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      The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home

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      Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.When Joan Rivers died in 2014, ending one of the greatest careers in modern comedy, several groups were interested in acquiring her archives, which included a meticulously organized collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes.Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, recalled a conversation with a representative from the Smithsonian Institution who wanted the catalog of jokes but said it would not be on permanent display. Her mind instantly went to the final tracking shot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked inside a crate and placed in a vast warehouse with hundreds of other crates.“I couldn’t do that because so much of who she was is in those files,” Melissa Rivers told me on a video call from Los Angeles. For her mother, a pioneering stand-up and withering critic of celebrity fashion, “a view was always important.”Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.The museum is in the planning stages of an interactive exhibition that will center on Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015. The show will allow visitors to explore the file in depth.Jamestown is where Lucille Ball grew up, and “Joan Rivers was the first headliner I booked for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival the year we announced to the world our intention to build the National Comedy Center,” Journey Gunderson, the executive director, told me by phone. Melissa Rivers, a television personality in her own right, was on hand for the groundbreaking in 2015.When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said. In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.Along with this bounty of material, the collection includes snapshots of other aspects of this major cultural figure, including her sense of fashion, like the pearls and a little black dress she wore early in her career as well as the multiple boas from her later fashionista years. Here’s a look at a few of the artifacts headed to the center.Insults in CharacterThe jokes were categorized by topics like fashion and career, and even cross-referenced.Joan Rivers EstateAs you can see from these cards, Joan Rivers often made herself the butt of the joke, leaning on tight, snappy punchlines to describe herself as unwanted or ugly or old. Gunderson said the self-deprecating gibes emerged from a character “she was using as a position of power to comment on the plight of woman.” In real life, Melissa Rivers said that “every now and again, she would say that for whatever age she was, she looked good. But that was that.” Rivers added that those jokes came from a real place. “That was a part of her, but maybe not as crippling as everyone assumed it would be,” she said. “But she also knew she looked good.”An Unparalleled CatalogIn a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.Break Thru Films/IFC“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (from 2010 and available on major platforms) is one of the greatest documentaries about a stand-up comic ever made: candid, unflinching and alert to the brutal amount of work necessary to succeed in show business. It also introduced the world to the cabinet of jokes that Rivers kept in her home. Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described the catalog as one of “the crown jewels of comedy that exist on planet Earth.”Help With HecklersWhen Rivers was starting out, she planned her responses to hecklers.Joan Rivers EstateRivers, a fixture on television who never stopped performing live, loved sparring with a crowd. But early in her career, she prepared for rambunctious audience members with this list of comebacks that could be weaponized to mock hecklers without losing the tempo of her set. Melissa Rivers said she saw her mother upset by a heckler only once, when later in her career someone was offended by a joke about Helen Keller. “She spun around and said: ‘Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.’”Early AmbitionsRivers hoped for a career as an actress and regularly went to the theater.Joan Rivers EstateBefore Joan Rivers became a comedian, she wanted to be a dramatic actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned this series of head shots to display her range. She didn’t make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote (with her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and Lester Colodny) and starred in. It closed after nine performances. But Rivers remained a stalwart fan of the stage, a regular at shows and a savvy commentator on the television series “Theater Talk.” When she went to the theater, she always dressed up and insisted her family do the same. Melissa Rivers said: “She always said, ‘This is church.’”Ticket From a Momentous TimeThe short-lived late-night show proved both a high and low point in Rivers’s career.Joan Rivers EstateWhen Joan Rivers left her position as the permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC to start her own version in 1986 on the then-fledging network Fox, she became the first woman in the modern era to host a late-night talk show. It was a bold move, a career landmark that also preceded a painful period of her life. She made an enemy of the “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. “That made her angry,” Melissa Rivers said. “Like she often said, if it had been a man, it would have been the great send-off to my protégé.” Rivers was banished from the Carson show and fired from her own the following year. Her husband, a producer on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” died by suicide months later. “It took a huge toll on their marriage and our family,” Melissa Rivers recalled, describing the period represented by this ticket as one of “great elation and great horror.” More

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      Pat Cooper, Comedian of Outrage, Is Dead at 93

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      He built his act on making fun of his Italian American heritage. He later publicly insulted stars he had worked with, including Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern.Pat Cooper, the stand-up comic who made outrage his act, progressing from mocking Italian American families like his own to publicly insulting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern, died on Tuesday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 93.The death was announced in a statement by his wife, Emily Conner.For more than 50 years, Mr. Cooper, clad in a tuxedo and Clark Kent spectacles, ranted comedically about his background, his family, the people who he felt had wronged him and just about anything else that bothered him.He developed the act, laced with sound effects, in small clubs in Baltimore and New York in the 1950s, and it proved a novelty at the time, when there were far more Jewish than Italian American comedians making jokes about their families and their culture.He broke through with an appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show” in 1963, then became a regular opening act for entertainers like Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. at clubs and casinos, including the Copacabana in Manhattan and the Sands in Las Vegas. He appeared on television shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Dean Martin and Mike Douglas, and released several albums, most memorably “Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights” (1966).The title of that album was a parody of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” (1965), whose cover depicted a woman apparently clothed only in whipped cream. Mr. Cooper’s cover depicted him slathered in marinara sauce, apparently naked but for a mound of spaghetti.“I got a genuine Italian mother — four feet eleven,” Mr. Cooper said during a typical routine, included on his album “Our Hero” (1965). “She has a bun over here, knitting needle over here, gold tooth over here, mole over here.”“She says, ‘Put garlic around your neck, it keeps away the evil spirits,’” he continued. “I ain’t got no friends, what spirits?”Mr. Cooper’s 1966 album cover was a spoof of one put out by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass the year before.J.P. Roth CollectionAudiences laughed at the Italian stereotypes, but an Italian American anti-defamation group did not get the joke and threatened to sue him. (No suit was ever filed.)Mr. Cooper’s act had dire consequences in his personal life. He became estranged from his parents and siblings, then from his first wife, Dolores Nola, and his children. He said they could not stand his success.“The only way I can beat them, I made fun of them,” Mr. Cooper said in an interview for this obituary in 2014.Later in his career he let the world know when he thought that stars had wronged him. In “How Dare You Say How Dare Me!” (2011), a memoir he wrote with Rich Herschlag and Steve Garrin, he accused Paul Anka of never saying hello when they did more than 50 shows together and then firing him for bringing it up. He claimed that an inebriated Johnny Carson once urinated on his foot in a men’s room, and that after loudly objecting with an expletive, he was not invited back on Carson’s “Tonight Show.”Another time, opening onstage for Sinatra, Sinatra asked him to remove a joke from his set. As Mr. Cooper told The Daily News of New York in 1997, he replied, “Hey, Frank, do I tell you what songs to sing?” Sinatra fired him.During an interview with the talk show host Tom Snyder on NBC in 1981, Mr. Cooper castigated Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett and Lola Falana, saying they did not treat their opening acts respectfully. When Mr. Snyder asked whether Mr. Cooper might be jealous, he denied it. “I want to stop the nonsense of some of the stars in my business who think they own a Pat Cooper,” he said.“We’re comics,” he added. “We’re not dogs.”His agent called him afterward and told him that he was finished in show business. But Mr. Cooper disagreed, and the episode actually raised his profile.“Everybody thought I lost my career — I raised my price!” he said in the 2014 interview. “In those days that was a terrible thing to say, what I did. Now it’s a reality show!”Howard Stern, drawn to Mr. Cooper’s vitriol, invited him on his radio show in the mid-1980s. But perhaps predictably they had a falling-out. Mr. Stern put Mr. Cooper’s estranged son, Michael, and his former wife on the air, and Mr. Cooper refused to interact with them. Then Mr. Cooper began berating Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern stopped having him on the show.Mr. Cooper continued performing at clubs and casinos and at Friars Club roasts until he retired in 2012. And he continued to insist that the industry had treated him poorly. “They don’t want me because I say what’s on my mind,” he said, “and they punish it.”Mr. Cooper in Las Vegas, where he made his home, in 2005 at a screening of “The Aristocrats,” a popular documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke. He also appeared with Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” and its sequel, “Analyze That.” Bryan Haraway/Getty ImagesPasquale Vito Caputo was born on July 31, 1929, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and raised in the Midwood and Red Hook sections of the borough. His father, Michele, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Louise (Gargiulo) Caputo, was a homemaker. He did not have a happy childhood.“I think I broke a record in my neighborhood — I think I must have run away 14 times,” he said. “People don’t run away from good homes.”He tried to escape, seeking to join the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, but he was rejected from each branch because of “hammerhead toes,” he wrote in his memoir. He was drafted into the Army in 1952 and stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C., but he was soon discharged, because of his disruptive behavior, according to Mr. Cooper.He then returned to New York, where he married Ms. Nola and had two children with her. He also began developing his act while supporting himself by driving a cab. “I was a stand-up comic who happened to be sitting down at the time,” he said.Mr. Cooper Americanized his name while performing in the Catskills in the early 1960s, a decision that further infuriated his family. The Oxford English Dictionary says that he coined the term “Bada-bing,” heard during a routine titled “An Italian Wedding” on the “Our Hero” album. (Mr. Cooper himself did not claim authorship.)He went on to appear alongside Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” (1999) and its sequel, “Analyze That” (2002), which also starred Billy Crystal; and alongside many other comedians in “The Aristocrats” (2005), the acclaimed documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke.Mr. Cooper’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1961. He almost never saw his children, Michael and Louise Caputo, again. Michael Caputo wrote a book about their poor relationship and appeared on the talk show “Geraldo” in 1990 to discuss what he saw as his father’s neglect.Mr. Cooper called in to “Geraldo” to argue that he was not at fault, and to castigate his son.“Let me tell you something, I don’t have to be your father, you’re not that thrilling,” Mr. Cooper said, adding, “And I don’t want to be your father.”The show’s host, Geraldo Rivera, interrupted him, saying: “Pat, enough, enough. You’re upsetting me even.”Mr. Cooper’s second wife, the singer Patti Del Prince, died of cancer in 2005. He married Ms. Conner in 2018. In addition to her, he is survived by his children from his first marriage as well as a daughter from his second marriage, Patti Jo Weidenfeld; three sisters, Grace Ferrara, Carol Caputo and Marie Caputo Mangano; and five grandchildren.Mr. Cooper said his son Michael had tried to reconcile with him over the years. He remained uninterested.“He said, ‘Well, now I want’ — what’s it? — ‘closure,’” Mr. Cooper said. “I said, ‘Well, then get a closet.’” More

