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      Exploring the Diversity, and Precariousness, of French Stand-Up

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      Fanny Herrero, the creator of “Call My Agent!,” returns with a Netflix show called “Standing Up,” which follows four struggling Parisian comics.PARIS — In the opening scenes of “Standing Up,” Nezir (Younès Boucif) mines his life for stand-up material as he cycles across Paris on a food delivery shift.“I’m poor,” he says to himself, testing the sound of the words in French. “It’s not handy to be poor. I don’t recommend it.” On the way, he crosses paths with a friend, Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye), who is begging a shop owner to advertise her comedy show.“Standing Up” is the latest project from Fanny Herrero, who created the showbiz comedy “Call My Agent!” In this new show, which comes to Netflix on Friday, she again takes viewers behind the scenes to see how deals and careers are made, this time in a less prestigious corner of French cultural life: stand-up comedy.Aïssatou and Nezir head to the Drôle Comedy Club — the show’s title in French is “Drôle,” meaning “funny” — for that night’s performances. The club’s owner, Bling (Jean Siuen), has had success, but is now struggling to come up with material, as the next generation of comics come up in his own club.Over the course of six episodes, “Standing Up” explores what it takes — and means — to “make it” in comedy. Herrero conceived of the show after a dinner three years ago with the comedian Gad Elmaleh, who told her about Paris’s growing stand-up scene. On his recommendation, she went to the Paname, the city’s first stand-up comedy club. She was amazed by the diversity onstage, she said in a recent interview: People of different ethnicities and from various backgrounds — from the suburbs outside Paris, from other cities, from the countryside — were performing. “It’s the story of our country,” Herrero said.The show’s struggling stand-up comics reflect this diversity. Nezir, who is of Algerian descent, and Aïssatou, who is Black, have both been in the game for a while, and are trying to get more recognition. Bling’s real name is Étienne, a very French name he jokes his Vietnamese parents chose to help him assimilate.The show frequently addresses racism in French society, even as some of the country’s politicians and high-profile intellectuals have recently decried the spread of American “woke” ideas around identity.In one episode, the police stop Aïssatou after she has looked through large shopping bags for her sunglasses. She jokes about the incident that night, and is warned not to mention at her solo show by her white producer. In another, Nezir makes a joke about how the only Arabs well-to-do Frenchwomen encounter are Uber drivers or Saudi princes. “As an Arab in France, I’ve lived in a lot of situations as Nezir,” said Boucif, who is also a rapper and holds a master’s in environmental law from the prestigious Sorbonne University.The show’s title in French is “Drôle,” meaning “funny.”Mika Cotellon/NetflixApolline (Elsa Guedj) meets Nezir (Boucif) at the comedy club.Mika Cotellon/NetflixBling (Jean Siuen) has had success in the comedy world, but is struggling to come up with material when the show opens. Mika Cotellon/NetflixPeople of color were instrumental in establishing the French stand-up scene, which is far younger than in the United States or Britain. Between 2006 and 2015, “Jamel Comedy Club” aired on French television, hosted by Jamel Debbouze, one of the country’s top comedians. Himself of Moroccan heritage, Debbouze featured largely people of color on his show. This gave “a voice to ethnic minorities that they didn’t have on TV shows,” said the comedian Paul Taylor, who performs in a mix of English and French.Taylor said there are only four clubs in France that follow the English-speaking stand-up tradition, with a lineup of several comedians each night. Generally, solo shows are favored in France, a result of the country’s strong theatrical tradition. Besides Paname, the three other clubs only opened in the last three years: Madame Sarfati, Fridge and Barbès Comedy Club.The Drôle Comedy Club in “Standing Up” was a purpose-built set, just in case Paris went into lockdown because of the coronavirus. The actors practiced their sets at Barbès Comedy Club, which opened for clandestine nights during Paris’s second lockdown, with around 10 comedians performing for around 30 audience members. The audience didn’t know the “Standing Up” actors weren’t comics, or that they were practicing for a television show.When it came time to film the characters’s stand-up sets at Drôle, the audience was made up of nonactors, with a camera trained on the performing comedian, and another on the audience’s reactions. “There is nothing worse than fake laughs and fake reactions,” Herrero said.Well-respected French comedians — Jason Brokerss, Fanny Ruwet and Shirley Souagnon — wrote the characters’ sets. Like “Call My Agent!,” the show features cameos, in this case from other French comics, including Hakim Jemili and Panayotis Pascot, who perform snippets of sets throughout each episode. Unlike with the appearances by internationally famous actors in “Call My Agent!,” Herrero doesn’t expect the French public, let alone Netflix viewers from other countries, to recognize these performers.Netflix has had a significant impact on stand-up in France. Before the rise of streaming services, only dogged French stand-up fans dug around the internet to look for performances. Now, comedy specials hosted by the streaming service have made American comedy much more accessible in France.Boucif named Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. as comedians he liked from his research for playing Nezir. “I like stand-up when it’s subversive, when it’s not politically correct,” he said. When asked about Louis C.K.’s admitted sexual misconduct and the controversy surrounding Chappelle’s comments about transgender people, Boucif said he didn’t know about those issues.Nezir and Aïssatou (Mariama Gueye) are both trying to make it as stand-up comics.Mika Cotellon/NetflixBoucif’s response is similar to the way many French comedians approach American comedy, Taylor said. They gravitated to the same few names who got the big Netflix deals, he said, but don’t understand the surrounding context.One of the later episodes of “Standing Up” includes a translated Louis C.K. joke. Herrero, who is aware of the comic’s past sexual misconduct, said the writing staff chose him because they needed a name the French audience would know.In her career so far, Herrero has broken with French television norms. She was not only the screenwriter for “Call My Agent!” but also, following the first season, named its showrunner. Typically, French screenwriters conceive of shows, then hand their script and control to directors, she said. The role Herrero negotiated with network executives looks more like the American showrunner model, where she retained overall control.France 2, the broadcaster that aired “Call My Agent!,” hasn’t run anything like it since. “It was a miracle,” Herrero said. “Most [French studios] are doing cop shows and family comedies,” she added.“Standing Up” is unusual in the French TV landscape for being a dramedy. The show’s target audience is relatively young, and Herrero said she hopes it will help stand-up comedy continue to gain credibility in the French mainstream.“It’s because of Netflix this show can exist,” she added. More

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      ‘All My Friends Hate Me’ Explores British Social Anxiety

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      The film “All My Friends Hate Me” satirizes anxiety and paranoia among upper-class British millennials. Its writers say they are laughing at themselves most of all.LONDON — Seven years ago, Tom Stourton, 35, received a wedding invitation from two college friends. He was surprised, having drifted apart from the couple. But he attended the event, arriving hung over and sleep deprived from another party the night before.“Over the course of the day, I became increasingly paranoid that I had been invited as a joke,” Stourton recalled in a recent video interview. He feared the groom would reveal the prank during the speeches.Looking back more recently, “it seemed like a funny idea,” he said, “being somewhere where you should be having fun with your friends, but there’s this undertone of something hostile.”The writer, actor and comedian wove this setup into a screenplay with his co-writer, Tom Palmer, also 35. The resulting film, “All My Friends Hate Me,” opens in limited theaters Friday, before coming to streaming platforms later this month.Stourton plays Pete, an anxious, self-involved 31-year-old who corrals a group of college friends to celebrate his birthday in the countryside. Over the course of the boozy weekend, he becomes increasingly worried that they secretly despise him. In a video interview, the film’s director, Andrew Gaynord, described its world as “manor houses and posh people and rolling fields — very British.”For Pete and his “mates,” the equally British social norm of keeping a stiff upper lip conceals contemporary anxieties about class, wealth and privilege. Insecurities are deeply felt but never discussed, and over the course of the weekend, Pete’s mental state starts to unravel. The film is part black comedy, part psychological thriller. “I liked the idea of a guy blowing things out of proportion in his head — and that playing like a horror film,” Gaynord said.Social anxiety like this is one aspect of a constellation