Rhys Darby: Mystic Time Bird (2021)

Ankle deep in my Our Flag Means Death hyperfixation, I’ve thrown in a number of other Taika Waititi projects to talk about, but I haven’t waded much into Rhys Darby’s other work yet. Not for lack of interest, though—he’s utterly phenomenal as Stede, and I definitely want to see more of him! Rather, I’m still looking through his IMDb and going through my time-honored process of obsessively figuring out what on the list is available to stream and where. But watching a few season 1-era interviews between Darby and Waititi made me curious about his standup career, so when I saw that his most recent special was available on Amazon Prime, I went for it.

This is a fun, interesting, kooky special. Its main throughline, in a roundabout way, is actually the death of Rhys’s mother. He tells a few different stories about her and makes offhand comments like, “I miss Mum, because I think she would’ve loved that joke.” And at different times throughout the special, he brings up grief and the career crisis he went through after her death—the act has a loose framing device about his visit to see a shaman while he was shooting one of the Jumanji films in Hawaii, at a time when he was grieving, lonely, and not feeling “very funny.” It’s an intriguing choice to create a standup special around such a deep personal loss. Even though it’s also crammed with silliness and nonsense, it keeps circling back to this pain, and at times it feels a bit like a confessional.

But yes, also lots of silliness and nonsense! As my first exposure to Rhys’s brand of standup, I enjoyed myself a lot. It’s delightfully weird, with plenty of physicality and sound effects. There’s a bit of observational humor, like the difficulties of living in LA after growing up in a walking country like New Zealand (“On a long weekend, you could walk New Zealand,”) or the absolute chaos of a bird getting trapped inside a house. Oh, and I love his recurring impression about what he thinks his accent sounds like to Americans; I bust up laughing each time he does it.

Most of the routines, though, are more based in storytelling. We get some really fun anecdotes. I love the routine about Rhys’s doomed Westworld audition, with wall-to-wall robot movements and sounds. When he admits to the casting director that he’s never seen Westworld, he asks, “Is it any good?”, then adds in an exasperated aside, “Why would you say that?!?” There’s also a couple stories rooted in Rhys’s love of and talent for sound effects. I especially like the one about his experiment to see if he could get away with mimicking the self-checkout at the grocery store. And there’s a long story about how he reacts when he starts to suspect he’ll be mugged at an ATM—I get such a kick out of the line, “And I’m thinking, for just a second, ‘Shit, should I mug him?’”

Some utterly wild stuff too. The bird-trapped-in-the-house bit is part of a larger routine about all of Rhys’s past lives as birds, in which he impersonates various types of birds across time. And his closing story features a pair of aliens trying to get their faulty spaceship working before they’re spotted by a human. At one point, he laments, “They’re not gonna get in contact because we’re so weird. We keep ruining it!”

I didn’t know what to expect from Rhys as a standup comic, partly because standup is an inherently different animal than comedy acting, and partly because he’s displayed such varied comic sensibilities just in the few films and shows I’ve seen him in. His standup is wonderfully offbeat and really energetic—I had a great time with this special!

Warnings

Language, references to violence, and thematic elements.

Trevor Noah: I Wish You Would (2022)

I didn’t watch Trevor Noah’s most recent Netflix special when it initially came out last year. It dropped shortly before his last episode of The Daily Show, and I wanted to save it for later, knowing that soon I wouldn’t be seeing Noah on my screens regularly anymore. Of course, I quickly forgot about it, so my plan actually worked out better than I thought! It’s been ten months since he left the show, and the show itself has been off the air for five due to the writers’ strike. But now that the strike has finally been resolved and The Daily Show has a return date, I remembered that I never checked out this special.

And honestly, it felt so good to have new Trevor Noah comedy to watch. I Wish You Would covers a handful of good topics mixed with a healthy dollop of fun. Early on, we get an older bit I’d seen before—Trevor making an uncomfortable discovery about his spoken German—but it’s attached to a larger routine that was all new to me. Talking about the German language leads into some ruminations on the word schadenfreude. Trevor notes, “Fun fact: that word was never translated into another language. I wonder why.” But he quickly admits that we all experience schadenfreude and dives into assorted examples, the best of which looks at the relationship between colonized nations and the British royal family. The bit on Elizabeth II’s death is especially good—I loved, “Buried with the jewels, #winning! You want the colonies to be sad? Those are their jewels!”

I’ve always liked Trevor’s talent for creating chains of routines, where one topic flows fluidly into another and another, each one a jumping-off point for the next. It can make it hard to reduce his comedy into shorter bite-sized clips, but I love seeing it in action in these longer-form settings. Ragging on people making dumb decisions in horror movies is nothing new, but I really like the way Trevor segues from this topic into the pandemic, realizing how dumb many people became once they were in a situation where they needed to take practical steps to stay safe. “If there’s one thing coronavirus did, it taught me how many of my friends are absolute idiots,” he remarks. “Everyone studied at the University of Facebook.”