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      in Television

      Tim Robinson and the Golden Age of Cringe Comedy

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      Tim Robinson loves spicy food.This minor fact is one of the major things I learned at my very awkward dinner interview with Robinson and Zach Kanin, creators of the cult Netflix comedy series “I Think You Should Leave.” Robinson ordered drunken spaghetti with tofu — spicy — and, almost immediately, the spaghetti started to make his voice hoarse. He insisted, however, that this had nothing to do with the spice — in fact, he said, his food wasn’t spicy enough. I asked our server if she could go spicier. She brought out a whole dish of special chiles. Robinson spooned them enthusiastically over his noodles.As I watched Robinson eat big red bites of his meal, I imagined a comedy sketch in which a man (played by Tim Robinson) gets himself out of an awkward dinner with a journalist (played by someone who looks exactly like me) by loading his food with increasingly hot peppers until he begins to lose control of his body. The sketch would end with him being wheeled away on a stretcher, on the brink of death — twitching, covered in filth, weeping — but also smiling.That would actually be a fairly tame premise for “I Think You Should Leave.” The show specializes in ratcheting mildly tricky social situations up to unbearable levels of cringe. It drives the good old vehicles of sketch comedy (corporate meetings, commercial parodies, game-show spoofs) into newly excruciating territory. If that sounds unpleasant, it often is — but it is also hilarious and bold and surprisingly poetic and addictive. Most of the sketches are short, and therefore easy to binge, which means that if they happen to vibrate on your comedy wavelength you will find yourself bingeing and rebingeing them until your favorite lines get stuck in your head for days, like music, and you end up talking almost exclusively in Tim Robinson references (“It’s interesting, the ghosts”) until your family asks if you might please stop soon.Over its first two seasons, “I.T.Y.S.L.” inspired a giddy and devoted following that spread memes and merch across the internet. Even if you’ve never seen an episode, you have probably encountered stray images from the show in the daily slush of content we all drink from our screens. You may have seen Robinson on Instagram, grinning in a hot-dog costume, standing next to a hot-dog-shaped car that has crashed into a storefront, saying, “We’re tryin’ to find the guy who did this and give him a spanking.” Or on TikTok, squinting his eyes and shouting, in a strange strangled voice that sounds almost too agitated to get out of his throat: “You SURE about that? YOU SURE ABOUT THAT???”NetflixAt the Thai restaurant, over dinner, Robinson was not shouting. In person, he is shy, mild, polite, sincere. He’s from Michigan, and he has a salt-of-the-earth Midwestern vibe. He speaks reverently about his family. He loves being a dad, he told me, and his kids are great kids (he has two, 12 and 13), and his wife, who was once his high school sweetheart, is an electrical engineer for Chrysler. “She’s smart,” he said, with feeling.It was strange to watch this man, whose face I had studied through so many violent comic contortions, in a subdued real-life setting. Robinson’s face is both anonymous and one of a kind. He has a big flaring dolphin fin of a nose; small, deep-set eyes that sit in little pools of shade; a warm, gaptoothed smile. His resting expression is bland, sweet, harmless — he looks, most of the time, like an absolutely standard middle-aged white guy who might be sitting next to you at an airport or a marketing conference. Someone you would feel perfectly comfortable asking to watch your stuff if you had to get up to go to the bathroom.But when Robinson activates that face, all kinds of amazing things happen. Tiny microexpressions ripple across it at high speed. He seems to have extra muscles in his forehead, because he can knit the space between his eyebrows into lumpy little mountain ranges of confusion, skepticism or disappointment. His quiet mouth gets very wide and loud. And his voice does things I’ve never heard a human voice do. It puffs up, squishes down, turns itself inside out. He can chew on his voice like a cow chews its cud.NetflixRobinson has mentioned in interviews that he has anxiety. I asked him if he still struggles with it.“Yeah,” he said, solemnly. “It gets worse. It gets worse, the older I get.”I had been warned that Robinson is deeply uncomfortable doing media. He dislikes, especially, being asked to analyze his comedy. That night, he and Kanin were exhausted. It was April, and they were nearing the end of the marathon process of finishing Season 3, basically living in the editing room, watching sketches over and over, trying to cut the material ruthlessly down to its essence. Their deadline was uncomfortably close; a writers’ strike was looming. They had no idea what day of the week it was. Netflix P.R. had very clearly forced them to meet with me against their will. (They agreed, after many weeks of pressure, to an 8 p.m. dinner at a restaurant that closed at 9.) They were friendly, but in the way you might be friendly to a dentist who is about to extract your wisdom teeth.I tried my favorite icebreaker question: “What is your very first memory?”Robinson said he couldn’t remember one. Neither could Kanin.“How many alternate titles did you guys have before you settled on ‘I Think You Should Leave’?” I asked.“That’s a great question,” Robinson said.“We had a lot,” Kanin said.“What were some of them?” I asked.They couldn’t remember.That’s how it went the whole time. Our conversation never took off. And the topic we kept returning to, the thing that flowed most naturally, was our small talk about spicy food.“Hey, that’s something good for the interview,” Robinson said.“That could be the headline,” Kanin said. “TIM ROBINSON LIKES IT SPICY.”Robinson spooned more chiles onto his noodles.“That’s the thing about spice,” he said. “It’s addicting.”Soon, mercifully, the restaurant closed, and we said goodbye, and they went off to do more late-night editing.Over the past 20 years, American culture has been gorging itself nearly to death on cringe comedy. “The Office”, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Veep,” “The Rehearsal.” What is this deep hunger? Why, in an era of polarization, widespread humiliation and literal insurrection — in a nation full of so much real-life cringing — would we want to watch people simulating social discomfort? It hurts enough, these days, just to exist.I think it’s for the same reason, actually, that we enjoy eating spicy food: what scientists call “benign masochism.” In a harsh world, it can be soothing to microdose shots of controlled pain. Comforting, to touch the scary parts of life without putting ourselves in real danger. Humor has always served this function; it allows us to express threatening things in safe ways. Cringe comedy is like social chile powder: a way to feel the burn without getting burned.And so we take pleasure watching Larry David saunter around instigating petty grievances, testing the boundaries of our social rules like a velociraptor systematically testing the electric fences in “Jurassic Park.” Or Nathan Fielder, with his laptop on its holster, robotically plotting flow charts, conducting experiments to try to determine, once and for all, what is and is not allowed.Because it’s tricky, being a person in a society. You have your needs, your wants, your whims, your dreams, your appetites, your fantasies, your frustrations. But — unless you are a castaway or a sociopath — you have to square those things with the needs of some larger group. More likely, multiple groups. Which means you must follow the rules. What rules? So many rules! Laws, norms, mores, superstitions, sentence structures, traffic signals — vast, overlapping codes, written and unwritten, silent and spoken, logical and arbitrary, local and global, tiny and huge, ancient and new. Some rules are rigid (stop signs), while others are flexible (yield signs) — and it’s your job to know the difference. Not to mention that the rules are never fixed: With every step you take, with every threshold you cross, the rule-cloud will shift around you. It can change based on the color of your skin, the sound of your voice, your haircut, your accent, your passport. Sometimes even the thoughts you supposedly have in your head.“I.T.Y.S.L.” is obsessed with rules. Its characters argue, like lawyers, over everything: whether you’re allowed to schedule a meeting during lunch (no), whether celebrity impersonators are allowed to slap party guests (at certain price points, yes), whether you’re allowed to swear during a late-night adults-only ghost tour (it’s complicated).Robinson understands a nasty little paradox about rules: The more you believe in them — the more conscientious you are — the more time you will spend agonizing, worrying, wondering if you are doing things right.This obsession makes “I Think You Should Leave” the perfect comedy for our overheated cultural moment. The 21st-century United States is, infamously, a preschool classroom of public argumentation. Our one true national pastime has become litigating the rules, at high volume, in good or neutral or very bad faith. “Norms,” a concept previously confined to psychology textbooks, has become a front-page concern. Donald Trump’s whole political existence seems like some kind of performance-art stunt about rule-breaking. The panics over “cancel culture” and the “woke mob” — these are symptoms of a fragmented society wondering if, in a time of flux, it still meaningfully shares social rules. Every time we wander out into the public square, we risk ending up screaming, or screamed at, red-faced, in tears.