Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers (2015)

When you come to an Anthony Jeselnik show, you know what you’re going to get. He’s become famous as a shock comedian who’ll joke about everything from dead babies to national tragedies. That can be a problem. It's hard to surprise people into laughing if they're prepared for everything. He gets pigeonholed as someone with a shock-value gimmick, and if that was true, he'd have flamed out a long time ago. But there’s a lot more to his technique than getting laughs out of saying what you’re not “allowed” to say.

Here’s an example. He opens Thoughts and Prayers with this joke, after the usual region-specific spiel (here, it’s in San Francisco) about how he loves being in wherever-he-is.

“Got to walk around a little bit today. Saw a baby.”

Pause. The audience is laughing in anticipation. This is one layer – for someone else, seeing a baby might just be nice. But they’re anticipating the sick twist.

“Saw a baby locked inside the back of a hot car. So it’s been a great day. Love that.”

Pause. They’re cheering. This is what they expected: I saw a baby – the baby was dying, I enjoyed that. Is that the whole joke? But then:

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a monster. I tried to help the baby. Tried to throw a rock through the window.”

Pause. More laughter. This is the escalation of the original joke: I tried to help it, by probably killing it with a rock. He’s piling on. Is this the whole joke?

Wait:

“Window was down.”

They erupt. He set it up, hit the punchline – perfect delivery – then doubled down on the punchline, then added yet another twist. Epilogue:

“Ruined that baby’s whole weekend. It was worth it.”

That’s Jeselnik’s solution to an audience who thinks they know where you’re going. It’s not as simple as just extending the jokes. It’s about making the expected become unexpected, through framing. It’s about misdirection. Anthony Jeselnik is probably better at misdirection than any other comedian right now. That joke isn’t even in the top 10 jokes from that special. It’s just a warm-up, so I felt comfortable spoiling it because it demonstrates his technique. Regardless of your attitude to his material, you have to appreciate his craftsmanship. He keeps pulling the rug out from under the audience, in almost every joke, and it magnifies the impact.

There’s an inherent self-reflexivity to Jeselnik’s act that other comedians with more normal material don’t have, or need. Throughout Thoughts and Prayers, he comments on how the crowd is reacting to each joke. Right after the baby-in-the-car joke, he throws out another offensive one. Great delivery, great misdirection – everyone erupts. I won’t spoil it. Point is, after it, comes an aside:

“See, that joke, that joke is a test. To see if you guys are cool or not. That thing about the baby in the car, that’s just me clearing my throat. If you laugh at that joke, whole show goes great.”

Getting the audience into that cosy space of mutual acceptance is gratifying for them, but Jeselnik’s act has sharp edges and a constant need for surprise and a slight discomfort. So this isn’t a ceasefire. If most comedy acts are the performer and the audience laughing together, Jeselnik’s is the performer vs. the audience. He makes them laugh even when they’d rather not. People laugh while covering their eyes in amused shame, while shaking their heads in half-hearted negation. Which is why the next joke is immediately prefaced with: “This next joke is a test to see how cool you are”. And so it continues, Jeselnik letting them get comfortable before shocking them again. It’s a masterful, rhythmic manipulation of the audience.

Regardless of his technique, jokes which are getting laughs from violating established morality only work for as long as you’re still in a mental space where you’re clinging to that morality. So after about 15 minutes of the act, just when you’re getting used to it, the jokes change – less dead babies and rape, more subversion, more off-the-wall misdirection. From relatively short one-liners to stories. And then back again. The set concludes with 18 minutes of Jeselnik getting real, talking about his experiences as a ‘controversial’ comedian and how Comedy Central tried to control his show. That’s probably the best part – it’s just as funny as the rest, but the ironic distance he keeps from the audience has shrunk. He’s almost confiding. And what he has to say is honest and occasionally even profound. Plus, he ends on maybe the single best joke in the whole special, an act of misdirection which required a solid 5-6 minutes of setting-up. How real was he being? Who cares? 

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers is on Netflix.