Once he starts in on the subject of COVID, Trevor covers it from several different insightful and entertaining angles. We get the way a real-life global disaster is like nothing he imagined based on movies—“We were supposed to be a team. Will Smith was supposed to be our hero. None of it went as planned!” There’s an excellent bit about COVID response on the African continent compared to the Western world, which also looks back on media coverage of Ebola in the mid-2010s. And I love Trevor’s pet “conspiracy theory” that the pandemic came about due to too much wishing, saying, “COVID was essentially like an asshole genie that gave us everything we asked for.” We look at all the people who wished they could spend less time at the office, more time with their kids, and all day every day with their significant other. Whoops!

There’s a fun riff on world leaders—we start by comparing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump’s reactions to getting COVID, then dovetail into a bit on how every U.S. president has a weird voice. Sure, it’s mainly an excuse for Trevor to trot out various presidential impressions, but he does it well, so I’m certainly not about to complain. Plus, I love him imagining someone without a weird voice trying to campaign and getting heckled offstage as a “normal-sounding-ass bitch.”

The final big set piece of the special revolves around an anecdote about ordering Indian food in Scotland, but of course it’s not merely that. It starts with a bit on Justin Trudeau—“He has the most adorable scandals. Are you kidding me?”—takes a detour to Trevor’s childhood, and includes the delightful line, “My tongue discovered its purpose!” It also has plenty of accent work, another thing Trevor does very well. And even apart from the side bits, the main anecdote takes all kinds of hilarious and suspenseful turns.

This is a great special, and I think I was able to appreciate it even more by watching it now instead of last year. It’s been so long since I was getting a regular dose of Trevor’s comedy and commentary, and seeing his standup again was so refreshing and fun.

Warnings

Language (including the N-word,) sexual references, and thematic elements.

John Mulaney: New in Town (2012)

This is the earliest John Mulaney special that’s available on Netflix, while Kid Gorgeous is his third, written six years apart. I can see the reflection of some of Mulaney’s maturity as a comedian, as some of the jokes here are a little rougher compared to Kid Gorgeous. Still very funny, though, with heaps of Mulaney’s hilariously-emphatic delivery. Overall, it’s been nice to watch so many standup specials recently, but I am glad that The Daily Show is returning next week. Let’s just say they’ve missed a lot!

After catching a YouTube clip of Kid Gorgeous’s fantastic “there’s a horse loose in a hospital” bit, I’ve spent the occasional night bouncing from Mulaney clip to Mulaney clip, and several of the excellent routines I’ve found stem from this special. I adore the whole bit about how much harder it is to do things than not do things – his demonstration of the way an adult’s face lights up when they say they didn’t do anything over the weekend is spot-on. There’s also a stupendous bit about the New York Post (“It’s like someone read the news in a better paper and is now texting you what they remember; it doesn’t have to be accurate, it just has to be short,”) in which he lays out their hierarchy of humanity, from “angels” to “pervs.” Some good jokes about Mulaney’s childhood, such as the racist bullying he received from kids who mistakenly thought he was Asian American and likening his youthful flamboyance to being like “an old queen,” as well as a bit about his confusion over why he’d want his girlfriend to meet his parents when things are going well between them.

Plenty of stuff I hadn’t seen before too. There’s a really fun sequence about Law & Order: SVU, and I like Mulaney’s contrasting examples of the ways his parents, both lawyers, used to put him “on trial” as a child. He also has quite a bit of material about being sober/his life before getting sober, which is a little sad in retrospect, given the recent news about him entering rehab. However, recovery is rarely a straight line, so I was able to appreciate this material from a time in Mulaney’s life when he was doing well and hope he’s able to get himself there again. I really love the way he talks about people’s complete inability to fathom what to offer him at parties in lieu of alcohol, and he shares some of the stories he’s heard about himself from when he used to get blackout drunk, though he’s in the dark about whether or not they’re true.

I mentioned some rougher jokes in this special compared to Kid Gorgeous, and it’s not about the construction – the setup, the delivery, the turns of phrase, etc. Rather, it’s to do with the content. There are some jokes, sprinkled in here and there, that feel a little uncomfortable to me. I’ve had the misfortune to see standups who are way more racist/sexist/homophobic/ableist, grossly overt while at the same time aggressively unfunny, but having gotten used to Mulaney as a more thoughtful comedian, I don’t really like these moments. They never really go on very long, and I hesitate to call it full-on punching down, but they’re lazy, easy moments that don’t sit right with me. I’ve had similar thoughts about early specials from Trevor Noah, and in both cases, I greatly appreciate that Noah and Mulaney are comedians who’ve grown more judicious with their humor. Their more recent work ably proves that 1) comedians don’t have to take cheap shots to be funny and 2) their material is often better without it.

Warnings

Language, sexual references, drinking/drug references, some off-color jokes, and thematic elements.