Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In this age of comedy excess, who’d be audacious enough first to push it farther by releasing two comedy specials simultaneously?
While Dave Chappelle seemingly fits that bill, his two-special collection released earlier in 2017 doesn’t quite qualify, as Chappelle had recorded and held onto both Deep In The Heart of Texas and The Age of Spin for a year or two before Netflix came calling and convinced him with cash to release both at once.
No, if it’s audacious you seek, look no further than the guy who dropped his pants in his first stand-up performance on TV. The guy who called himself “The Amazing Racist” for a recurring prank segment that the Sham-Wow guy included in his bad and bonkers movie, InAPPropriate Comedy. The guy who found one of his otherwise innocuous jokes at the flashpoint that exposed Carlos Mencia’s joke thievery. The guy whose comedy storytelling series became a Comedy Central webseries, and later a late-night TV show, only to lose it this year when he sold his new double-special to Netflix instead.
That guy is Ari Shaffir, ladies and germs. Shaffir’s Double Negative collection includes a 44-minute set called Children, followed by a 47-minute called Adulthood; both filmed on the same night at Cap City Comedy Club in Austin. Shaffir took only a brief intermission to change his wardrobe and the lighting, keeping the same crowd in the house.
Shaffir cited “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” the 1995 double-disc collection from The Smashing Pumkpins, as inspiration for him splitting his act thematically into two separate works, and Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” in his end credits “for freeing me as an artist.”
If you know that going in, it might help you connect with Shaffir’s life philosophy that “children are garbage” and that he’ll fail to follow the advice of his school’s guidance counselors “to apply myself.” Or you could just look at the squint in his eyes and hear him describe how stoned he is, and how stoned he gets, and figure out how his laissez-faire libertarian outlook extends to his extended immaturity in adulthood.
When Louis C.K. namechecked Todd Glass on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, it was a for bit he didn’t include on 2017 from his encores in which he jokingly uses Glass as a sounding board. When Shaffir namechecks a fellow comedian, it’s almost always very intimate and possibly embarrassing. He did that on his first stand-up special, and does so again in his Children set. This time, Shaffir is calling out one of his comedian friends for having a baby with a woman he barely knew, and not taking Shaffir’s advice to get an abortion instead. “By the way, nobody asks a married couple, ‘What are you going to do?’” he jokes. Shaffir doesn’t want to have kids himself, nor is he a fan of them in general – and especially not if they’re accompanying their parents at places typically reserved for adults. Like a fancy restaurant. Or Bonnaroo. Or Oktoberfest in Germany. He realizes this routine generally finds him falling out of favor with any moms in his audience, but that’s not going to stop him from feeling nauseous if he has to watch your babies on a cell-phone video. “I feel like I’m Dexter and I have to fake the emotion,” he says. A running thread through the Children episode hinges upon another friend of Shaffir’s who got pregnant from a single Tinder date, and whether she heeds his advice or not.
In Adulthood, meanwhile, Shaffir rejoices in all of the behaviors he can continue to indulge in since he doesn’t have children of his own. Even if it results in STDs or worse for his genitalia. He also drops a “double negative” reference in the beginning of this set, addressing a 1994 track from The Notorious B.I.G. in which he dedicates his rap “to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’.” Shaffir follows that lyric literally down a rabbit hole, before coming back to his own life, and how he avoided becoming a smart adult by smoking a lot of pot. Which eventually finds him traveling to Amsterdam, where a grilled-cheese eatery is more fascinating to him than the Anne Frank House next door.
Shaffir tries to relate young Anne’s legacy to contemporary times, good taste be damned. Which he fully realizes, too, saying: “I can already tell you guys are not going to go with me on this.”
But Shaffir will go farther yet, using a story about one of his gay college friends and doubling-down on it with a more recent trip Shaffir took to Thailand to explain why he thinks he may be homophobic.
Because after all of his sexual adventures and misadventures, if not even “The Thai ladyboy,” which Shaffir jokes “is like the ’92 Dream Team of transsexuals,” cannot seduce him successfully, then what hope does he have for expanding his own sexuality?
Maybe when Shaffir finally matures into full adulthood, he’ll have sorted that all out.
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.