of mental health issues impacting young British people, and its effect on young men has been getting more attention in recent years. Twenty percent of men in Britain aged 16 to 29 are likely to experience some form of depression, according to a recent report from the Office for National Statistics. The BBC recently announced a new documentary about men’s mental health, which is centered on the singer James Arthur, and, in Arthur’s words, “our reliance as a nation on anti-depressants.”In 2019, Prince William helped introduce a campaign, Heads Together, to tackle stigma around mental health. Last year, his younger brother, Prince Harry, discussed his own struggles in “The Me You Can’t See,” a documentary series for Apple TV+ that he co-produced with Oprah Winfrey.When they were writing the script, Palmer and Stourton wanted to make sure they were depicting anxiety authentically within this wider cultural context. So Palmer consulted with the author Olivia Sudjic, whose 2018 book, “Exposure,” discusses modern anxiety. According to Sudjic, millennials, in particular, can be on high alert, policing their own behavior. In a recent video interview, she described this anxiety as a “ripple effect” of “paranoia around ‘cancel culture’ and vigilance online” that afflicts a generation of adults who grew up on the internet.Pete (Stourton), left, and Archie (Graham Dickson) both struggle with fragilities in the film.Super LtdBut in the four years since “Exposure” was published, the ways that anxiety is discussed have shifted, Sudjic said. Before the pandemic, there was a “stigma,” she said, around being open about your mental health issues if your life looked more comfortable than other people’s. Then, during Britain’s lockdowns, even the wealthy struggled. Since then, it’s become more “OK to talk about mental health even if you feel like you’re very privileged,” she said.In “All My Friends Hate Me,” which was filmed in late 2019, the discomfort of acknowledging your own wealth and privilege needles the characters, a familiar thread in much of Stourton and Palmer’s work. The pair met at Eton College, an elite all-boys boarding school known for educating princes and prime ministers. After university, they formed the comedy duo “Totally Tom,” and in 2010, a YouTube video they made went viral. In it, Stourton plays a student at the University of Bristol, or as Palmer put it to The Spectator newspaper, a “posh buffoon” trying incredibly hard to be cool. The following year, they were nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a show directed by Gaynord, who the pair had met on the British comedy circuit.The character of Pete is a continuation of these themes.“They’re sort of fair game, aren’t they?” Palmer said in the video interview, referring to “posh people.” The pair wrote the film with a focus on trying to make fun of themselves, Stourton said.Gaynord, however, comes from a different background. “I grew up in a council house,” he said. “My mum’s a cleaner, my dad’s a taxi driver, in Manchester. My school wasn’t particularly good.” What he and “the Toms” had in common, he said, was a tendency toward anxiety and overthinking.Material circumstances are at the root of the “existential dread” plaguing many young British men, according to Alex Holmes, the author of “Time to Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging and Connection.”In a recent video interview, Holmes described turning 30 as “the benchmark age where everything has to change dramatically.” Not meeting certain milestones — like acquiring a mortgage, getting married and starting a family — can lead men to a lot of anxiety around a “feeling of catching up,” he said.In “All My Friends Hate Me,” Pete finds himself in his friend’s parents’ house, drinking his friend’s parents’ whiskey. As the weekend goes on, his friends also mock him in a scathing “comedy roast” that Pete finds deeply unfunny. It’s a nod to the cruel humor Stourton was surrounded by as a student, which was really “a way to get one up on someone, so the jokes don’t end up being angled toward you,” he said.The infantilizing nature of the weekend becomes an additional source of stress for Pete, as does the presence of Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a new addition to the group, and his ex and current girlfriends. The film finds comedy in the tension between the intensity of Pete’s suffering at all this and the possibility it’s all in his head.“It’s particularly funny,” Stourton said, “watching the white privileged man experiencing being gaslit.”After all, “he doesn’t have any real problems in his life,” Gaynord said. “I think it’s quite cathartic to laugh at that.” More

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      Taylor Tomlinson: A Comic With the Confidence of a Star

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      On her new Netflix special, “Look at You,” she demonstrates tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs.The moment I knew that the stand-up comic Taylor Tomlinson was going to be a star was not after she made the precociously funny debut special, “Quarter-Life Crisis,” at the age of 25. Or her assured follow-up, “Look at You,” which premiered on Netflix this week. Or even after the news that she’s writing and starring in a movie about her own life (directed by Paul Weitz).It was the minute after the comic Whitney Cummings insulted her bangs.This took place on Cummings’s podcast, one of two freewheeling episodes that Tomlinson, now 28, appeared on during the pandemic that were also filmed and released on YouTube. For most of their chummy conversations, Tomlinson appeared polite, deferential, even in awe of her friend and mentor, a more seasoned stand-up, writer and television star. But when Cummings offhandedly suggested her protégé might need help from a stylist with her new haircut, the temperature in the room plummeted.“Are you serious?” Tomlinson asked, shooting a look that jarred the voluble Cummings into juddering paralysis. Tomlinson diagnosed the insult as a disingenuous play for content and calmly told Cummings to stop. Then came the counterpunch. Shifting from her friend to the camera, she told a story of pitching a television show with Cummings that described her, brutally, as an underminer. Tomlinson wrapped up this entertaining story with a compliment, saying she learned how to stand up to Cummings from Cummings. Along with teaching a lesson that it’s always best to tread carefully when commenting on a new hairstyle, Tomlinson displayed steel, poise, showmanship and a willingness to get tensely uncomfortable, which can help turn a good joke into a great one. More than anything, she showed a commanding ability to quickly pivot without fluster. Small talk can reveal big things.The bangs were gone by the time Tomlinson shot “Look at You,” but it did not escape my notice that after an arty opening shot of her all alone in the audience, she began her set with jokes about them. “It’s been a rough couple years,” she said, setting up expectations of talk about the pandemic. “I got bangs at one point.”This new hour has the confidence to start slowly but build, anchored by three or four superb extended bits. Tomlinson has emerged as one of the youngest comics with multiple Netflix hours because of tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs. With a quick smile and wide, alert eyes, her comic persona leans into a wholesome, cheerful affect, a Christian upbringing and impeccably basic cultural references (Harry Potter, Taylor Swift). This provides a solid backdrop for incongruously dark swivels, sometimes accompanied by the kind of shimmies Steph Curry does after hitting a shot near half court.Her gift is making weighty subjects come off as breezy. There’s no way a special that covers night terrors, panic attacks, bipolar disorder, a dead mother and a disturbingly blunt father, along with suicidal thoughts, should seem this delightful. That requires skill and savvy. Take her six-minute chunk on her mother dying young. These jokes are carefully massaged, contextualized and accented to work for any crowd, and among her strategies to lighten the mood is arguing that it’s OK to laugh because the death of her mother helped her career.“Do you think I’d be this successful at my age if I had a live mom?” she asks, flashing the kind of condescending disappointment given to someone ordering lobster at a diner. “She’s in heaven. I’m on Netflix. It all worked out.”Tomlinson has a people pleaser’s ability to ingratiate. In her new special, she says she looks like someone who would be better at meeting your mother than at sex. “I’ll meet your mom all night long,” she boasts. But to get a laugh, she’s just as happy to play the jerk. “Lot of my friends are settling down,” she says. “Some are just settling.”Tomlinson taped her first special after a breakup with her fiancé. Since then, she has clearly spent many hours with a therapist, which makes its way into many jokes. Ever since Maria Bamford dug into the subject of mental health, it has been explored thoroughly in stand-up, particularly in the last year or two, and we may be reaching the point of exhaustion. And Tomlinson occasionally risks veering into a kind of comedy that doesn’t fully digest and transform therapy into jokes.And yet, the strength of her best bits is the specificity and depth of her analysis of her own psychology. There are few jokes with the classical structure breaking down the difference between men and women, but more investigation into her own eccentric personality. She attributes her tendency to rush into relationships as a reaction to her mother’s dying so early in her life, and builds many jokes out of her trust issues, including a wonderfully performed series of punch lines about how she interprets any kindness from a boyfriend as a tactic. “Oh, is this your move?” is her refrain, about everything from opening the car door to staying together for six decades.Her first special was a portrait of a young fogy, but this new one zeros in on her self-protective cynicism and exaggerates it until it’s an absurd cartoon. The funniest parts of these jokes are in the subtext, how Tomlinson performs knowingness in a way that can be truly clueless. But unlike many comics who find laughs in saying the wrong thing, her act never comes off as character comedy. It’s a testament to her acting ability that even when you know she’s presenting a deluded version of herself, you buy it.For a comic her age, Tomlinson is remarkably nimble, able to pivot from light to dark, innocent to dirty, chummy to aggressive. Whatever gets the laugh. If there is something missing from her comic tool kit, it might be a certain vulnerability. She can push right past that, and understandably so. She’s dealing with grave issues, like a parent’s death or a wounding comment, and her emotional armor needs to be thick. Notably, she allows it to get a little thinner when it comes to more modest concerns like, well, her bangs. It’s in that bit that she sits in insecurity.