Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In Joe Mande’s world, Joe Mande is a star, worthy of all the awards and adulation that comes with it.
Just look at these promotional plaudits for Joe Mande’s Award-Winning Comedy Special in his first official Netflix trailer, or the fact that he’s already seemingly given himself an award for it in advance!
The conceit, in fact, is that Mande wants to win the (fictitious) “American Humour Award,” and before we see him perform any actual stand-up, Mande talks to the camera in the style of TV shows he’s worked on such as Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, he seeks out advice from former “American Humour Award” winners Bo Burnham and George Wallace, and casually shoots hoops with “Joe’s Best Friend” and NBA All-Star Blake Griffin.
It’s all a bit absurd (including his insistence on naming an infamous director to work with him), but Mande commits when the action cuts to him onstage, then to a three-person judges panel in the audience marking down any standing ovations and applause breaks he receives during the performance.
After joking about his ambiguously vague ethnic look — which had New Yorkers thinking he was Puerto Rican, and at least one black woman in Los Angeles thinking he was black, too — Mande devotes the bulk of his material to TV shows.
A discussion of the mid-2000s MTV dating series, Next, finds Mande debating the politics of dick pics. He really enjoys some deep cuts analyzing the HBO documentary, Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop. And he has plenty of ideas for the ABC reality show, Shark Tank, and he’s even built a website for one of his pitches he describes in this Netflix special (spoiler alert if you click here to see Mande’s Shark Tank idea!). “It’s a paradigm shift. I’m a visionary,” he jokingly claims of this idea. “It would revitalize the economy. It would end obesity as we know it.” Fans of Mande likely know hundreds of other crackpot ideas over the past decade thanks to his live variety show, “Totally J/K,” which he has hosted in New York City and Los Angeles with his friend and fellow Emerson College grad and sitcom writer Noah Garfinkel. Mande shares some stories about him and Garfinkel getting high when they lived in NYC and attending tapings of Maury and Huckabee. They don’t prove quite as dangerous as Mande’s Google history of videos might suggest.
But the set does lead Mande to acknowledge at one point: “It’s a real question if I even do stand-up anymore. Honestly feels like I just get onstage and recommend documentaries.”
Is that enough to earn him a trophy at the 189th Annual American Humour Awards, hosted by Andy Richter?
I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it’s worth noting that Mande convinced his funny friends Nick Kroll, Kristen Schaal, Chelsea Peretti and Ron Funches to dress up and play nice (or naughty) as his fellow nominees.
We’ll also have to wait to see if Joe Mande’s Shark Tank idea really takes off. So to speak. But if it does, he definitely deserves all the awards.
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.
