Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Stand-up comedy in 2017 exists somewhere between the more, the merrier, and too much of a good thing.
The digital boom has bestowed us with more comedians and more comedy specials than ever before, and as much as we all need to laugh either to escape the horror of real life or to mock the ridiculousness of it, not everyone who’s putting out new hours of stand-up each year has the material worth filling that time. I’ve certainly seen and reviewed plenty of comedy hours (whether on Netflix, HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, EPIX, Seeso or beyond) that weren’t half-bad, except that they also were.
Thank goodness for Netflix’s The Standups.
Proving that great jokes can come from great joke-tellers in 27 or 28 minutes, The Standups has declared independence from the hour-long comedy special format for established stand-up comedians. They deliver this Fourth of July with a six-pack of half-hours from Dan Soder, Nate Bargatze, Fortune Feimster, Deon Cole, Nikki Glaser and Beth Stelling.
For context:
In the past decade, only Comedy Central has presented half-hour stand-up specials annually to up-and-coming comedians under the Comedy Central Presents and The Half-Hour banners. Before them, HBO used to also grant half-hour slots to all sorts of jokesters, most recently in 2005 with One Night Stand specials for the likes of Louis C.K., Jim Norton, Patrice Oneal, Bill Burr and Flight of the Conchords.
Now comes Netflix, with The Standups arriving as a counterpart to last year’s series of half-hour comedy specials, The Characters. If The Characters served as showcases for future star sketch players such as Lauren Lapkus, Tim Robinson and John Early, then The Standups has allowed these stand-ups to deliver all killer, no filler.
And with bingeing in mind, the half-hours share veteran comedy director Troy Miller, who has designed the end of each stand-up special to segue seamlessly to the next.
Miller’s camera finds Dan Soder lollygagging in conversation back in the kitchen. Soder, a recurring character on Showtime’s Billions and a weeknight voice on SiriusXM’s Comedy Central Radio, has become one of the strongest stand-up comedians working today. He does so, in part, by coming across as an overgrown man-child whom you can introduce to your parents. Or especially your grandmother. After making fun of himself for not only having a roommate at age 33, but also having that roommate catch him talking in a higher-pitched voice with his grandmother, Soder suggests: “I think that’s actually a good test, ladies. You should have your boyfriend call his grandma right in front of you. See what kind of man you’re putting inside of you.” Soder might not have the confidence to get high with his grandma or catcall a woman ever, but neither of those are bad things whatsoever.
Soder ends by walking out of the venue, where he meets Nate Bargatze‘s ride as it pulls up curbside. If you love Soder but somehow think he’s too aggressive or too intellectual for you, then you’ll really love Bargatze. Bargatze won’t hesitate to tell audiences he’s neither college-educated nor that engaged in what’s going on around him. He’s aware there was or is a pipeline protest, but that’s about the extent of it, and he follows Leonardo DiCaprio on Twitter, but “he Tweets nothing fun out.” Stay through the end for his closing story about a trip to the Cape Fear Serpentarium, but know that if any joke captures his essence in this half-hour, it’s when Bargatze reveals he asked a comedy pal for advice on a bit about shopping at Walmart: “Hey, do you think if I told people I was buying a hammock, is that going to come off like I’m bragging?”
The camera swoops high into the crowd, then back down to greet Fortune Feimster, who as a North Carolina native, is only half-joking when she openly declares: “I am a woman. So do not kick me out of the bathroom, please!” You’ve likely seen Feimster on Chelsea or The Mindy Project, but if you haven’t, she hopes she’s not surprising you that she’s a lesbian. It didn’t quite surprise her family, although her retelling of it does allow Feimster to get in a topical dig at the Trump administration. Which she quickly tags with a qualifier: “Oooh, my one political joke.” In fact, the LGBTQ protests against Chick-fil-A forced her hand. “That was a dark day, you guys,” she jokes. “Cause here’s the deal, people. I’m fat first, lesbian second.” She has enjoyed, or rather, not so much, her rare sexually-charged encounters with men in her life, and you’ll get to hear all about it here.
Deon Cole is waiting in the back of the room to go up next, and the black-ish co-star and former Conan writer takes a decidedly different and daring take on his new Netflix time, pulling out notes and announcing: “What I’m going to do tonight is, I’m going to try out some jokes. Do some jokes. Hopefully they work, and if they don’t, I’m never going to see y’all again so it don’t matter. Also, I only wrote black material. White people, I didn’t know y’all was coming. So, just sit there and take that s—.” To be fair, not all of Cole’s jokes about race. He’s got plenty of non-sequitur observations and one-liners, too. But Cole keeps his experimental new joke conceit up until the end, which either will earn your respect or make you go meh.
Either way, Cole leaves the mic open for Nikki Glaser to take over. Glaser jokes about just getting out of a long-term relationship, and all of the farts she’d held inside for all those years. She’s braver about wearing a tampon through the TSA checkpoint than she is about filling out her Match.com profile, afterward. It might make more sense to you that Glaser talks more freely about her sex life than she does about revealing other personal things about herself, since she did star last year in her own Comedy Central series mixing sex and comedy, Not Safe with Nikki Glaser. And so she’ll leave you with helpful hints and warnings about what goes where and when, and a more appropriate phrase to remember than “you play with fire, you’re going to get burned.”
Beth Stelling is waiting in the wings as Glaser walks offstage, and in her view, “The TSA is mostly performance art.” Stelling is that friend you wish you could be who had just the right, most clever, sharpest thing to say in any given moment — whether you’re stuck in an elevator with an elderly man, getting body-searched by TSA agents, or caught by a bystander doing something that looks worse than it is. When she once saw 198 on her scale, she wondered: “Can. We. Get there!?” To her sister who claimed that her wedding couldn’t go awry because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, Stelling replied: “Statistics disagree.” She has since shed the weight, which means Facebook memories don’t seem so sweet or thoughtful to her. Stelling may jokingly claim that “nothing makes a dick go softer than a funny woman,” but those aren’t real men she’s talking about.
Which leads us back to Soder as her half-hour ends with nobody waiting to go on next.
No matter where you start, you’ll likely have some new favorites of your own to mention when friends or family ask you about your own tastes in stand-ups.
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.