“Having bangs is exactly like being on mushrooms,” she says. “The whole time you’re like: Do I look weird?” More

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      Akaash Singh and His Case for Bringing Back Apu

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      The stand-up comic, whose special has gone viral, takes issue with how some South Asians like Hari Kondabolu portray their experience in the United States.When “The Simpsons” stopped using the Indian convenience store owner Apu in new episodes, many saw it as a hard-won victory against cultural stereotypes. The Indian American comic Akaash Singh was not one of them. In fact, he was upset about it — and as stand-ups do, he brought that onstage.“Here is a brown man married to a beautiful brown woman, owns his own business, selling overpriced products to unwitting white people,” he said, building momentum at the start of his 20-minute debut special, “Bring Back Apu,” released on YouTube a month ago. “Apu is not racist. He’s the American dream.”Singh, 38, hit a nerve, racking up one million views in a week. (It’s now approaching 1.5 million.) The special never mentions the comic Hari Kondabolu by name, but it is a response to a public conversation kicked off by his cutting critiques of “The Simpsons,” which did more than anything else to lead to the removal of the character. Kondabolu started criticizing Apu on late-night television in 2012 and, five years later, built it into a documentary, “The Problem With Apu,” fleshing out the argument that Apu was a modern-day minstrel figure. After avoiding the issue for a while, Hank Azaria, the white actor who voiced Apu for decades, apologized and refused to play the character.Even a decade ago, there were few South Asian voices getting attention in mainstream American comedy. Not only are there more now, but there are enough to reflect sharp divides among them. In a 2019 special, Aziz Ansari mocked the fact that Apu being played by a white person was only lately becoming controversial. “Why didn’t anyone say anything 30 years ago?” he asked, then answered his own question. “Because Indian people could only say something like four years ago, OK? We’ve had a slow rise in the culture.”Singh and Kondabolu have a lot in common: both comics are around the same age; both passionately cite their parents in their arguments about Apu and believe that representation matters. “The Simpsons” was important to Singh, he told me, in part because it was the only show of his childhood to portray a happy, loving Indian couple.What he saw onscreen as a boy “was always an Indian guy who can’t get a girl to save his life or an Indian girl who is supposed to marry an Indian guy but falls in love with someone else,” he said in an interview at Alice’s Tea Cup on the Upper West Side. “With Apu, finally there was one. It was an arranged marriage and he was in love with her. Arranged marriages where people are in love happen. A lot of Indian people I know.”Kondabolu did not respond to a request for an interview. But in a recent conversation with the author Wajahat Ali at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Kondabolu was asked how he responded to South Asians who were unhappy about the loss of Apu. He said that while of course Apu had positive characteristics, the source of the comedy, the reason people laughed, was the accent. As he put it in his documentary, that is “a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.”Singh said that he wasn’t necessarily offended by comic accents and even thought Azaria did a better one than most “brown comics I know.” But he added that the accent shouldn’t outweigh the rest of the character. “A lot of my brown acting friends refuse to do a role that has an accent. I don’t understand that,” he said. “Your parents have that accent. That accent is beautiful. My issue is: What are the jokes behind that accent?”When Singh evokes the immigrant generation in his special, it is to soberly lament the loss of their values. He contrasts the South Asians who talk about the racism of “The Simpsons” with the self-reliance of the older generation. “I don’t remember being raised on this stuff by our parents,” he told me. “The mentality everyone I knew had was keep your head down, do the work, everything will work out.”He said he was angry in part because “the industry seemed to reward these stories.” He added pointedly that South Asians in America were not oppressed the way Black people or homosexuals have been. “This is a struggle that you are using to get ahead,” he said about his peers, “but it’s not a real struggle.”There’s something decidedly old-fashioned about Singh’s argument. He’s a comic proud to tell you that he doesn’t drink or do drugs and that he waited to have sex until his 30s, with the woman who became his wife. He also said he might be out of touch, which is why he brings up on his special that he’s from the 1990s. But there is an audience for this kind of comic attack on progressive critiques, one that comedians have been exploiting onstage and in podcasts. Joe Rogan is the most notorious example, but there is a constellation of popular podcasts around him, including Flagrant 2, with Andrew Schulz and Singh as hosts.Singh heatedly balked when I suggested he was part of an “anti-woke” comedy scene. He described himself as a moderate who leans left, but conceded that he spent more time mocking progressives on his podcast. Then again, in reaction to Senator Ted Cruz tweeting out a link to the Apu special, Singh said “I hate him,” noting that his parents had no running water or heat around the time of the power crisis in Texas when Cruz fled to Cancun.Growing up in Dallas, Singh said, and being surrounded by loud Texas conservatives pushed him to be a liberal; after moving to New York in 2008 to pursue comedy, those on the left pushed him in the opposite direction. When I ask if he ever worried about only being reactive, he brushed off the question, saying that is essential to his comedy. Singh is open about how liberal politics can be a good foil. When he appeared on Rogan’s podcast, he defended “woke” people. “Without them,” he asked the host, “what are we?”Singh said he even dabbled in what he described as victimhood in 2018, when he said he was going broke. “I tried to sell a special that had a little bit of that, a little sob story,” he said. “It was about going to India and connecting with my culture. It’s in the same vein of white people going, ‘This is so authentic.’ It didn’t work.”“Bring Back Apu” did. Singh said he recently sold out a 500-seat show at the Irvine Improv in Southern California.Singh is quick to compliment Kondabolu, who he said reached out to him after hearing him on a podcast. “He said I implied he didn’t work hard and I said I don’t think that at all,” Singh said, praising Kondabolu’s joke writing and work ethic. “My issue is with your mentality,” Singh said he told his fellow comic. “The victimhood mentality. The mentality weakens us as a people.”“There’s merit to both sides,” Singh said. “I’m not completely right, as much as I would love to be.” More

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      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Bob Odenkirk’s Long Road to Serious Success

