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Surviving The Game
Comic performer Chris Gethard turns storytelling into stand-up, playing up his persona on new album
By Michael Shashoua / Jester editor-in-chief
Comedic actor and talented improv performer Chris Gethard has delved
into stand-up in his own way, which is captured on “My Comedy Album,” released by Don Giovanni Records, a Brooklyn-based punk rock
label, on April 22.
Before considering the album as a whole, it bears mentioning that
one piece on it, “I Survived (A Joke About Advertising)” while
really effective as material and in performance, is actually too
horrific and disturbing to qualify as funny. Gethard himself even
seems to recognize this in one offhand comment in the middle of the
piece. In short, he recounts watching a disturbing late night show
called “I Survived” featuring stories of those who survived horrible
crimes and accidents that by all accounts, they should not have – in
ugly, sickening detail. The joke is supposed to be the innocuous or
wildly inappropriate commercials airing in the middle of these
stories – like an eHarmony ad in the middle of a story involving
rape. But the gruesomeness of the actual survival stories is just
too much and overwhelms any humor that could have come out of
Gethard’s point in relating this.
All that said, there are good parts to this album, especially the
longer pieces “Alan Rickman” and “Bonnaroo,” which capitalize on
Gethard’s skill as a storyteller, seen previously in monologues both
solo and with “Assscat” show performances at the UCB Theatre, and
his own book, “A Bad Idea I’m About To Do”
What makes Gethard so compelling when performing such extended
stories is the way he pulls an audience into his self-deprecating
spiral. “It’s unacceptable,” he says, emphasizing that age 32, he’s
too old to be tattooing Smiths lyrics on his arm, even though he
did. This streams out of the crazy break he re-tells in “Bonnarroo,”
in which an uncharacteristic ecstasy binge leads to the realization
that he should break up with his girlfriend he’s dated for eight
years. Gethard carefully paces out the steps of the binge – not
having done drugs for several years, but then at the Bonnarroo music
festival, buying all he could with the cash he had on him, then
withdrawing $300 and spending it all on more ecstasy.
Similarly, “Alan Rickman” is a tale about what happens in Gethard’s
dating life after that break-up, again with bits of that
self-deprecation thrown in, namely how he can’t believe he’s having
such a wild time with anyone, in New York. Perhaps it all stems from
something he relates in “Mother’s Day,” a shorter piece on the
album, which recounts one of the more humiliating things that could
possibly happen to anyone.
Aside from “I Survived,” Gethard’s “My Comedy Album” is a good
chance to hear what Gethard can do with storytelling, which hasn’t
been available in audio form like this before.
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© 2005-2018 Michael Shashoua