A backdrop, a stool, a beverage, a microphone. A man wanders on stage and grumbles self-deprecatingly; the audience fidgets in anticipation. The world is in flames, and such familiar comforts are an escape. Please, let us laugh.
We're living through a comedy-astheatre boom: metatheatrical quasiauto biographies (Kate Berlant, Daniel Kitson), avant-garde character work (Natalie Palamides, Cole Escola), quicksilver candor (Jerrod Carmichael, Taylor Tomlinson), and Spalding Gray-esque evening-length storytelling (anything written or produced by Mike Birbiglia). But Colin Quinn, in his soothing, pseudo-cantankerous standup special "Small Talk," at the Lucille Lortel, wants you to know right away that he won't be bothered with all that young person's guff. He's skeptical of social media, if you can believe it. He mocks his own untucked shirt and his gym shoes. ("I'm an old man," he says, "and I'm dressed like a twelve-year-old boy.") His performance is scripted, and loosely organized around themes, but we are mostly in shaggy-comic territory. "Small Talk" is a club set barely disguised as a show.
Quinn's beloved stage persona, tailored and then washed soft by a million tour dates, is a Brooklyn stoop philosopher, an Irish American blue-collar sage. In various comedy specials for Netflix and HBO, Quinn has gruffly shepherded his audiences through a history of the world ("Long Story Short," from 2011), American politics ("Unconstitutional," from 2015), and the formation of New York's demographic hodgepodge ("The New York Story," from 2016). In that last production, buffed to a high shine by its director, Jerry Seinfeld, Quinn talked frankly, and deliberately stereotypically, about race a provocative highwire act in which his tightly packed joke writing and sawtooth bonhomie served him well.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 06, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der February 06, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.