“I Think You Should Leave” makes comedy, relentlessly, out of moments when the social rules break down. When things stick, grind and break.Almost always, sketches start quietly. The show reproduces, with loving accuracy, our small-talk, our polite jokes — the way groups use humor to defuse social tensions. A woman, holding her friend’s new baby, says to her partner, teasingly: “Maybe we could have another.” To which he responds, with a nervous grin: “Uh, let’s talk about that later.” Men at a poker game trade jokes about their wives. (“Trust me, my wife has nothing to complain about — unless you’re talking about every little thing I’ve ever done!”)A lot of “I.T.Y.S.L.” sketches seem to start with a little thought experiment: What would happen if someone took this throwaway joke literally and seriously? How would it warp social reality if these anodyne little pleasantries were actually brought center stage — if someone ignored all the rules we are supposed to intuitively understand?This is the premise of one of the show’s best sketches, a sketch I’ve memorized so deeply I can hardly even see it anymore. A man at a party is allowed to hold a baby, which cries as soon as it nestles into his arms. “It’s not a big deal,” he says, good-naturedly. “I guess he just doesn’t like me.” That’s a classic, lukewarm, tension-defusing witticism, and everyone smiles politely. But Robinson has invented a guy who takes this absolutely seriously, who becomes obsessed with explaining to everyone, at the top of his lungs and at great length, precisely why the baby doesn’t like him — because it knows, somehow, that he “used to be a piece of [expletive].” Gradually, the man hijacks the entire party with obsessive explanations of all the many ways he used to be reprehensible — “slicked-back hair, white bathing suit, sloppy steaks, white couch.” And he insists, over and over, that “people can change.” The reasoning is absurd, and yet he is so sure and persistent and literal that it becomes a kind of social contagion. By the end of the party, everyone has come over to his side — including the baby, who smiles at him.Robinson is a genius at stepping into these in-between social spaces — chitchat, reassuring smiles — and zeroing in on the tension at the heart of it all. Then he will isolate that tension, extract it and inflate it like a balloon until it fills the whole room, until it fills the whole universe. He is a virtuoso of social discomfort.NetflixTim Robinson grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. His mother worked for Chrysler. As a kid, he disliked school. He had no idea what he was going to do with his life. But then he went to a show that changed his life: a traveling troupe from Second City, the famous Chicago comedy group. Immediately, Robinson thought: Oh. This is what I want to do. So he did.The comic actor Sam Richardson, who also grew up in Detroit, told me he first saw Robinson perform in a suburban bowling alley. “I was like: This guy is the funniest dude in the world,” he said. “His cadence is so specifically his own. You can’t teach it. It’s incredibly human. It’s human beyond human.” Robinson quickly became a star in the local scene — Richardson said he was, hands down, the best improv comic he’d ever seen. “Hands down,” he repeated. “Like, all hands go down. I’ve never seen Tim flounder in a scene. We all flounder. But he could always just find the ball and dunk it. It was incredible.”Robinson’s talent propelled him out of Detroit to Chicago, after he joined Second City — and then eventually to New York, where he signed on as a cast member of “Saturday Night Live.” There is a clip that sometimes circulates on social media of Robinson, in a bit part on a forgettable “S.N.L.” sketch, making the host, Kevin Hart, break out laughing over and over. Although none of Robinson’s lines are particularly funny, he has an instant presence and charisma. He doesn’t even have to say anything; he just embodies some species of funniness that no one else can touch. It would have been easy to imagine him blooming into his generation’s Will Ferrell or Kristen Wiig.NBCBut it was not to be. Robinson’s sensibility was too specific and weird. His anxiety was crippling. His sketches kept being cut.“Tim would call me every Sunday morning and just be so broken down,” Richardson told me. “He’d say things like, ‘Maybe I’m not funny.’ He was grossly unhappy.” Richardson went to an “S.N.L.” taping once, during the holidays, and he remembers Robinson standing backstage in a Santa costume, beside himself with excitement because one of his sketches was scheduled to get on the air. Then, at the last second, it was cut. Robinson was crushed.Robinson was dropped from the “S.N.L.” cast after just one season. But he didn’t leave. Instead, he joined the writing staff. And this is when everything started to change. He found a comedy-writing soul mate in Zach Kanin, another staff writer, who was his polar opposite in terms of background (well-connected East Coast family, Harvard Lampoon, New Yorker cartoonist) but had exactly the same sense of humor. Robinson and Kanin shared an office and became a power duo. Although plenty of their sketches never made it to the air, they were always a hit at table reads. They were the cool guys, the artists. They just needed their own vehicle.It took a while to happen. Netflix let them make an episode of the anthology sketch show “The Characters” — and it was wild and foul and brilliant, the standout episode of the season. For Comedy Central, Kanin and Robinson made a sweet, kooky sitcom called “Detroiters,” co-starring Sam Richardson. That gained a cult following but was canceled after two seasons.This all led, eventually, to “I Think You Should Leave”: the full, shocking, unapologetic flowering of their weirdo comic vision.“I.T.Y.S.L.” creates, with shocking efficiency, a whole comic universe. There are so many sketches I’d like to describe. The one in which a prank-show host has an existential breakdown at the mall because his costume is too heavy. (He is pretending to be “Karl Havoc,” a huge guy in a wacky vest who messes with people in the food court — but he ends up just standing there, frozen, hulking and dead-eyed, muttering to his producer: “I don’t even want to be around anymore.”). There’s the sketch in which a man at a restaurant won’t admit he’s choking because he doesn’t want to look dumb in front of the celebrity who is sitting at his table. But the brilliance of these sketches never comes from the premise alone. Instead it’s in the rhythms, in the gymnastics of Robinson’s face and — especially — in the strange poetic writing. The way language glops out of everyone’s mouth like soft-serve ice cream. “I can’t know how to hear any more about tables!” a driver’s ed teacher yells at his students, after they won’t stop peppering him with questions about the bizarre centrality of tables in his instructional videos. “And now you’re in more in trouble than me unfortunately,” a man says to a co-worker who’s lost his temper.“It always feels like improv, when you’re watching the show, but it is not,” Akiva Schaffer, one of the show’s directors, told me. Robinson and Kanin are meticulous about their scripts — everything that feels slightly “off” is written exactly that way. That odd driver’s-ed-sketch sentence, Kanin told me, came from something his young daughter said. In fact, many of the show’s men, when they are agitated, speak like children: their words forced out by the pressure of need, right on the edge of coherence. Robinson shared a memory from his childhood. Once, when he was a kid, his family moved to a new house, and he and his brothers went out to play in the backyard. A boy next door stared at them, so they stared back — until, finally, agitated, the boy yelled: “Stop keep looking at me!”Robinson’s comedy is, as my wife has put it, “very male.” (She is, to be clear, a fan.) There’s a lot of yelling and nasty language and juvenile behavior. There are colorful synonyms for poop (“mud pie,” “absolute paint job”). When a man’s ego is threatened, the whole universe seems to hang in the balance.But it would be a mistake to confuse Robinson’s comedy with the usual “very male” comedy: the archetypal bad boy, swinging his id around, railing against P.C. culture and his nagging wife, preaching that the rules are stupid, that society is a scam and a cage, that we should follow our desires and never negotiate and certainly never apologize.Robinson’s comedy is doing something much more interesting. This is comedy of the superego. It understands that every moment of human life requires a negotiation with rules — and that this is hard, and stressful, and there are so many ways it can go wrong. But the negotiation is also vital. The rules, after all, are holding some pretty destructive forces back.One of my favorite things about “I.T.Y.S.L.” is all the crying. Robinson’s characters cry while driving and at parties and in the middle of work meetings — after, say, a man chokes on a hot dog he’s been secretly eating out of his sleeve, or after the boss makes him take off his ridiculous hat. One man tries to defuse a tense situation by doing a whole zany “Blues Brothers”-style dance — but it backfires, making everything worse, and so he pulls off his sunglasses to reveal a puffy wet red face.When a Tim Robinson character cries, it is a result of an epic struggle for selfhood — a Greco-Roman wrestling match between the man’s public persona (confident, respected, “normal”) and the private, vulnerable self that he alone secretly knows. Those two selves collide, like plates on a fault line, and what gushes out are all the molten emotions the man has spent his whole life stuffing down. His terror of vulnerability leads to an eruption of vulnerability. It is hilarious and troubling but also touching. You want to shun the man and yet you also want to hug him — until you want to shun him again. (Almost inevitably, while the tears are still flowing, Robinson’s character will double and triple down on whatever got him in trouble in the first place.)Netflix“These guys are really having a hard time,” Schaffer told me. He said Robinson and Kanin’s extremely meticulous scripts originally contained zero crying, but it arose naturally during filming. “We would do three takes and I’d be like: ‘Oh, this guy should start holding back tears,’” Schaffer said. Then, sketch after sketch, they’d realize: “Wait a minute, this guy seems like he might be getting teary, too. We started joking: Should every character be crying by the end?”Robinson’s tears come out in a variety of ways. Sometimes his eyes just get big and wet — as in one sketch, when a man gets caught after secretly complaining to the waiter that his otherwise wonderful date has been eating all the best bites of their “fully loaded nachos.” (“Just say the restaurant has a rule,” he pleads with the waiter. “One person can’t just eat all the fully loaded ones.”) Sometimes a single tear comes trickling down his cheek — as when an office worker can’t reciprocate when his co-workers are sharing viral videos. What is clear, in each case, is that the tears are coming from an extremely deep place, like the purest artesian well water. Something is being squeezed out of these men, under tremendous pressure — some kind of sacred male pain-juice.This is a big part of what sets “I.T.Y.S.L.” apart from other cringe comedy. Despite its loudness and brashness, it is somehow fundamentally touching and vulnerable and sad. Its tenderness keeps it bearable. Robinson’s characters are rarely proud of their antisocial behavior. They want, desperately, to follow the rules. They are searching, as hard as they can, for the elusive balance between self-interest and the interests of the group. They just can’t seem to find it. The pain of that leaks out of their eyes. And then, before long, the screaming begins.Opening illustration: Source photograph by Atiba Jefferson/NetflixSam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. He has written about rhinos, pencils, poets, water parks, basketball, weight loss and the new Studio Ghibli theme park in Japan. Lola Dupre is a collage artist and an illustrator currently based near Glasgow, Scotland. Working with paper and scissors, she references the Dada art movement and is influenced by modern digital-image manipulations. More

