool Pope could not be lower if we were lying at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.”

Ultimately, Cross believes and can joke sincerely about the notion that we all really just want to be left alone and not told by others what to do with our lives. Which he tags with the sweet irony that Americans make an exception for our Founding Fathers – they can tell this straw man what to do. That argument hilariously frustrates Cross. “These people couldn’t conceive of Oregon! What a monumental waste of time!” The Americans of 1776 wouldn’t believe much of anything we consider normal in 2016 (which is a common enough joke premise), so Cross leaps forward, too, asking us to imagine how we’d feel if we slept for 200+ years and awoke to a new normal.

If you’re still with Cross, he’ll scale it back by the end to a slightly less distant, less serious future moment.

There’s an encore, too, for those of you who wondered if Cross still could and would mine reading materials for comedy gold.

The camera shoots Cross most often either in close-up, or at a distance from behind him, looking out at the audience as a silhouette in the spotlight. He’s delivering this post-DNC keynote in one of America’s hippest cities, albeit also the capital city of the one state so conservative its residents will remind us how quickly and easily it could leave the U.S. and return to its Republic status.

That push-pull again.

Perhaps Cross is the underdog, again, or still. That’s kind of how he likes it.

[Watch David Cross: Making America Great Again! on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.