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.When Bob Odenkirk’s agent first called him about playing an oily bus-stop-ad lawyer named Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” — at the time a little-watched cable show in production on its second season — Odenkirk hadn’t seen a minute of it, much less heard about it. But he readily accepted the gig.He was in no position to turn down good work — even if it was a minor role, intended to last only a few episodes. “I needed money!” he told me. Odenkirk’s pedigree was in comedy, where he enjoyed a paradoxical status: legendary and obscure. He studied improv under the visionary teacher Del Close and performed for packed crowds at Second City alongside buddies like Chris Farley. He had a hand in writing sketches that helped define the ’90s era of “Saturday Night Live.” He acted on “The Larry Sanders Show” (excellent and underseen), wrote for “Get a Life” (excellent and canceled swiftly) and did both for “The Ben Stiller Show” (excellent and canceled even more swiftly) and for one of the all-time-great American sketch series, “Mr. Show,” a cult hit that he created for HBO in 1995 with his friend David Cross. When it ended after four seasons, Odenkirk tried directing feature films with decidedly mixed results, failed to get a litany of other projects off the ground and turned to mentoring younger talents whose love of sketch comedy matched his own.So when the offer came in 2009, he flew from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, watching “Breaking Bad” — about a mild-mannered New Mexico chemistry teacher named Walter White who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and, in the midlife crisis that ensues, becomes a coldly calculating meth kingpin — for the first time on the plane. “I didn’t even watch a whole episode, but I didn’t need to, I got it,” Odenkirk recalled. He also didn’t bother to memorize the reams of cascading, hucksterish dialogue that the writer Peter Gould had crafted for him, certain that these lines would be cut way down by the time he stepped on set.They weren’t. And, 12 years later, on a Friday night this December, Odenkirk was still in Albuquerque, still playing Saul Goodman. The role had not merely changed his life but, to a significant and not-unwelcome degree, commandeered it.“Breaking Bad” grew into a prestige-TV-defining smash on the order of “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men.” And Saul proved such an enjoyable part of it that, when the series ended, its creator, Vince Gilligan, decided his next TV project would be a prequel, created with Gould and titled “Better Call Saul,” focused on the surprisingly poignant question of how this scumbag lawyer came to be quite so scummy.Odenkirk and Bryan Cranston in Season 5 of “Breaking Bad,” in 2013.Ursula Coyote/AMC“Better Call Saul,” Season 1, 2015.Lewis Jacobs/AMCMy first glimpse of Odenkirk came via a pair of monitors wedged into the open garage of a suburban home, on the northeast side of town. It was a punishingly cold evening, which seemed even colder thanks to a scattering of fake snow arranged outside the house. Crew members huddled in winter coats, and production vehicles sat humming up and down the block. Odenkirk, who’d recently turned 59, was here to shoot a scene from an episode that will air later this year during the show’s sixth and final season. Gilligan himself was on hand to direct, adding to the last-hurrah ambience: “We have to be out of here tonight,” Gilligan told me in the garage, eating a slice of pizza from the catering truck before darting back inside, “so there’s a little time pressure.”It was Odenkirk’s fourth consecutive night shooting in the house, his workday starting around dusk and ending around dawn. But when I said hello to him between setups in a spare bedroom, where he sat reading Mel Brooks’s autobiography, he was feeling voluble and introspective. “This has been the biggest thing in my life,” Odenkirk told me from behind a Covid-protocol face shield, “and it’s emotional to say goodbye to it, and to all these people I’ve been working with for so many years.” He grinned, then added, “I guess people who work on, you know, ‘N.C.I.S.’ would say the same thing. But would they mean it?”If “Better Call Saul” hasn’t been a hit on quite the epochal scale of “Breaking Bad” — few things are — it might wind up being the greater artistic achievement. Odenkirk and the show’s writers are close to pulling off a tricky double transformation: First, they wound Saul back from the two-dimensional opportunity for levity he was on “Breaking Bad” into a tragicomic antihero called Jimmy McGill — the man Saul Goodman used to be, who wrestles with near-pathological unscrupulousness while trying to win the respect of a prideful older brother (Michael McKean) and a devoted girlfriend and fellow lawyer (Rhea Seehorn) whose belief in him he can’t seem to help betray. And then they started to turn Jimmy, piece by piece, back into Saul again.The show’s central question is whether a flawed person can truly change for the better, and the implicit answer, given that we know who Jimmy is on his way to becoming, is grim. The result has been a decade-plus, nonlinear experiment in character development spanning multiple seasons of two different series, the closest precedent to which might be Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries. Emmy voters nominated Odenkirk for best lead actor in a drama four times, and you can imagine the shock of those who knew him from “Mr. Show”: How did the guy who did that manage to do this?Talking in the spare bedroom, Odenkirk was dry and earnest, underscoring that the lunatic places he has been able to push himself onscreen are exactly that: places he pushes himself. Now, with the role that made him an unlikely star finally ending, it was clear that Odenkirk was ready to push somewhere new. He’d parlayed a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-writing career into a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-acting career, pivoted to a frustrating and unfruitful directing career, then stumbled into a celebrated dramatic-acting career so fruitful that Alexander Payne (“Nebraska”), Greta Gerwig (“Little Women”) and Steven Spielberg (“The Post”) all cast him in movies. Odenkirk, of course, foresaw none of this, nor that he would write a memoir of his life, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” to be published next month by Random House — much less that he would star in an action movie called “Nobody,” written by the creator of “John Wick,” which grossed $55 million worldwide last year, about an ex-government assassin who, seeking revenge after a home invasion, leaves a trail of destruction that puts his family in far more danger than the initial intruders ever did.Odenkirk in the film “Nobody,” 2021.Universal Pictures“I’ve done all these different things, and there’s been a great degree of failure,” Odenkirk told me later, adding, “I don’t wanna be a dilettante. I would feel horrible if that’s how I was characterized.” He paused, then assumed a tone of mock grandiosity. “Or!” he said, smiling. “Am I the best dilettante that ever lived?”Inside the house, a cameraman captured a beguiling tableau: There was a glass-topped watch winder, lined with felt and fitted with three fancy-looking timepieces, each traveling in its own hypnotically undulating orbit. A few inches away stood a framed photograph of a dog and, next to this, a squat urn.Framed from overhead, Odenkirk shuffled into the shot and planted himself in front of these things, telegraphing a faint, happy drunkenness, with just a few grunts and an impressive economy of motion. He set down a glass of liquor next to the urn and proceeded to pluck the watches from the winder, stuffing them into his coat pocket. Slowly, the camera tracked forward, making clear that Odenkirk stood on a balcony overlooking a living room — and, a beat later, revealing a jarring sight on the floor below. Lagging behind the camera, Odenkirk casually peered over the balcony’s edge and, spotting the thing in question, reacted with a jolt, his boozy contentedness giving way, abruptly, to a silent-comedy pantomime of terror.“This is the God’s-eye view,” Gilligan called out to Odenkirk, explaining the mechanics of the shot. “We see something a second before you do.” They filmed one take, then another, the sequence short but demanding precisely timed interplay between camera and actor. “It’s really funny,” Gilligan told Odenkirk of his performance. “Let’s do one where you hang out there a touch longer.”“Maybe the camera shouldn’t move till I touch the urn?” Odenkirk suggested.“Yeah,” Gilligan replied, “but let’s perfect this version first, where we see it before you do. That’s how the Coens would do it, and I love those guys.”Much like Coen brothers’ films, “Better Call Saul” is a show about audacious schemers — some of them drug lords, some thieves, some hit men, some cops, one veterinarian and many lawyers — who put elaborate plans in motion that those of us at home are routinely kept in the dark about, left to guess where they’re headed.Saul is, first and foremost, a rhetorical safecracker. Odenkirk realized early on that virtually every time the character speaks, his aim is to entrance people with a slick spell of words until he gets what he wants. “He’s trying different tacks, looking at the person he’s talking to, going down one road, seeing if it’s working,” Odenkirk told me. But one of the dramatic tensions of “Better Call Saul” is that his mouth rarely stops running when it should, even when it gets him into trouble. “It’s almost like he thinks the more complicated his scheme is, the better,” Odenkirk said. “Like Huck Finn: I know how we’ll sneak into the house — first, you pretend to be a widow. … ” Odenkirk laughed. “Like, Hold it, why not just go through the window?”That night’s shoot required something besides verbal acrobatics, though. Gilligan showed me an iPad with a schematic of the set, upon which he’d diagramed Odenkirk’s looping path through the house and the camera angles he devised to capture it. “I think it’s going to be a very shocking and dismaying sequence for the audience and one that does not have the benefit of dialogue,” Gilligan told me. “Bob doesn’t say a single word, and what he’s known for is his mouth,” but “he really made himself indispensable to this show because we realized there’s so much more to him than his mouth.”Like its predecessor, “Better Call Saul” is about a man who descends in fits and starts into his worst possible self, and who finds that descent irresistible in comparison with a straight-and-narrow life spent, as