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      Five Stand-Up Specials for Memorial Day Weekend

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      Wanda Sykes, Sarah Silverman, Lewis Black, Zarna Garg and Greg Warren each deliver very funny hours worth your time.Zarna Garg, ‘One in a Billion’(Amazon Prime)Most comedy about the American immigrant family is related from the point of view of the assimilated son or daughter poking fun at the clueless, thick-accented parents. The beauty of our current moment is the many new perspectives on old jokes. In the fertile scene of South Asian comedians, Zarna Garg represents something fresh: the revenge of the Indian mom. She’s heard the jokes about the closed-minded Indian parents forcing their children to go to medical school. Now she fires back forcefully, with enough panache to subvert stereotypes even as she’s fully embracing them. Her ethnic and religious humor (she makes a convincing case for Hindu being the most chill religion) is unapologetically old-fashioned: quick setups, rapid-fire punchlines, her name in giant letters on the set behind her. There’s a genuine warmth behind the slickness. You believe her extreme pride in her daughter going to Stanford just as much as her operatic horror at the fact that she’s studying ceramics. Garg has the kind of presence that powers network sitcoms. Of the recent spate of specials produced by Amazon Prime, tentatively tiptoeing into competition with Netflix, hers is the best.Sarah Silverman, ‘Someone You Love’(Max)Have you ever wondered if porn ruined the Catholic schoolgirl uniform? Or about the relationship between Judaism and diarrhea? Or the many sexual sounds that go into the term “moral compass”? It will not surprise anyone that Sarah Silverman has. These are only some of the scatological and sexual premises she summons up in her new hour (debuting Saturday). Silverman is 52 but looks and sounds just like that virtuosic comic who rocketed to fame in the 1990s. She has evolved, of course, and the virtue of doing so is one of the themes of her characteristically funny special, but it plays a minor role next to bits about masturbation and Hitler. While she’s known for juvenile gags and political humor, what’s also essential to her comedy, and on full display here, is how distinctively loopy she can be. As influential as she has been, no other comic quite captures this aspect. She has one randomly charming bit about how when she comes home, she says hello in a booming voice over and over. “Sparkle peanut,” she tells herself before going onstage, right before an introduction by Mel Brooks, a spiritual forefather.She’s shambling and casual. Sometimes too much so. Did she need to keep in the part where she singled out a guy for leaving his seat, disrupting the flow of a joke? But her special is bracketed by two fun sketches: a final song about bad breath performed with incongruous and committed elegance, and an opening scene with her (fictional) children backstage. She thanks the woman standing next to them, says she has been amazing and adds: “Everyone said, ‘Don’t get a hot nanny.’” Then she pauses for an uncomfortably long silence.Wanda Sykes, ‘I’m an Entertainer’(Netflix)My favorite punchline in the latest special by Wanda Sykes is the title: “I’m an Entertainer.” It sounds banal or direct, but in the context of the joke, which involves her awakening sexuality (she came out as a lesbian after sleeping with men for years), it hits you with a jolt that is surprising and a little unsettling. That’s Sykes at her best. As it happens, Sykes is an old-school entertainer. She can act, improvise, do sketches, host awards shows and whatever else without losing her signature snap. In her stand-up specials, she tends to stick to a recipe consisting of a chunk of sharply topical liberal jokes (hit or miss), some personal bits about amusing tension with her cigarette-wielding French wife and white kids (solidly funny) and a few tense wild cards. Then for the crowd-pleaser, she brings on Esther, the roll of stomach fat she named after the “Good Times” star Esther Rolle. Mouthy, no-nonsense, up for some fun, Esther always gets laughs. But we learn in this new hour that Sykes is considering removing her breasts on the advice of her doctor, who suggested building new ones from tissue from her gut. (Sykes doesn’t explain why.) In other words, Esther is moving neighborhoods and will be close enough to her neck that Sykes worries about getting strangled.Greg Warren, ‘The Salesman’(YouTube)With the kind of puffed-chest intensity you tend to see in high school football coaches and motivational speakers, Greg Warren brags that he was “a big deal in the peanut butter game.” He worked in sales for Jif and shot this hour in Lexington, Ky., because that’s where the company made its products. Maybe he really was a big deal moving jars. Who knows? But after this special, he owns this nutty spread, comedically. Directed by Nate Bargatze, a clean comic of a far mellower temperament, Warren trash-talks rival brands (look out, Peter Pan), does on-brand crowd work (“What kind of peanut butter do you eat?”) and gets political in discussing how Smucker’s bought his old employer. It now owns peanut butter and jelly, he tells us, before adding with a mix of gravity and anxiety, “If they ever get ahold of bread.” By the end, Warren has made another sale: He has done for peanut butter what Jerry Seinfeld did for Pop-Tarts and Jim Gaffigan did for Hot Pockets.Lewis Black, ‘Tragically, I Need You’(YouTube)If a stand-up can tap into or channel the fury of an audience, he can light up a room. But maintaining that anger is tricky. It can curdle into shtick or just wear out its welcome. Lewis Black’s great gift is that behind that dyspeptic front, you could detect a thoughtful, introspective side, a little damaged perhaps. He shows us more of that vulnerable side here, in part because the isolation of the pandemic put him in a reflective mood. The title refers to the audience. Along with swinging sharp political elbows, in defense of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, say, Black beats himself up over past relationships and sings the praises of companionship. He talks about his failed career as a playwright, bringing up theater because “I like to feel the interest of the audience leave the room.” More

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      James Acaster’s ‘Party Gator Purgatory’ Was Decades in the Making

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      As a child, music was the British comedian’s first obsession. Decades later, his first record tells the story of a toy alligator.The British comedian James Acaster can remember the moment he fell in love with music at 6 years old. At a party held by a member of the congregation of the “hippie-ish” church his parents attended in Kettering, a town in central England, he heard a compilation album featuring songs like Men at Work’s “Down Under” and “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band.“I just couldn’t believe how good every single song was — it was blowing my mind,” Acaster said in a recent video interview. Music became “a pretty immediate obsession.”By the time he was a teenager, Acaster was playing in several bands. He left school at 17, without taking his final exams, and didn’t go to college, so he could focus on building a career in music.At 22, though, he didn’t have a record deal, and when his experimental jazz group split, Acaster started focusing on comedy instead. He had been dabbling in stand-up as a side project since he was 18, and it felt like a welcome break from the pressures of trying to make it in music.“It was nice to do it and not care about it,” he said. “Whereas every time I was onstage with a band, I really cared and wanted it to go well.”In one special in his Netflix series “James Acaster: Repertoire,” the comedian moves from the idea of him being an undercover cop to talking about a breakup. Silviu Nutu Vegan Joy/NetflixToday, Acaster, 38, is one of Britain’s most popular comedians, and he has finally released a debut album of sorts: “Party Gator Purgatory,” a 10-track experimental record featuring Acaster’s drumming and made with the 40-artist collective he founded called Temps.In comedy, Acaster has had critical and mainstream success. A fixture on British comedy panel shows, in recent years he’s also found success in podcasting with “Off Menu,” a show about dream meals he co-hosts with the comedian Ed Gamble.On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice: a mixture of whimsy and vulnerability, surrealism and biting commentary, as seen in his stand-up special “Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999,” in which he explored a difficult period in his personal life with both candor and his signature frenetic performance style.This balance is what has connected with people, said Matthew Crosby, a British comedian and friend, who praised Acaster’s “genuine authenticity” in a recent phone interview.Acaster looms so large on the British comedy scene that others have begun to emulate him. “Anyone who’s got a really distinctive unique style, whether wittingly or unwittingly, gets aped by the circuit — Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill are the people who immediately spring to mind,” Crosby said. “And you see it now with lots of people doing James.”On the talent-filled British comedy circuit, Acaster has carved out a singular voice.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAs comedy, once his low-pressure creative pursuit, transformed into a fully-fledged career, Acaster disengaged from both listening to and making music. Then, in 2017 he had a mental-health crisis precipitated by breakups with his girlfriend and his agent, and he began collecting albums released in the previous year, ultimately purchasing 500 releases from 2016 alone, he said.“When things got a bit rough that was my most recent thing that had brought me a lot of comfort so I carried on doing that,” he said. “I just sort of reacquainted myself or renegotiated my relationship with music as a fan.”He codified the personal project in “Perfect Sound Whatever,” a 2019 book in which he claims that 2016 was the best ever year for music, and explains why.In 2020, he started making music again, and the result is “Party Gator Purgatory,” an experimental, hip-hop inflected and drum-heavy record, which follows the death, purgatory and resurrection of a life-size toy alligator Acaster won at a fair when he was 7.The album’s high concept is typical of Acaster’s creative process, and the way he works his way out from a single idea. “You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” he said. This approach is clear across Acaster’s books, podcasts and stand-up. On the album, the idea is the travails of a stuffed toy; in one special in his Netflix stand-up series “Repertoire,” Acaster began with the idea of his being an undercover cop, “and by the end you’ve got a show that is about a breakup you’ve had,” he said.“He’s not afraid of being incredibly niche,” Crosby said. “He doesn’t sort of sit down at the start of each day and go, ‘What can I do that’s going to make me a load of money?’ He goes, ‘What am I really interested in?’”This penchant for niche ideas is evident in an album that is dense and genre-defying. “Party Gator” is largely inspired by “What Now?,” a 2016 album from the experimental musician Jon Bap, in which the drums feel deliberately out of sync.“You’re just running with whatever hunch you’ve got that this might be fun,” Acaster said of his approach to the creative process.Tom Jamieson for The New York Times“He’s just a freak and he likes weird music and I think we both like a lot of weird stuff,” said NNAMDÏ, a Chicago-based musician who raps on the album, in a video interview.Making the album was a labor of love, an all-consuming project that stretched over two years. On the album Acaster plays drums, served as a producer and curated a 40-strong roster of collaborators, including the singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos and the rapper Open Mike Eagle. He would listen to a drum track he’d created, figure out who he wanted on it, and reach out. Acaster had interviewed some of the musicians he wanted to work with for his book, “Perfect Sound,” and around half of them he cold emailed. “I just got very very lucky that people would say yes,” he said.Taking place mostly during Britain’s pandemic lockdowns, the collaborations happened over email and Zoom, through which Acaster was able to foster an environment of experimentation. “For the majority of it, he just told me to do whatever I felt like doing,” NNAMDÏ said. “He kind of took what I did and manipulated it. It is still what I did, but he added his own little textures to it and chopped up some things and kind of freaked it, made it cool.”With an album that may not appeal to mainstream audiences, Acaster is levelheaded about what its reception could look like. “I really hope that it finds its audience, and the people who would like it discover it and get into it,” he said.In many ways, the making of the album is a mark of success for Acaster.“I love it all and I love it as much as any of my stand-up shows, anything I’ve done,” he said. More

