The Tom Brady celebrity roast on Netflix ended with regret (he said he wouldn’t do it again), outrage (“Super Bowl of Cruelty,” The Washington Post thundered) and weeks of chatter. In other words, it was exactly what the streamer surely had hoped for. The other major winner was the stand-up Nikki Glaser, whose set was perfect promotion for her knockout new special.
She begins her tight, cynical hour about the end of your 30s with a pugnacious bit about why she doesn’t want to have kids and finishes with another on why getting married is settling. Both show off Glaser’s gift for grabbing a subject, attacking it from every side, playing smart and dumb, ingratiating and insulting, going sweet or sour. Her joke tool kit overflows. Her most assured tack finds laughs by cluelessly saying the wrong thing, as when she tests out ideas for a friend’s baby shower, mulling bull-riding or a trampoline park before arriving at a “stomach-punching contest at a staircase museum.”
Glaser, who calls herself a “rangy broad,” likes the polish of old-school showbiz. In a glittery dress, she closes with a ta-da of a final line. But she can also get real. There’s a vulnerable subtext to her steely persona. You can even see it in her roasts if you squint. Our harshest insults often reflect our own insecurities, and this new hour is so wised-up on the dreams of youth that it can seem melancholy. Looking for a soul mate? “Your soul mate statistically is in China,” she quips. “The closest you’ll get is your soul mate touched your phone on an assembly line.”
In his debut “Money Never Wakes,” Nathan Macintosh squeaked in rage over the obscene inequities of class in this country. His follow-up, “Down With Tech,” also self-produced, focuses his populist fury on the tech oligarchs and how much of our attention we have conceded to their whims. Together they form a mad-as-hell double-header perfectly suited for our era: angry at elites, hilariously exasperated and flamboyantly ineffectual.
By the end of this polemical hour, you almost wonder if the reason his new special doesn’t have more views on YouTube is that the people controlling the algorithm have thin skin. Macintosh mocks our soulless scrolling culture as a reflection of the “salamander face” and “dead lifeless eyes” of Mark Zuckerberg. The indifference of the tech world to human labor and dignity, in his account, is absolute. In a decade, he declares in a dystopian aside, the only jobs left for human beings will be influencer, robot cleaner and the person shoving rising sea levels back into the ocean.
There aren’t as many comic highlights as in his previous hour, but the overall special is more cohesive. And Macintosh’s persona is even more refined. With his eye-popping and gesticulating approach, his comedy belongs to the tradition of the overwhelmed little guy, the desperate nebbish — a Little Tramp for the social media age. He’s fighting the tech bros for all of us, but when he says eyes are “the screens of the soul,” you know we lost.
Rachel Feinstein, ‘Big Guy’
(Stream it on Netflix)
Rachel Feinstein married well, comedically. I’m not saying the veteran New York stand-up got hitched to an Irish Catholic firefighter for the jokes, but if she did, it was a savvy career move. Her special feels like a culture-clashing sitcom, centering on the divide between her liberal Jewish roots (“My dad’s name is Howie, and he has a never-ending sinus infection”) and the knockabout world of the New York firehouse. A gifted mimic, Feinstein creates crowded scenes, but her impression of her lovable galoot of a husband dominates, showing up so early and often that it even threatens to crowd out her own voice.
Spouse humor can get a bad rap, but who do you know better? And the intimate portrait of the life of the firefighter adds texture to comedy that can veer into caricature. Her jokes range from his emotional makeup to his speech patterns to unexpected details about his co-workers, like the fact that many of them moonlight as D.J.s. “I always wondered what that would feel like,” Feinstein muses, “to have the most respected job and the least respected job at the same exact time.”
Neal Brennan, ‘Crazy Good’
(Stream it on Netflix)
Neal Brennan’s jokes have premises that stick in your mind, the kinds of taut, brain-tickling ideas that would make great story pitches or internet headlines. A few hot takes from his new special: Documentaries are the reason for the increase in anxiety and depression. “The sun is basically the cops for white people.” “The best athlete is generally the craziest one.”
These make you want to hear more, and even when the subsequent argument and punchline don’t live up to the premise, not to worry: He’s on to another provocative thought. Brennan is a better idea man than performer, and he’s self-aware enough to play to his strengths, adapting to the times, adding a few clever visual flourishes to break up the jokes (like attack ads from one religion about another). Early on, he guiltily confesses that he spends a lot of time on social media, and his comedy feels like it, not just in its alertness to that peculiar language and discourse, but also in its punchy spirit and impatience, the way it’s tightly curated and drunk on argument. His new hour is not his most ambitious, but it’s the most fun, as attention-grabbing as a TikTok scroll.
Ian Abramson, ‘The Heist’
(Rent or buy it on YouTube, Amazon or Apple TV+)
If you’re a comedy fan with an experimental bent, give this giddily oddball performer a shot. He begins with a cinematic heist scene and ends with a wild lark of a closer that no one will see coming. With a thin mustache and a curl of hair dangling down his perspiring forehead, Ian Abramson looks like Gomez Addams gone to seed. His work is aggressively high concept (he does an impression of a kernel of popcorn) and leans hard on a vaudevillian spirit that evokes the early ambitions of Steve Martin. Abramson aims for novelty, but not at the expense of the jokes.
In fact, he’s so committed to getting laughs that at one point he puts on a collar that will deliver an electric shock if his bit doesn’t work. (An audience member holding a remote control decides.) It’s his way of saying that while he may be adventurous, he’s not precious. It’s stand-up by way of the Coney Island sideshow. Abramson says he has trouble remembering the order of letters in the alphabet, so he made a mnemonic device to help. It began: “Acronym-based comedy doesn’t ever feel good.”
