One thing I love about standup comedy—which is perhaps my favourite form of contemporary art—is that it is at once unmediated and reflexive. Standups speak directly to an audience, playing versions of themselves, sometimes with a pseudonym, more often sharing their performer’s name—but characters nonetheless. It’s the original autofiction.
We don’t normally think of the Bible as funny, but the Book of Tobit is another with some unexpected dark humor and subversion. For instance, the bride’s father giving Tobias his daughter’s hand in marriage while telling his servants to dig his grave. The next morning, they sneak in the room to see if he’s still alive and, upon discovering him breathing, run back outside to quietly fill in the grave before the groom finds out.
Kieran, I couldn’t help but think of you when we watched James Acaster’s four-part “Repertoire” special on Netflix. I am not the connoisseur of standup that you are, but those shows (watched as a whole, as they have to be) floored me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. It wasn’t just that he was funny, it’s that it seemed like he was bending and reinventing genres of standup in ways I’d never seen. Hope to talk to you about it sometime. And if you haven’t gotten to it, highly recommended obviously
We don’t normally think of the Bible as funny, but the Book of Tobit is another with some unexpected dark humor and subversion. For instance, the bride’s father giving Tobias his daughter’s hand in marriage while telling his servants to dig his grave. The next morning, they sneak in the room to see if he’s still alive and, upon discovering him breathing, run back outside to quietly fill in the grave before the groom finds out.
Kieran, I couldn’t help but think of you when we watched James Acaster’s four-part “Repertoire” special on Netflix. I am not the connoisseur of standup that you are, but those shows (watched as a whole, as they have to be) floored me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks. It wasn’t just that he was funny, it’s that it seemed like he was bending and reinventing genres of standup in ways I’d never seen. Hope to talk to you about it sometime. And if you haven’t gotten to it, highly recommended obviously