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      China Ramps Up Culture Crackdown, Canceling Music and Comedy Shows

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      Performances across the country were canceled last week after Beijing began investigating a stand-up comedian.The cancellations rippled across the country: A Japanese choral band touring China, stand-up comedy shows in several cities, jazz shows in Beijing. In the span of a few days, the performances were among more than a dozen that were abruptly called off — some just minutes before they were supposed to begin — with virtually no explanation.Just before the performances were scrapped, the authorities in Beijing had fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million, after one of its stand-up performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke; the police in northern China also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online.Those penalties, and the sudden spate of cancellations that followed, point to the growing scrutiny of China’s already heavily censored creative landscape. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity. Performers must submit scripts or set lists for vetting, and publications are closely monitored.On Tuesday, Mr. Xi sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China for its 60th anniversary, reminding staff to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Mr. Xi’s emphasis on the arts is also part of a broader preoccupation with national security and eliminating supposedly malign foreign influence. The authorities in recent weeks have raided the corporate offices of several Western consulting or advisory companies based in China, and broadened the range of behaviors covered under counterespionage laws. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China on Tuesday reminding staff there to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Pool photo by Florence LoMany of the canceled events were supposed to feature foreign performers or speakers.It was only to be expected that Beijing would also look to the cultural realm, as its deteriorating relationship with the West has made it more fixated on maintaining its grip on power at home, said Zhang Ping, a former journalist and political commentator in China who now lives in Germany.“One way to respond to anxiety about power is to increase control,” said Mr. Zhang, who writes under the pen name Chang Ping. “Dictatorships have always sought to control people’s entertainment, speech, laughter and tears.”While the party has long regulated the arts — one target of the Cultural Revolution was creative work deemed insufficiently “revolutionary” — the intensity has increased sharply under Mr. Xi. In 2021, a state-backed performing arts association published a list of morality guidelines for artists, which included prescriptions for patriotism. The same year, the government banned “sissy men” from appearing on television, accusing them of weakening the nation.A bookstore in Zibo, China. Literature is closely regulated by the authorities.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesOfficials have also taken notice of stand-up comedy, which has gained popularity in recent years and offered a rare medium for limited barbs about life in contemporary China. The government fined a comedian for making jokes about last year’s coronavirus lockdown in Shanghai. People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, published a commentary in November that said jokes had to be “moderate” and noted that stand-up as an art form was a foreign import; the Chinese name for stand-up, “tuo kou xiu,” is itself a transliteration from “talk show.”The recent crackdown began after an anonymous social media user complained about a set that a popular stand-up comedian, Li Haoshi, performed in Beijing on May 13. Mr. Li, who uses the stage name House, had said that watching his two adopted stray dogs chase a squirrel reminded him of a Chinese military slogan: “Maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win.” The user suggested that Mr. Li had slanderously compared soldiers to wild dogs.Outrage grew among nationalist social media users, and the authorities quickly piled on. In addition to fining Xiaoguo Culture Media, the firm that manages Mr. Li, the authorities — who said the joke had a “vile societal impact” — indefinitely suspended the company’s performances in Beijing and Shanghai. Xiaoguo fired Mr. Li, and the Beijing police said they were investigating him.Within hours of the penalty being announced on Wednesday, organizers of stand-up shows in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and eastern Shandong Province canceled their performances. A few days later, Chinese social media platforms suspended the accounts of Uncle Roger, a Britain-based Malaysian comic whose real name is Nigel Ng; Mr. Ng had posted a video poking fun at the Chinese government on Twitter (which is banned in mainland China).But the apparent fallout was not limited to comedy. Scheduled musical performances began disappearing, too, including a stop in southern China by a Shanghai rock band that includes foreign members, a Beijing folk music festival and several jazz performances, and a Canadian rapper’s show in the southern city of Changsha.The frontman of a Buddhist-influenced Japanese chorus group, Kissaquo, said last Wednesday that his concert that night in the southern city of Guangzhou had been canceled. Hours later, the frontman, Kanho Yakushiji, said a performance in Hangzhou, in eastern China, had been canceled, too. And the next day, he announced that Beijing and Shanghai shows had also been called off.“I was writing a set list, but I stopped in the middle,” Mr. Yakushiji, whose management company did not respond to a request for comment, wrote on his Facebook page. “I still don’t understand what the meaning of all this is. I have nothing but regrets.”Organizers’ announcements for nearly all of the canceled events cited “force majeure,” a term that means circumstances beyond one’s control — and, in China, has often been used as shorthand for government pressure.Stand-up show organizers did not return requests for comment. Several organizers of canceled musical performances denied that they had been told not to feature foreigners. An employee at a Nanjing music venue that canceled a tribute to the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto said not enough tickets had been sold. A Chinese rock band concert in Qinhuangdao, China, last year. Scheduled musical performances have been canceled, with organizers citing “force majeure.”Wu Hao/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the foreign musicians whose shows were canceled have since been able to perform in other cities or at other venues.But a foreign musician in Beijing, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said his band was scheduled to play at a bar on Sunday and was told by the venue several days before that the gig was canceled because featuring foreigners would bring trouble.Lynette Ong, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, said it was unlikely that the central government had issued direct instructions to spur the recent cultural crackdowns. Local governments or venue owners, conscious of how the political environment had changed, were likely being especially cautious, she said.“In Xi’s China, people are so scared and fearful that they become extremely risk-averse,” she said. “Overall, it’s a very paranoid party.”In the past, when nationalism has gone to extremes, or local officials overzealously enforced the rules, the central government would eventually step in to cool down the rhetoric, in part to preserve economic or diplomatic relationships. But Professor Ong said Beijing’s current emphasis on security above all would give it no reason to intervene here.“If people don’t watch comedy, there’s no loss for the party,” she said.Joy Dong More

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      Stand-Up Comics Are Asking, What’s So Funny About Grief?

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      Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Stand-up comedy.Are these the new five stages of grief? It can seem that way to those following the comedy scene. The past year has brought us specials and solo theatrical shows with jokes sandwiched between deeply felt thoughts on the death of a father, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend and sister.Dead baby jokes were once a juvenile niche. Now comedy about the death of a child has become its own heartbreaking genre. Just this month, the comic Liz Glazer released her debut stand-up album, “A Very Particular Experience,” about the stillbirth of her daughter (“a comedy show meets shiva”) and Michael Cruz Kayne premiered his wrenching solo about the death of his son, “Sorry for Your Loss.” Early on, he warns us that we might cry. “If you don’t,” he adds, pausing, “that’s rude.”There are so many grief-stricken comedians these days that it invites the question: For an art form traditionally associated with punchlines about dating and airplane food, why is it mourning again (and again) in America?The pandemic certainly put grief on the minds of artists and audiences, and that also explains a boom in books, theater, podcasts and television on the subject. One way to look at the final season of “Succession” is as a cringe comedy about people who are terrible at grieving.But the growth of stand-up on this theme is rooted just as much in aesthetic changes in the form. One of the most exciting developments in popular culture over the past decade is the growing ambition of comedy. Not only has it produced some of the finest, most urgent art on the pandemic, #MeToo and other newsworthy topics, but comics have also displayed a broader emotional palette than they did a generation ago. They are after more than just laughs. These new shows illustrate how grief, precisely because it’s usually handled with solemnity, jargon and unsaid thoughts, is ripe territory for stand-up.Michael Cruz Kayne warns audiences at his show about the death of his son that they might cry, adding, “If you don’t, that’s rude.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt the same time, there’s so much grief comedy right now that it’s already developed its own clichés: Joan Didion references, bits about the phrase “He’s in a better place.” Striking the right balance between light and dark is also tricky. Several comics sink into an indulgence they can’t afford. Comedy doesn’t have to be only about jokes, but when it stops being funny, there had better be a good reason.A SIGNAL TURNING POINT in modern stand-up was the moment when Tig Notaro walked onstage at a club in 2012, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you. I have cancer. Thank you.” She revealed that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and that her mother had died. She wondered aloud, “What if I transitioned into silly jokes?”Then a funny thing happened: The crowd protested, loudly. Notaro sounded surprised, even mocking the interest in bad news, before adding: “Now I feel bad I don’t have more tragedy to share.”That storied set was eventually released as a special, called “Live,” to considerable acclaim. Many comics followed with raw tragedies to share. Laurie Kilmartin live-tweeted as her father died before turning that into a special. Doug Stanhope used his mother’s last days for a baroque routine.Comedy has always gravitated toward darkness. Richard Pryor and George Carlin broached the saddest subjects. But there is a difference in comedy today, in aim and overtness. An extreme example is “Red Blue Green,” a 2022 special from Drew Michael, who has produced some of the most formally experimental and artistically polarizing hours in recent years. Toward the end, he describes comedy as “mining sadness” and transforming it into a balloon animal to make it palatable for an audience. That was the setup to the twist, a long rant about his own failings and insecurities and miseries that ends without a punchline. The result was something more like therapy than art — a deflated balloon.This is the risk of comedy that lingers in tragedy. It can get stuck there. Hannah Gadsby had also toyed with the surprise of setting up tension without relieving it in the surprise hit “Nanette,” to make a point about how always going for the joke can stunt your growth. That success touched a nerve, and the backlash included loud complaints that it wasn’t comedy at all. Besides giving short shrift to Gadsby’s deft balancing act, this policing of genre boundaries does comedy no favors. A flexible, broad art form is a healthy one.Hannah Gadsby in their special “Nanette,” which set up tension without relieving it. NetflixThe push into melancholy territory can be found in more ingratiating work, including specials by the most commercial stars. In his 2018 special, Adam Sandler downshifted into melancholy and sang about the death of his friend Chris Farley. But the tone has changed most dramatically among a younger generation of comics who seem interested in more than mere escapist entertainment. It’s also probably no coincidence that little-known comics are more likely these days to get attention from producers and industry people if they build shows around a narrative or theme.“At this point in comedy, it’s not enough to be funny,” Ben Wasserman said in the Brooklyn funeral parlor where he staged his vaudevillian “Live After Death,” which explores the death of his father and grandfather (not to mention his tragic lack of an agent). “You have to make people feel.”MAYBE THAT WAS SAID with tongue in cheek, maybe not. Either way, there’s no question that in certain quarters of comedy, jokes are not enough.For instance, at shows around New York, the quirky, swaggering Gastor Almonte has been performing a hilarious 10 to 15 minutes about his hatred of oatmeal. In a previous era that might have added up to a debut special that resembled the work of Jim Gaffigan. But when Almonte turned it into an hourlong solo show, “The Sugar,” that material was beefed up with a soul-searching story about his diabetes diagnosis and how the prospect of mortality changed his family. Watching it, I confess I wondered what the Gaffigan version of this show would look like.“The Sugar” was staged downtown at Soho Playhouse, which has developed into a hub of weighty theatrical stand-up shows, many of which are transfers from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. One of that theater’s biggest hits of the year was Sam Morrison’s breakthrough, “Sugar Daddy.”Quick-witted and charismatic, Morrison delivered a tightly honed work about the pain of losing his boyfriend that is both a love letter to his partner and a self-deprecating satire of a culture of mourning, one that spoofs well-intentioned condolences and support groups. He argued that the difference between comedy and tragedy was thin, saying that in the plays of Shakespeare, “comedy is only tragedy with a marriage at the end.” He explained that grief was lonely and impossible and “nothing helps as much as this show,” before a pinpoint pause, “because you guys can’t talk.” And he flat out played the vain millennial fool. “What is trauma but unmonetized content?” he asks, echoing a line from “WandaVision,” a series that itself is a grief narrative.In contrast to Drew Michael, Morrison is uncomfortable going long without a laugh. I saw the show twice, and the second time the punchlines had become faster, more insistent, almost as if the best argument he came up with was to keep you laughing.Most of these comics share a belief that discussing the subject has become taboo, even stigmatized. “We don’t talk about grief: We keep our grief to ourselves,” Kayne says in “Sorry for Your Loss.” Glazer hit this same theme. “For that reason alone,” she says, “I want to talk about it.”There is an irony in so many comedians talking about grief by saying no one talks about grief. It evokes the parade of cancel culture-obsessed comics complaining about how you can’t joke about anything without getting canceled while doing that very thing. But the grieving comics are quicker to mock and undercut their own motivations.The fundamental hallmark of these shows is a meticulous self-awareness. The comics are constantly justifying their own work. There’s a defensiveness here, an anxiety that is understandable. Grief doesn’t sound like a fun night out. And there has been a backlash that you can detect from other comics, even ones practicing dark comedy. In his amusingly navel-gazing special “Blocks,” Neal Brennan poked fun at himself and others by terming this genre “stand-up traumedy.”In “Baby J,” John Mulaney mocked the idea of exploiting death. Marcus Russell Price/NetflixJohn Mulaney ridiculed the tendency to exploit death in his special, “Baby J,” by recalling how in elementary school he was jealous of a classmate whose grandfather had died because he became the center of attention. The recent movie “Sick of Myself” takes an even darker view in its scathing satire of the culture of victimhood. In one scene, the wildly self-involved protagonist fantasizes about her own funeral. It’s funny, if glib and uncharitable, in the way that biting satire often is.The truth is that death is too good of a straight man to ignore.So many of the opening jokes get their laughs by treating mortality with just the right amount of irreverence. (Glazer begins with “I hope you like stillbirth.”) The lightest touch is just enough. Witness the dry understatement of this line from the comic Rob Delaney’s wrenching memoir “A Heart That Works,” about the death of his young son: “In between Henry’s birth and his death was his life. That was my favorite part.”Another reason grief is an unexpectedly great subject for comedy is that in a fragmented, polarized culture, with a shrinking common collection of references, it’s universal and relatable in a way few other topics are. Even if we don’t know someone who has died, we will. Or as Kayne explained to his audience: “We’re all pre-dead.”When someone dies, the conversations follow a tight script. Sorry for your loss. There are no words. We are all afraid of saying the wrong thing, and those suffering don’t entirely know how to respond. It’s a relief to hear comics not just poking fun at the stale jargon of condolences, but also demystifying the hidden world of the grieving, which can be messy and petty. The competitiveness of grief is a frequent subject. Who suffers most? The consensus is it’s parents of children who die, but only in these shows might you hear someone weigh the levels of pain of a parent of a 2-year-old versus that of a 10-year-old (as Colin Campbell does in “Grief: A One Man Shitshow,” about the gutting experience of losing two teenage children in a car crash).While it might seem counterintuitive, the popularity of joking about death represents a welcome shift from pessimism about comedy that was popular among performers like Gadsby and Michelle Wolf during the Trump era. These more recent comics generally share a faith that comedy helps — even if only a little. There’s a joy in the performances of Morrison, Kayne and Alyssa Limperis (whose “No Bad Days” focuses on her late father) that takes you by surprise.It makes you question the seeming obviousness of the incongruity of this kind of comedy. Death is an integral part of life, one every great art form explores. It’s the existential elephant in every room. Why do comics joke about it? A better question: How can they avoid it?Ali Siddiq in “The Domino Effect 2: Loss.” He avoids self-aware jokes and instead leans into stories you can get lost in.via YouTubeThis may be part of the reason the most riveting special on grief spends no time analyzing the subject. In his eye-opening “The Domino Effect 2: Loss,” Ali Siddiq, a revelation of a performer, adopts a different approach. Instead of self-aware jokes, he leans into stories that are easy to get lost in, especially with his jaunty, magnetic delivery. Looking back on his childhood, he describes how he became a drug dealer and lost a girlfriend, a sister and eventually his freedom. He tells the story of his arrest with vivid, suspenseful detail, but also sadness at the cascading devastation of loss. It’s the rare comedy about grief that takes the advice, “Show, don’t tell.”THE BEST ART DOESN’T hit you over the head. It taps your temple with metaphor, allusion and maybe an oblique tease. Stand-up is so immediate, so direct in its relationship between the comic and the audience, that there’s a temptation to just be blunt, to tie up and underline your points with a punchline that calls back to an earlier one. But while there are only a limited number of subjects to joke about, there are infinite ways to do it. That variety is where art flourishes.One theme repeatedly voiced in these shows is the impossibility of overcoming sadness. We are told that time will not heal all wounds; that grief makes you want to get others to understand, even if they never will. The final stage of grief, the real one, is acceptance, and in one of his early jokes, Michael Cruz Kayne tells you that is the one you will never get to.You don’t need to have endured the death of a loved one to confront this problem, the one of failure. But you can try approaching it in different ways. This is what Kayne’s show is all about, how you can see the same thing from a radically different perspective. He cleverly illustrates this point by looking at examples in math, language and, most of all, comedy. The death of a child is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. It’s obscene to use it for comedy, to laugh at it.But by turning this experience into a show, he keeps the memory of his son alive. It’s a subtle, moving performance that finds beauty in the trying. You get the sense that it’s what allows him to laugh at things he shouldn’t. When he takes the body of his child to a funeral home for cremation, he pays the bill and receives a receipt, which is projected on the wall behind him. It reads: “Thank you please come again.” More

