![]() ![]() The Trump joke, which turns into a performance of Early’s own early closeted sexuality, does work as a joke on its surface, but it’s just as much a mimicry of stand-up’s inescapable Trump material over the last several years.Įarly’s stand-up is a good fit within the world of the grandiose concert documentary he’s created, especially its cycle from a pretense of self-awareness to embodying self-obsessed characters and back again. But in both cases, they’re backward demonstrations of exactly the same idea: Early’s not interested in those as topics he’s laughing at the way those ideas get used to signal seriousness. There are a few departures from that focus on tiny complaints the show’s opening stand-up joke is about the Trump Access Hollywood tape, and there’s one very brief aside about school shootings. ![]() The special’s centerpiece is a long reflection on the dire shallowness of millennial culture, set on top of a loose piano meditation in the style of a public service announcement. He mocks the hollowness of “be yourself” Instagram captions. In one section, his put-on frustration with the language of phone-location-service permissions devolves into an incoherent tone poem, with the repeating ack, ack, ack sounds of his own line reading eventually turning him into a helpless broken doll. Early is a delighted, furious close reader. The stand-up portions of Now More Than Ever build towers of righteous, mournful grievance on top of pebble-size complaints. The fact that it’s all covers is the crux of the joke. Now More Than Ever, a special all about empty ideological signaling and performative smarm, discards that entirely. They’re often written to evoke or play on familiar artists, but they are always doing heavy joke lifting within the lyrics and the musical concepts. The songs are original in those specials. The idea of stand-up and musical performance blended together is its own winking cover of the past several years in millennial-comedy trends, including Bo Burnham, Whitmer Thomas, Matt Rogers, and Cat Cohen. The persona of his stand-up is the same as his cover-band character: He’s all skeezy ( faux?) black leather pants and scruffy half-beard, clowning at sincerity as he bemoans the state of millennial culture. But the bulk of the hour is the stage show, a combination of deadpan cover songs and breaks where Early shifts into stand-up routine. Hard cut to Early walking into the greenroom where the band has gathered, announcing, “I made my famous lemon squares!”īackstage sketch-style scenes appear throughout the special, telling the story of Early’s terrible behavior. The first scene of the special (which begins with a white-on-black introductory card that reads, “This film should be played loud bitch!”) sees Early alone in his dressing room, shot illicitly through a half-open door, frantically transferring a pile of lemon squares from a grocery-store clamshell onto a platter. ![]() There are backstage scenes that play like sketch comedy between Early and his backing band, with Early as a vain, pervy, self-absorbed lead singer, perpetually talking over and coming on to his collaborators. The Lemon Squares are a solid cover band Now More Than Ever is a beautifully dumb, exquisitely articulated cover of empty-headed millennial ennui.ĭirected by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey and shot in the style of a self-serious concert documentary, Now More Than Ever gives Early a graceful opportunity to blend several types of comedy into one unified hour. In Now More Than Ever, that play between contexts is happening on the level of the entire special, as one big tongue-in-cheek mechanism to enable Early’s favorite thing: jokes buried inside endless hairpin turns from sincerity to inauthenticity and back again. ![]() But great cover bands are always playing two registers at once: They revive a song’s original context, and they nestle it inside whatever their new version is doing, whether that’s an ironized revival or a megaearnest, nostalgia-mining operation. They’re capable, fun performers who throw themselves into songs by Britney Spears, Neil Young, and Donna Summer. John Early and the Lemon Squares, the band at the center of Early’s new HBO comedy special, Now More Than Ever, is pretty decent as a cover band. Early in Now More Than Ever, a cover of a concert documentary of a cover band featuring a comedian covering millennial jadedness. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |