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      Best Comedy of 2021

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      The return of indoor shows brought comedy closer to normal, and there were plenty of specials from Bo Burnham, Tig Notaro, Roy Wood Jr. and others.From left, a scene from Tig Notaro’s HBO special “Drawn,” Susie Essman in HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Tiffany Haddish in Netflix’s “Bad Trip.”From left: HBO; John P. Johnson/HBO; Dimitry Elyashkevich/NetflixComedy got dangerous in 2021. Not cancel-culture dangerous (though after creating one of the loudest controversies of the year with his Netflix special “The Closer,” Dave Chappelle might disagree). More like “I might contract Covid at this show” dangerous. After a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime shutdown of live performances, audiences returned to indoor shows, and comics picked up where they left off. These are some of the highlights.Best Punch Line Inside a Club to Defuse Covid AnxietyOne night at the Comedy Cellar, Dave Attell told a guy in the crowd: “I’m glad you’re wearing a mask because we need a survivor to tell the story.” But in the basement of the West Side Comedy Club, Bill Burr took down the elephant in the room even quicker: “I’m happy to be down here working on a new variant.”Best Experimental ComedyTig Notaro is not the first stand-up to turn herself into a cartoon, but her “Drawn” HBO special was the most ambitious attempt, using a different animated style for each bit — realistic one moment, whimsically fantastical the next, veering from the perspective of the audience to a cockroach. Imagine if Pixar did stand-up.A scene from “Drawn,” an animated HBO special from Tig Notaro, which uses a different animated style for each bit.HBOBest Musical ComedyThis was the year that visual humor caught up to the verbal kind in comedy specials. Bo Burnham invented a new comic vocabulary with his Netflix hit “Inside,” a filmic meditation on isolation, the internet and ironic distance itself. It was so tuneful and thematically well made that a blockbuster musical is surely in his future.Best Opening BitIn “Imperfect Messenger,” a Comedy Central special packed with refined comic gems, Roy Wood Jr. begins by discussing things that are not racist but feel racist. Things that have, as he puts it while rubbing his thumb and his fingers together as if he’s grasping at something, “the residue of racism” — like when white people use the word “forefathers,” or when you go somewhere and there’s “too many American flags,” which he calls “too much freedom.” He rubs his fingers and thumb again and asks: “How many American flags equal one Confederate flag?”Roy Wood Jr. in his Comedy Central special “Imperfect Messenger.”Sean Gallagher/Comedy CentralBest DirectingWith a jangling horror soundtrack, claustrophobic close-ups and the menacing humor of a Pinter play, the movie “Shiva Baby” offers a modern spin on the postgraduate angst of “The Graduate.” Its director, Emma Seligman, is the most promising cringe-comedy auteur to come along in years.Best MemoirIn the Audible original “May You Live in Interesting Times,” Laraine Newman describes studying with Marcel Marceau, dating Warren Zevon and farting in front of Prince. She gives you what you want in a “Saturday Night Live” memoir, but what makes her audiobook excel is her nimble voice, impersonating a collection of characters, none more charismatic than her own.Best Documentary“Mentally Al” catches up with the unsung comic Al Lubel when he’s near broke, disheveled and struggling with an impossibly dysfunctional relationship with his mother. Onstage, however, he’s consistently hilarious, even when the audience doesn’t think so. After countless documentaries about how a really funny person became a star, there’s finally a revelatory one exploring why one didn’t.Best Political ComedySometimes the most powerful punch is a jab. In “Oh God, an Hour About Abortion” — an understated, humane and deeply funny examination of the experience of having an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion — Alison Leiby uses observational comedy to reframe a political question at a critical moment for reproductive rights.The comedian Alison Leiby performing at Union Hall in Brooklyn in September.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesBest Keystone Cops UpdateNot since Chaplin has running from the police been as funny as Tiffany Haddish in “Bad Trip,” a scripted movie on Netflix that includes unscripted scenes, such as Haddish emerging from under a prison bus dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forcing a male bystander into an uncomfortable decision.Best SpecialThere’s never been a better year for handsome comics making jokes about their fraying mental health. Along with Bo Burnham unraveling onscreen and John Mulaney describing the depths of his addiction in live shows, the British comic James Acaster delivered his masterwork, “Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999,” on Vimeo. It’s a nearly three-hour show, wildly funny and deeply felt, that mocks how easily mental struggles can be turned into entertainment before doing just that.Best Arena SpectacleThere were prop missiles, shining diamonds and a massive sign that announced “World War III” in lights. I’m still not sure what the battle was about, but as soon as the born entertainer Katt Williams charged into the Barclays Center, yellow sneakers a blur, it was clear he had won.Best Netflix DebutNaomi Ekperigin is a natural — a comic that can make you laugh at just about anything: summing up Nancy Meyers movies, vaccines, clichés (why L.A. sucks), the way she says “OK.” In a half-hour set, as part of the collection “The Standups” that will be released on Netflix on Dec. 29, she even has two different jokes about the color beige that earn laughs. It’s a delight.Naomi Ekperigin performs in Season 3 of “The Standups,” coming to Netflix on Dec. 29.Clifton Prescod/NetflixBest Grand Unified TheoryIn describing how the porn industry pioneered everything on the internet, from user-generated content to diversity casting, Danny Jolles, in his endearing and far too overlooked Amazon Prime Video special, “Six Parts,” finds a new way to describe the fragmentation and filtering of the news: fetishes. All news, he argues, has become “kink news,” catering to our narrow, even perverse whims.Best Inside Comedy ParodyLast year ended with the release of “An Evening With Tim Heidecker,” a parody of edgy stand-up comedy that was a bit too vague to really resonate. Now, Heidecker hit the bull’s-eye with his recent YouTube spoof of The Joe Rogan Experience; its 12-hour running time (really one hour on a loop) is its first joke. So precise, so meticulously sensitive to the details, to the cadence and lingo of that podcast, his conversation with two sycophantic guests (played with pitch-perfect smarm by Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh) is a master class in sounding absolutely earth-shattering while saying precisely nothing.Best Argument for the Staying Power of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’No comedy that started in 2000 should still be this funny. Part of the reason for this feat is the consistently elite supporting performances, none more important than Susie Essman, who shined this year. Famous for her volcanic fury, she can do dry and understated just as well. I have not laughed louder at a television show this year than after hearing her say the word “caftan.”Susie Essman, left, plays Susie Greene in the long-running HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”John P. Johnson/ HBOMost Underrated Star ComicJim Gaffigan has put out so much material for so long that he’s easy to take for granted. The fact that he’s family friendly probably doesn’t help his press either. His dynamite new special, “Comedy Monster” (premiering Tuesday on Netflix), may be his best, showing Gaffigan at his most dyspeptic. It suits him. Who would have thought that he would so satisfyingly eviscerate marching bands and parades? Or have the most unexpected prop joke of the year (keep an eye out for a grand piano). More

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      ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: Face-off on Morak

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Mandalorian‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: Face-off on MorakMando joins forces with an old enemy, just one of several major compromises he makes in hopes of rescuing Grogu.Mando and Boba (Pedro Pascal, left, and Temuera Morrison) took on the Empire together again, with a little help this time from a certain red-headed rogue.Credit…Lucasfilm Ltd.Dec. 11, 2020Season 2, Episode 7: ‘The Believer’It was bound to happen. All season long, Mando has been suffering loss after loss. The Child’s floating transport-egg? Totaled. The Razor Crest? Destroyed. Grogu himself? Kidnapped. So it was inevitable that at some point, Mando was going to have to give up what has mattered to him more than anything for most of his life: his helmet.About a third of the way through “The Believer,” Din Djarin realizes that the only way for him to infiltrate an Imperial refinery — and thus to obtain the information he needs to rescue Grogu — is to shed his near-impenetrable beskar shell and go undercover as a stormtrooper. He does get to stay masked, at least. He puts on a pathetic-looking helmet, with the little frown etched into the face-plate that’s common to the Empire’s armor. But as soon as he dons the gear, his body stiffens and he lapses into silence. The Mandalorian no longer feels like a Mandalorian.It gets worse. Once Din arrives in the facility, he discovers that he’s going to have to access a communications terminal that requires a face-scan. He makes one sad, fruitless attempt at keeping his stormtrooper disguise on while doing the scan, but