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      Bill Saluga, a Memorable Comedic Wiseguy, Is Dead at 85

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      He played many characters in his career, but he was best known by far for the one who said, “You doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”Raymond J. Johnson Jr. was a wiseguy, dressed in a zoot suit and a wide-brimmed fedora and waving a cigar in his right hand.When someone mentioned his name, the shtick took off.“Ohhhh, you doesn’t have to call me Johnson,” he would say. “My name is Raymond J. Johnson Jr. Now, you can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junie, or you can call me Ray Jay, or you can call me R.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Or you can call me R.J.J. Jr.“But you doesn’t have to call me Johnson.”And you can call his creator Bill Saluga, a diminutive comedian with a thick mustache who came up with Johnson while a member of the Ace Trucking Company, an improvisational sketch troupe whose most famous alumnus is Fred Willard. Mr. Saluga also played Johnson on various television series; on a disco record (“Dancin’ Johnson”); and, most memorably, in commercials for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer.In 1979, at the peak of Mr. Saluga’s fame as a comedic one-hit wonder, Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote that “now everybody and his brother are doing Saluga impressions throughout this very impressionable land of ours. He’s right up there with Steve Martin’s wild and crazy guy and Robin Williams’s madcap Mork.”Bob Dylan played off Mr. Saluga’s Johnsonian wordplay, and his own name change, in his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody.” He sang, in part:You may call me Terry, you may call me TimmyYou may call me Bobby, you may call me ZimmyYou may call me R.J., you may call me RayYou may call me anything but no matter what you sayYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyMr. Saluga died of cardiopulmonary arrest on March 28 in a hospice in Los Angeles, his nephew, Scott Saluga, said. He was 85 and had been living in Burbank.The Tribune Chronicle, a newspaper in Warren, Ohio, near Youngstown, where Mr. Saluga was born, first reported his death on April 8. But it did not become widely known until Hollywood trade publications published obituaries this month.William Saluga was born on Sept. 16, 1937. When Billy, as his friends called him, was 10, his father, Joseph, was killed in an accident while working at the Republic Steel mill, and his mother, Helen (Yavorsky) Saluga, started working as a bookkeeper.Billy was a class clown and a cheerleader in high school. After two years in the Navy, he became a performer. In the early and mid-1960s he was seen on a local TV station, with a sketch comedy group called the Thimble Theater and at the Youngstown Playhouse, where, for seven years, he played roles in numerous productions, including “Inherit the Wind” and “Guys and Dolls.”In 1968, he became the talent coordinator for the comedian Steve Allen’s interview and entertainment show. “If you have a special or unusual talent,” a newspaper ad for the show read, “television needs you. Call Bill Saluga. 469-9011.”In 1969, after replacing a member of the Ace Trucking Company, he created the Johnson character during a man-on-the-street sketch with Mr. Willard at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, It became part of the troupe’s repertoire until he left in 1976. By then, the group had made numerous appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.”Mr. Saluga appeared from 1976 to 1977 on the comedian Redd Foxx’s variety show and a comedy and variety series hosted by the comedian David Steinberg, on both of which he played Raymond J. Johnson. For the Steinberg show, he also portrayed a New York street guy named Vinnie de Milo.“Billy was always doing Ray J.,” Mr. Steinberg, said by email. “He was relentless with it. I would say, ‘Mr. Johnson,’ and Billy would be off.” He added: “He did it everywhere. At parties. His timing and delivery were so funny every time.”The character, with a delivery based in part on the con man Kingfish from the sitcom “Amos ‘n Andy,” appealed to Anheuser-Busch, which hoped to use him to distinguish Natural Light from a rival beer, Miller Lite. In 1978, the company teamed Mr. Saluga with Norm Crosby, the malaprop comedian, for a commercial set in a bar.When a customer asks for an Anheuser-Busch Natural Light, Mr. Crosby counsels him to say, “Just say ‘Natural,’” which propels Mr. Saluga to say: “See, you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser-Busch Natural Light. And you doesn’t have to call it Anheuser Natural. And you doesn’t have to call it Busch Natural. Just say ‘Natural.’” And when Mr. Crosby says, “Johnson’s right,” Mr. Saluga says, “Ohhhh, you can call me Ray or you can call me Jay. … ”The pair would go on to do a second spot. Eric Brenner, a friend of Mr. Saluga’s, said in a phone interview that Mr. Saluga had earned significant money in residuals from the two commercials, probably the most he made in his career.For the next 40 years, he took regular acting jobs — including a hostile ticket taker at an opera house in a 1992 episode of “Seinfeld” and Louis Lewis, the comedian Richard Lewis’s fictional cousin, in three episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2005 — as well as reprising Raymond J. Johnson on the animated TV series “The Simpsons” (2002) and “King of the Hill” (2010). “He played outrageous characters onstage, but offstage he was very reserved,” said Bill Minkin, a friend and fellow comedian. “It was that Midwest down-home thing.”No immediate family members survive.Mr. Saluga did not mind being known primarily as Raymond J. Johnson. In fact, he said, it gave him an agreeable anonymity when he stepped out of character.“I would sit in restaurants and hear the people behind me in the booth talking about me, and I was right there,” he said on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast” in 2017. “They didn’t know who I was, which was great.” More