Henry Hill puts it at the end of “Goodfellas,” as “a schnook.” Or, as Saul himself puts it at the end of “Breaking Bad,” as “just another douchebag with a job and three pairs of Dockers,” managing “a Cinnabon in Omaha.” One of the dark jokes on “Better Call Saul” arrives in a series of flash-forwards, when we discover that, after fleeing New Mexico, Saul is indeed living under an assumed identity in Omaha, overseeing a food-court Cinnabon — a drab and joyless existence, shot in black and white.Both shows resemble updated westerns, depicting lawlessness on the onetime frontier of a now-fading empire. And both suggest that the impulse to cheat, cut corners and get over on chumps, if not inflict harm upon them outright, is far from some aberrant pathology in the American identity but rather a constitutive force. One of the more provocative implications of “Better Call Saul” is that Jimmy’s truly unforgivable transgression isn’t that he behaves unethically but that he does so as an uncouth underdog: driving a junky yellow car, wearing garish suits and lacking the decency to launder his self-serving behavior behind a fancy law-school diploma.From behind his face shield, Odenkirk explained that his first impulse as an actor and a writer is to search for layers of buried motivation and stress-test the script for emotional falsity — even when that material consisted of him descending a staircase as quietly as possible, hoisting a makeshift weapon over his head. But he acknowledged that there was “no subtext here.” When he was younger, he said that he could be a “pissy guy” with a “chip on his shoulder,” but after this many years of playing Saul, he’d learned when to trust people like Gilligan and Gould — to simply shut up and do what his collaborators told him.Odenkirk’s abiding conviction is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesFor five hours I watched as he sneaked around the house, engaging in a weird cat-and-mouse game with another character. “This is optional,” Odenkirk told Gilligan after some sneaking, his brain unable to resist subtextual probing, “but I think part of him enjoys this? The romance of danger?”Gilligan nodded, by way of saying no: “I think you need to play it more like, Ah, I gotta get outta here,” he replied, “otherwise it’ll play weird.”Whenever a new shot was being prepared, Odenkirk retreated to the bedroom to read, chitchat with the scene’s only other actor (rather than risk a possible spoiler, I won’t name him) and make phone calls. At one point he sent for me, and I found him on his cellphone with someone on the crew, proposing a plot that, I soon gathered, involved hoodwinking Gilligan.“They say we’ll be done at 2 a.m., but it’s not gonna happen,” Odenkirk said into his phone, sketching out a subterfuge that he thought would help “motivate Vince” to bring things in on schedule. This required leveraging a 45-minute break in some mildly duplicitous way, and I was amused to see that Odenkirk, making his show about an inveterate schemer, wasn’t above a little scheming of his own.When the call went around the set for “lunch” — at 11 p.m., disconcertingly — there was much left to finish. For some people on the crew, this was a chance to nap, but for Odenkirk it was an opportunity to read the script for the series finale, which Peter Gould had written and delivered to him under strict orders to share it with no one. An assistant on the show said, “I’m supposed to take anyone out who tries to read it besides Bob.”“Peter’s coming to the house tomorrow afternoon, and we’re gonna talk about it — you can’t be there for that,” Odenkirk told me. “But why don’t you come over beforehand?”Odenkirk shares a home in Albuquerque with Rhea Seehorn and another actor from the show, Patrick Fabian (who plays the manicured law partner Howard Hamlin). I arrived the next morning and found Odenkirk in the kitchen, wearing jeans and running sneakers, showing no signs of the all-nighter he pulled. The house was built in the 1940s, Odenkirk said, by a contractor who specialized in office buildings, which accounted for its slight resemblance, from the outside, to a dental clinic, down to a ribbon of ornamental glass bricks installed beside the front door.Photographs of his wife, the comedy manager Naomi Odenkirk, and their two children hung on the walls alongside pictures of his roommates’ families. (Seehorn got the master bedroom, downstairs, while Odenkirk and Fabian claimed bedrooms upstairs.) Odenkirk decided to live with fellow cast members a few years ago, to help alleviate the isolation he felt when “Better Call Saul” began. “It’s about loneliness,” he said, when I asked if the roommate arrangement reflected some method-style immersion. Making the first season, Odenkirk lived by himself at a condo owned by Bryan Cranston, the star of “Breaking Bad,” who vacated it when that show ended. Odenkirk likened that experience to living “on an oil rig,” his mind gnawing at its own edges after draining shoots. “It gave me great sympathy for someone like James Gandolfini, who talked about how he couldn’t wait to be done with that character, and I think Bryan said similar things: ‘I can’t wait to leave this guy behind.’ I finally related to that attitude.”This surprised Odenkirk, at first: “I always used to scoff and roll my eyes at actors who say, ‘It’s so hard.’ Really? It can’t be.” And yet, he discovered, “the truth is that you use your emotions, and you use your memories, you use your hurt feelings and losses, and you manipulate them, dig into them, dwell on them. A normal adult doesn’t walk around doing that. Going: ‘What was the worst feeling of abandonment I’ve had in my life? Let me just gaze at that for the next week and a half, because that’s going to fuel me.’”In Odenkirk’s case, this meant dwelling on painful childhood memories, “putting myself back to being a 9-year-old,” he said, “and my dad wakes me up at 2 a.m. to tell me he’s leaving and he’ll send me money to pay the bills, and I’m thinking, I don’t know cursive enough to write the check, so how am I going to pay the bills? ‘Let me just make myself that kid again, because I’ll take that feeling of loss and fear and play it tomorrow!’” He added, “If there was one thing that let me do this, it was some access I have to the emotional, even traumatic spaces inside me that maybe isn’t the most healthy person to be.”Growing up outside Chicago, in the town of Naperville, Odenkirk was one of seven siblings. He readily discusses his father, and his loathing for him, referring to him in his memoir as “a hollow man” with a short temper, who spent his days with drinking buddies when he was around at all and who did an abysmal job of caring for his children. “It’s not that I didn’t love my dad,” Odenkirk told me. “He just wasn’t around, and he was a kind of a blank, shut-down guy, and he did things that were tortuous to me and my older brother, because he was drunk. He was always telling us, ‘The family’s broke, I don’t know what we’re gonna do and where we’re gonna live.’ And we’re little kids! Like: ‘I’m 5! I can’t help you with that!’”Odenkirk’s response was to dissociate, “reading” his father as though he were some literary grotesque out of Dickens. In his memoir, he describes his father’s death — which came when Bob was 22, by which point the two were fully estranged — with remarkable coolness: “Saying goodbye to him was a shrugging affair.” When I asked if the wound had really cauterized so neatly, Odenkirk said: “I’ve often felt like I must be hiding something, or not acknowledging something, or can’t see something. There’s no question I wish I had a father figure in life, especially as a kid, especially a good one. Wouldn’t that have been nice? There are definitely things I’ve had to deal with there, because I had nothing, an emptiness.”Odenkirk says that the “tension and trauma” his father generated is “one reason my brothers and sisters and I are so close.” His younger brother Bill earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before Bob assisted him in achieving his own dream of becoming a comedy writer, on shows like “The Simpsons” and “Mr. Show.” Their older brother, Steve, is a banker in Tucson, Ariz. Other siblings have pursued various careers: water-table tester, retail worker, funeral director and real estate agent. “Bob was born with a really independent streak,” Bill Odenkirk told me, “more so than anyone in our family. He’d probably argue that he’s had to discover who he is, but I feel he was born with a very strong sense of what he didn’t want to do and what he did want to do, which was performing and being out there doing something other than a conventional job.” Which, Bill added, “wasn’t the thinking at our house.”Bob’s role at home was the resident ham, putting on shows in the kitchen for his mom and siblings. By adolescence, the negative influence of his father and the positive influence of “Monty Python,” which began airing on PBS in the 1970s, instilled in him a mocking disrespect toward authority: “With any authority figure, I had so much resentment, and of course that was all unfair and unhelpful — except, maybe, in my comedy.” His abiding conviction, in a paraphrase he attributes to Eric Idle of “Monty Python,” is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”“You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’” Odenkirk said.Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesOdenkirk’s belief that truly great jokes carry some irreducible amount of anger — and that this anger’s noblest function is to torpedo pieties and hypocrisies — helps explain his lifelong commitment to sketch comedy. Sketch can be irreverent verging on assaultive, not merely in terms of content, but on the level of form itself. An audience goes into a sketch ready for all manner of rapid-fire experimentation, a wildly porous fourth wall and extreme narrative deconstruction. There are internal laws of physics governing a good sketch, keeping everything on the right side of total nonsense, but these laws tend to be mutable, ephemeral and contradictable to a degree seldom seen in, say, sitcoms or feature films. For a few minutes, everyone agrees to inhabit a world radically untethered by the kinds of rules they teach in screenwriting classes. In any given sketch, as Odenkirk put it, “there’s a disrespect for the form itself.” You can end a sketch by trashing it, he said, “and that’s perfectly fine and wonderful.”For this reason, he said, “most people have a phase of liking sketch comedy, and it ends around 30. And I get it, because it’s just ideas and ideas and ideas, and somewhere around that age, life clicks in and people can’t take 10 more ideas every night. They go: ‘Can you just have the friends show up and do the same thing and behave the same way? I have enough going on in my life.’” That sketch comedy is a young person’s game, he went on, is compounded by its driving ethos that “the world is a bunch of clowns. As a young person, you get such delight out of someone saying that. You’re so happy to hear it, for a couple reasons. One, part of you is an angry young person. And another, which I can see in my own kids, is the intimidation factor of the world. It’s a safety mechanism of saying: ‘I don’t have to feel intimidated by this insurmountable world that I’ll never make my way in. I can just call it all [expletive].’”Odenkirk was describing a perspective that he is proud to have only partly outgrown. Even as he has worked in other forms, his commitment to sketch comedy has been unwavering, whether this has meant shepherding younger acts like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or reuniting with David Cross and most of the old “Mr. Show” roster for “W/ Bob and David,” a resuscitated version of the show that they made for Netflix in 2015. (The first episode featured a time machine, capable of traveling in real time only, fashioned from a porta-potty.) “Nothing Bob does creatively is more important to him than sketches,” Cross told me, praising “the ability and patience he has to go, ‘This seems like a really awful idea, but let’s dig through it, and there might be a nugget we can take everything else away from, start from this tiny, dismissible joke and build out from there.’”Odenkirk with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” in 2008.Adult SwimOn “Mr. Show,” which refracted the silliness and social bite of “Monty Python” through a Gen-X prism, Odenkirk frequently sublimated his anger into deranged satires and loopy parodies. In one celebrated sketch, called “Thrilling Miracles,” he played a sadistic daytime-infomercial cookware pitchman who, it emerges, thinks that saucepans talk to him and scalds a kindly homemaker with boiling milk. In another, he played a tracksuit-wearing mob boss named Don Corelli: a tyrannical paterfamilias who insists to his lackeys that “the highest number is 24” and threatens violence against any who challenge this inane edict. Other sketches achieved an anarchic silliness: In “The Story of Everest,” which Odenkirk co-wrote with Jay Johnston, he plays an aged father who guffaws and bellows and speaks in an old-timey voice as his son, back from a triumphant ascent of the mountain, keeps losing his balance and falling into wall-mounted shelves lined with his mother’s thimble collection — over and over and over.Odenkirk’s path to “Mr. Show” was bumpy. In the late ’80s, Lorne Michaels hired him for the “S.N.L.” writing staff, where Odenkirk wrote one of the show’s most famous sketches — about a self-hating motivational speaker named Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, who lives “in a van down by the river” — and co-wrote another, about schlubby Chicago-area dudes obsessed with “Da Bears.” But Odenkirk says that the triumphs were few and that he struggled to find his stride. He incorrectly assumed that he and his cohort, that included Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien, could radically remake “S.N.L.,” when in fact they were there to serve the prerogatives of an institution. “My inability to grasp what was happening around me, and what that show was, speaks to my myopia and the kind of myopia you need to have when you’re young and doing creative work,” Odenkirk said. “You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’”Odenkirk in various “Mr. Show” sketches from 1995 to 1998. Clockwise from top left: “Prenatal Pageant,” “24 Is the Highest Number,” “Thrilling Miracles” and “The Story of Everest.”HBOThat attitude was bred into Odenkirk by Del Close, the acting teacher, in Chicago. Close’s earlier students included Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, and his later students included Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert. Close died in 1999, but he remains an enormously important shadow figure looming over contemporary comedy — one who never enjoyed a fraction of the mainstream success of his best-known disciples. In “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk quotes Close as saying, “I belong in struggling organizations,” which he took to mean that there was more freedom to experiment if you remained a scrappy upstart, pleasantly installed on the culture’s fringes.Odenkirk internalized that lesson. His brother Bill told me: “I think I have a wider love of comedy than Bob. He’s more of a purist and someone who wants his comedy to be more challenging and more to the bizarre side of things.” Until “Breaking Bad” came along, Odenkirk had in fact conducted his career almost entirely on the fringes, leaping from one struggling organization, as it were, to the next. When he writes in his memoir that “I had no intention, ever, of making it big,” you believe him, instead of suspecting false modesty, because while he’s inarguably ambitious, that ambition has always seemed to point somewhere other than mass adoration. It’s important to remember that, while “Breaking Bad” finally did confer fame, the show wasn’t a hit until a few seasons in, when Netflix began streaming it and put it in front of millions more people than had seen the original broadcast, on AMC. In that light, you could argue that Odenkirk never left the fringes for the mainstream; rather, the mainstream finally came to him.Odenkirk stood with Rhea Seehorn at the kitchen island in their house, talking about the finale of “Better Call Saul” — very carefully, because I was there. Odenkirk read Gould’s script the night before, and Seehorn didn’t try to hide her curiosity.“You have 13?” she asked, eyes wide, referring to the episode number. “You like it?”“It’s a lot in there, a lot to think about,” Odenkirk replied. “I think I like it, but I was pretty wiped out when I read it in the middle of the night. I think it’s a challenging way to go, to finish the series. It’s not flashy. It’s substantial, and on some level it’s things I hoped for, for years, in this character’s brain. On the other hand, yeah, I have to read it again. But what I like about it is, it’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It doesn’t feel cartoonish. It’s pretty great, I think. It’s pretty great.”He added: “I would wanna end with this kind of character-development focus. That’s what it’s about, instead of something that just has guns in it. I guess there’s a few guns, but they’re not like in other episodes.” He turned to me, explaining: “I spend a fair amount of time doing crimes this season. Just stupid crimes.”By the end of the fifth season, Saul has embraced full criminality, symbolized by an unsavory pilgrimage through the New Mexico desert, with the wonderful Jonathan Banks, who plays the baldheaded heavy Mike Ehrmantraut, at which point his metamorphosis is nearly complete: from a morally elastic but ultimately well-meaning guy into one who decides his good intentions have been punished so relentlessly that he should probably set them ablaze once and for all.Of Season 6, Seehorn said: “It’s quite funny, and then very dark — brutally dark. They turned the volume up on all of it. Whatever direction someone was already going in, they made it more extreme.”Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn in Season 3 of “Better Call Saul,” in 2017.Michele K. Short/AMCSeehorn and Odenkirk interacted with an easygoing, lived-in affection — one that they’ve been building for years, onscreen and off, but that deepened last summer, when Odenkirk collapsed on set in front of her and Fabian. It was a heart attack, and as he lay there without a pulse, it was their screams that alerted a medic.“I’d known since 2018 that I had this plaque buildup in my heart,” Odenkirk said. “I went to two heart doctors at Cedars-Sinai, and I had dye and an M.R.I. and all that stuff, and the doctors disagreed” on treatment, with one suggesting he start immediately on medication and the other telling him it could wait. He listened to doctor No. 2 and was fine — until this year, when “one of those pieces of plaque broke up,” Odenkirk said. “We were shooting a scene, we’d been shooting all day, and luckily I didn’t go back to my trailer.” Instead, he decamped to a space where he, Seehorn and Fabian liked to retreat during downtime: “I went to play the Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and I just went down.” He added, “Rhea said I started turning bluish-gray right away.”The soundstages “Better Call Saul” calls home are “massive,” Odenkirk said. After a few agonizingly long minutes, the show’s health safety supervisor, Rosa Estrada, and an assistant director, Angie Meyer, arrived, administering CPR and hooking him up to an automated defibrillator. It zapped him once, then once more, producing an irregular pulse that quickly disappeared. “The third time,” Odenkirk said, “it got me that rhythm back.”An ambulance took him to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, “and around 5 a.m. the next morning they went through right here” — Odenkirk showed me a scar on his wrist — “and blew up the little balloons and knocked out that plaque and left stents in two places.” Later that morning, Odenkirk’s wife and children arrived in Albuquerque, staying with him at the hospital as he recovered for the next week.Odenkirk has no memory of any of this. He cobbled together his account from Seehorn and the others who helped save his life.“That’s its own weirdness,” Seehorn said. “You didn’t have a near-death experience — you’re told you had one.”Seehorn asked Odenkirk how the night shoots had been going, commiserating about the disorientation of keeping nocturnal hours. “I had to do it with Vince,” she said, “when I go out to — ” here, she whispered something Kim does this coming season, that, if I heard correctly, was just enough of a spoiler to omit here. “My character doesn’t usually do things at night,” she told me. “Not outside. She’s like an indoor cat! But this year I had things to do that usually only Bob does.”Seehorn is a deft, sensitive actor, and her performance opposite Odenkirk, along with Michael McKean’s, constitutes the show’s emotional core. Whereas “Breaking Bad” explored an operatic birth-of-a-supervillain premise, “Better Call Saul” works in a more muted — and, to me, more affecting — register. Seehorn’s Kim is a Type A striver with a rebellious streak; she wants to do work more meaningful than representing a regional bank and finds something alluring in Jimmy’s reckless heterodoxy. Meanwhile, McKean’s Chuck McGill, a revered senior partner at the type of high-powered law firm that necessarily represents an array of high-powered malefactors, looks down on his brother with mistrust and scorn and tries to get Kim to do the same. These three characters love one another, and help one another, and yet they continually hurt one another too, in ways that can be as devastating as they can be small.Contrasting the two series, Peter Gould told me that “Better Call Saul” is “about a guy who, in a lot of ways, really wants to be loved and feels rejection tremendously, more than he wants to show. Walter White maybe finds out that what he really wants is power, and he’s very happy to have people fear him, but Jimmy wants love, and even when he’s trying to intimidate people, there’s an undercurrent of wanting approval and acceptance. And it’s something he never quite gets.”Odenkirk pointed out the window toward the Sandia Mountains. If we hustled, he told me, we could fit in a hike before Gould showed up. We drove to a trailhead Odenkirk knows and loves, he traded his sneakers for hiking boots and we began climbing. “We might want to hustle just to warm up,” he said, proceeding to charge up 1,015 feet of elevation on a snowy mountain trail a matter of months after his collapse.As we walked, I mentioned one of my favorite things he did in recent years. It’s a sketch on Tim Robinson’s excellent Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave,” in which Odenkirk plays a sad-sack guy enjoying a lonely meal at a diner, who desperately pressures a stranger and his child, one table over, to help him pretend that his life isn’t as bleak as it is — to corroborate the fantasy that he has friends, owns “every kind of classic car,” including “doubles” and “triples” of some, that he doesn’t live in a hotel and that he married an ex-model whose face he first saw hanging on a poster in his garage.It’s a fantastic sketch that, despite its preposterousness, undoes any neat distinction invoked in the title of Odenkirk’s memoir between “comedy” and “drama.” To tweak Odenkirk’s paraphrase of Idle, it’s comedy with despair in it. With snow crunching underfoot and conifers looming above us, I asked Odenkirk if he thought he could have mustered a performance like that before “Better Call Saul.”Odenkirk in “I Think You Should Leave.” Netflix“I think I’ve gotten more capable of striking a tone of melancholy and making it honest in a comedy piece,” he said. He thought back to his days acting opposite Farley, at Second City. “I actually remember being onstage with Chris and Jill Talley once, doing an improv scene, and thinking to myself, If I was in the audience, I’d be watching them, not me. And I kept thinking, as we were doing the scene, If I was in a drama, I could be the funniest guy, and the way you’re watching Chris Farley in this scene, you’d be watching me. And there was a part of me that thought I could do it, maybe one day. But then I didn’t try. It was just a stray, existential thought that I noted and never acted on, because I love sketch comedy. I thought, It’s fine if you like Chris more than me. It’s fine if you like David Cross more than me. I like those guys more than me!”The best-loved sketches from “Mr. Show” contain only hints as to the depth of Odenkirk’s dramatic talent. But he reminded me of one, “Prenatal Pageants,” in which he plays the beaten-down father of an unborn child whom he and his wife enter into a beauty contest for fetuses. This role could be a total throwaway, but for some reason Odenkirk decided to play it with depth, supplying a sketch aimed at our image-obsessed society with a palpable sadness: This is a simple, slow-witted man, who takes a string of demeaning jobs in order to enter his unborn child into beauty contests. “I remember doing that and saying, ‘I’m immersing myself in this character at a level I don’t normally do, and it feels very true,’” Odenkirk said. Cross told me: “One of the things that made ‘Mr. Show’ stand out is there’s pathos to a lot of those characters. I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s a humanity to some of those characters that you don’t really see that often in sketches.”Odenkirk had been thinking about that particular performance recently, he said, in the context of an upcoming project: a faux-documentary series about cults, co-starring Cross, in which the two will play gurus. “We’re trying to go to another level with it,” Odenkirk said, adding that, after the “Mr. Show” reboot for Netflix, they decided that “we needed to move into a new area, but one that connected to our comedy.” Cross described the show as having “elements of seriousness and drama to it, not like a ‘Law & Order’ episode, but these guys are gonna be real human beings.” Playing them would require a kind of “emoting that we might have once been a little gun-shy about,” Cross added, “but not anymore.”Odenkirk said his ambition was to “do our comedy, but maybe take all that we’ve done in the intervening years and put it to some use, of digging into character and playing it with some sensitivity, having some levels but also be funny.”If you tried to unite the various strands of Odenkirk’s career, you could do worse than to say that they are by and large about “damaged men,” as Cross put it to me, living in (deranged by?) an America in decline: buffoonish authority figures he lampoons with wit and venom, underdogs he invests with a complicated, warts-and-all tenderness. Perhaps it’s because Odenkirk came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but this was true of Matt Foley on “S.N.L.,” true of any number of “Mr. Show” characters, true of Saul Goodman, true of Jimmy McGill and true of the bruiser he plays in “Nobody” — a guy whom Odenkirk regards, much like Jimmy, as a cautionary tale. (The movie was inspired by two real-life break-ins that Odenkirk declines to discuss in any detail.) “My hope is we get to do a trilogy, and he ends up with nothing,” he said. “He destroys everything he loves.”We reached a vista, some 9,500 feet above sea level, overlooking Albuquerque. “Better Call Saul” would keep Odenkirk here at least until mid-February. “I wanna stay under the radar,” he said, imagining what came next, “and get to be this guy who gets to go over here and then gets to go over there. Because some of these things I’ve done feel opposed. They don’t live in the same Venn diagram. But I think that’s cool.”Odenkirk thought about this for a second. “I like being able to get away with it,” he said. “And that’s something that gets harder if people know you too well.”Prop Stylist: Jess Danielle. Hair and makeup: Cheri Montesanto.Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, Calif., and he writes the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. His last feature for the magazine was about the actor and comedian Seth Rogen. Zachary Scott is a photographer and faculty member at the ArtCenter College of Design and California Polytechnic State University. He last photographed Adam Sandler for the magazine’s cover. More

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      ‘Clue’ Review: A Whodunit That Looks a Lot Like a Board Game