immediately a warning alarm sounds, and he has to remove the helmet. For only the second time in this series, the actor Pedro Pascal — the star of “The Mandalorian” — shows his face.I could quibble with the narrative logic that led to this moment. We’re told early on that the Imperial base on the mining planet of Morak is protected by various devices which identify and weed out wanted fugitives. No one has seen Din’s face, so no scanners would register him as an outlaw. But wouldn’t it make sense for a scanner at an Imperial outpost to make sure the faces it’s scanning belong to actual Empire employees?I have no complaints, though, about the emotional punch of the scanner scene. It pains the Mandalorian to reveal himself — and it’s painful to see him do it. As the title of this week’s chapter, “The Believer,” implies, this is a man of deep faith who doesn’t take the trappings and the rituals of his order lightly. When the Imperial commander Valin Hess (Richard Brake) asks him to sit down and have a drink with him in the refinery’s commissary, Din is so mortified — so soul-sick — that he can barely move or speak.As with most of the episodes this season, this one was primarily made up of a few white-knuckle action sequences. Rick Famuyiwa directed and is credited as the screenwriter. Initially, Famuyiwa introduces a scenario reminiscent of the classic movie “The Wages of Fear,” with Din and the dastardly mercenary Migs Mayfeld (Bill Burr) driving a transport vehicle filled with the explosively volatile starship fuel rhydonium across bumpy roads. Then their transport is attacked by pirates, who keep coming in waves after seemingly every last-ditch effort by Mando to fend them off.Paradoxically, Din and Migs are saved by the Imperial forces, who salute them as they roll into the refinery with potentially enough rhydonium to help the Empire strike back (again). But when Migs hears this boast from Hess, it stirs the criminal’s conscience, reminding him of all the past atrocities he has witnessed. He impulsively shoots Hess before executing a daring escape with the help of Mando, Boba Fett, Fennec Shand and Cara Dune, finishing it with a long-distance shot that blows up the rhydonium and the refinery.But as exciting as all those chases and shootouts are, it’s almost more thrilling this week to hear Migs push back against Din’s understanding of how the galaxy works. Although Migs sabotages the Empire, he’s not really a partisan of any kind. He insists to Mando that folks born on one planet believe one thing and folks born on another planet believe something else, and that none of this matters because in a life-or-death crisis, people will cross any line they have to, just to survive.The action in this episode seems to probe Migs’s point as Mando finds himself delivering vital rhydonium to the enemy — and killing “pirates” who could well be agents of the Republic, for all he knows — in order to further his own personal agenda. It also can’t be too reassuring for the by-the-book Mando to hear Hess argue that the Empire will prevail again because “Everyone thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order.”This is something else that our hero has been losing this season: his certainty about “the Way,” and about what he is and isn’t duty-bound to do. Taking care of Grogu has given him a new perspective on where his loyalty truly lies.That’s why it’s significant that during Migs’s rant about how both the Empire and the Republic routinely wreck the lives of ordinary citizens, Din is shown looking out the window at Morak’s native children. As an orphan himself, that’s who he identifies with the most. And as we head into next week’s season finale, that’s who the Mandalorian is most passionate to save.This is the way:After all the mythology built up around Boba Fett over the decades, it is both strange and awesome to have him just hanging around all the time as part of the Mandalorian’s team. (“Fett, punch in the coordinates!” Mando will say, as though it’s perfectly normal to be barking orders at one of the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunters.) It was also cool this week to see how Fett’s ship, Slave 1, looks from the inside as it’s making the crazy horizontal-to-vertical pivot it does during takeoffs.Even with a stand-up comedian as a guest star, this episode featured fewer moments of comic relief than usual. I think I laughed out loud only once, when Migs shoots Hess, right as a stormtrooper walks into the cafeteria. The tension of that moment is immediately defused by the ridiculous image of a trooper carrying a lunch-tray, looking like a dumbfounded fifth grader.The locations this season have all been pretty spectacular — and impressively varied. This week, we begin in an imposing trash heap patrolled by giant “walkers,” and we end with a fight at a refinery by a towering dam. There’s nearly always something to marvel at on this show.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More