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      This Paper Mill Playhouse production is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy.“Clue,” the campy 1985 film based on the popular board game, became a cult classic because of an all-star cast delivering delicious mile-a-minute quips. A new stage production, adapted by Sandy Rustin from Jonathan Lynn’s screenplay, with additional material by Hunter Foster and Eric Price, may not be the out-and-out hoot the film is, but the show is a very fun, very silly 1950s-set whodunit that strikes some contemporary parallels on the way to its grand reveal.As the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings drone on a television set, the eager-to-please butler, Wadsworth (an agile Mark Price), prepares for the arrival of his boss’s six guests, invited under undisclosed circumstances and each assigned aliases for the night.There’s a handsy shrink, Professor Plum (Michael Kostroff); the vivacious madame, Miss Scarlet (Sarah Hollis); and Mr. Green (Alex Mandell), a gay Republican who is hiding the fact that he didn’t vote for Eisenhower in the last election. These three play straight against the production’s broader comics: the dimwitted Col. Mustard (John Treacy Egan, with excellent timing); Mrs. White (Donna English), a multiple divorcée; and Mrs. Peacock (Kathy Fitzgerald, hilarious), a senator’s wife with a drinking problem who dresses like an American Girl doll. (Jen Caprio did the costumes.)They soon discover that their ties to Washington, ranging from the morally murky to the criminal, have landed them on the wrong end of a blackmailing scheme. After their host, Mr. Boddy (Graham Stevens), arrives, he adds McCarthyism blacklisting to their worries. The lights turn off, things — specifically a candlestick, a wrench, a lead pipe, a revolver, a rope and a dagger — go bump in the night, and Mr. Boddy winds up dead, with the dwindling survivors scrambling to make sense of it all.“Is this about the Red Scare?” Mr. Green whimpers. Released in the Reagan era, the film was a pointed satire of conservative hypocrisy. Though the stage version begins with a strong undercurrent of paranoia, which reads believably as both Covid-19 apprehensions and a paralyzing fear of outing yourself as possibly cancelable, it mostly drops politics once the “big scary mansion” high jinks get underway. The plot’s whodunit structure is a surefire farce setup, but given the state of U.S. affairs, the production could have used a stronger political backbone.Casey Hushion directs with a steady eye toward possible laughs, and Lee Savage’s set conveys an appropriately stuffy mansion, with hidden passages and falling chandeliers. The finely tuned cast scurrying about to convince a stray cop (Kolby Kindle) that the propped-up corpses are merely having a good time is a welcome throwback to an era of physical comedy that’s been mostly usurped by sarcasm.Wadsworth’s conclusive explanations — a clever take on the film’s notorious alternate endings, which played at different theaters — make a case that what was then dismissed as a marketing gimmick was actually an early predecessor of today’s multiverses. As those left standing rush to blame one another, in different possible scenarios, they mirror our own increasingly selfish desire to think our perception as being the correct one. Like the board game, and life itself, the play winds up making only one perception true — but thank goodness this one’s fun.ClueThrough Feb. 20 at the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N.J.; papermill.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Moses Storm and the Case for Pretentious Modern Stand-up

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      In his new special, the comic claims he has no agenda, but his jokes and stories about poverty cohere into trenchant commentary. Why are themes out of fashion?Surely you’ve heard the grumbles, the sighs and the outright complaints about self-serious comedians making points instead of punch lines, pandering for applause, creating specials that are more like solo theater shows or, the unkindest cut of all, TED Talks.Eye-rolling over comedy getting tragically serious started among hard-core fans and comics, migrated to podcasts, and now has made its way to specials themselves. Witness “Trash White” (now streaming on HBO Max), a promising if schematic debut from Moses Storm. After opening with a topic sentence (“Crazy will always beat scary”) and a story about growing up poor, he assures the audience that he’s not making a “modern-day comedy special.”In case you’re not clued in to this critique, which reached its zenith in the backlash to Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” he dismissively mentions TED Talks. “I have nothing of educational value to add to your night,” he says. “I have legitimately no agenda.”Here’s the funny part: None of this is true.Storm, whose Timothée Chalamet hair stylishly clashes with his white outfit, has actually made a quintessentially modern comedy special, hitting on every trendy trope, from eccentric camerawork (it opens with a swirling bird’s-eye view of the stage) to documentary elements and theatrical design, including a pointedly cluttered and abstract set. Unless I’m missing the sarcasm, his statement that “The idea of upward mobility in this country is a lie” sure sounds like an agenda.Storm is trying to have his cake and make fun of those who say “Let them eat cake,” too. But one gets the sense that his anxiety about coming off as smarter than funny is an impediment here. What distinguishes this special is not the quality of its jokes, which range from fair to middling, but how they are woven into a thematically and formally coherent show that has something to say about poverty in America today.Storm is hardly the first comic to make jokes about being broke. In fact, there may be no more common subject. In his recent Netflix half-hour, Dusty Slay illustrated his level of poverty as a kid by describing the ice cream his mother offered. “My mom would pour milk into a bowl,” Slay explained. “Then when we’d show up, she’d say, ‘You’re too late.’” Storm also has a bit about the ice cream his family could afford.Dusty Slay talked about growing up poor in his recent special.Clifton Prescod/NetflixIn a raucous special that comes out next month on Netflix, the stand-up Ms. Pat has some superb material on what her family did to save money, including eating “water sandwiches” and cooking in the fireplace.There’s an entire other universe of comics who find humor in currently being poor. Kyle Ayers has a great bit about how he drives for Uber to support his stand-up and once took home two of his five audience members. During the ride, one asked, “How’s it going?” and he shot back, “I think we both know ‘how it’s going.’”And yet class does not seem to be as prominent a subject in stand-up as race or gender. That’s because by the time comics becomes famous enough to make really popular specials, they tend to be too well-off to want to talk about money. (Though an exception might be Gary Gulman’s next special, judging by his current tour.)Storm, a 31-year-old actor and stand-up, digs into the subject from many angles, telling jokes that pinpoint cultural double standards. (When it comes to dyslexia, he explains, the rich get Adderall and the poor are just considered dumb.) Other bits unpack euphemisms in the tradition of George Carlin. He singles out the term “food insecure household” because it makes a serious issue “sound adorable.”The most fascinating part of the special is when Storm discusses his mother’s attempts to win $10,000 from “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” the TV series (hosted by the late Bob Saget) that showcased footage of mishaps in the kitchen or someone getting a baseball to the groin in the front yard. His mother was determined to manufacture an accident with her five children that would win the top prize. The plan was for Moses to drop an egg onto his sister’s face. And using videotape from his childhood, he shows what happened. (You’ll have to watch the special to see if they won.)What begins as a farcical series of mistakes turns into something darker (more “Gypsy” than “Noises Off”) as his mother gets flustered at her small children for botching a comic bit. There’s something uncomfortable about the scene but also poignant. The context of her fury is clarified by Storm’s point that being short of money makes you afraid and desperate. This is the theme Storm works on best, the distorting cycle of poverty, the complex ways being poor keeps you poor.But the portrait of his mother feels unfinished, as if there’s more to say but he hasn’t figured out how to do it. The nuance of character can be funny and interesting, but too often it’s sacrificed for thin quips. “We were living in this terrible part of Florida called Florida,” he says, before fake laughing and adding, “No one’s ever made that joke before.” If it’s so hack, why keep it?The difference between solo shows and stand-up sets is not just the number of jokes, but also the expectations for plot and theme. Stand-up can get away with being a disconnected collection of setups and punch lines, but aiming for more should not be considered some kind of gimmick or affectation. It’s evolution. In a healthy comedy scene, there are many kinds of humor, some more dense with punch lines than others. Comedians like Mike Birbiglia have proved that not only do you not need to choose between stories and punch lines, but one can also support the other, although pulling it off isn’t easy. A joke can hit harder if there’s something behind it beyond a clever misdirection.Unlike Storm, I am happy to admit that I have an agenda. I want comics to make the best versions of the shows they set out to make, and that includes using words with precision. It also means fleshing out ideas without apology and sometimes challenging the audience. There is no one way to do comedy, but complexity, passion and ambition are always welcome. There’s much more to say on this, but for that, you will have to wait for my TED Talk. More