Greetings and welcome to my new blog, where I remind myself (and maybe even you) that actually, I am doing things with my time and I am not completely blind to the modern media landscape. Naturally I’m starting with a 6 month old comedy special that is frankly the least sexy way to establish myself as a media luminary and intellectual, so it’s fortunate that I’m not really going for that.
First of all, shout out to wardrobe for Sarah’s Onitsuka Tigers, which are also my shoe of choice. ASICS must start selling them in the USA again so that I can stop reaching out to every gay polycule I know that is visiting Japan and begging them to bring me a pair back.
—-
A brief apology, I wrote those two paragraphs before consuming the entire thing. I now have my full reaction ready:
Wow.
I’ll be honest I expected things to be a little bit more egregious than they eventually ended up being. Given my understanding of (but not witnessing of, prior to this) Sarah’s work, I was prepared for grossness and body horror to ensue. In the opening however, I was mostly impressed by the puppetry/stop motion film work. It gave space to a medium you don’t see getting much play in the current moment, and definitely not in the stand up space, where puppets have been relegated to the casino tours of Jeff Dunham.
I remained impressed by the alternative nature of Sarah’s stand up, which again I expected, but the commitment with which she would engage with audience members only to insult them with mostly anti-comedy and non-jokes brought a level of absurdness to the show that made other premises feel much more acceptable.
Between these moments I think Sarah has an enjoyable absurdist set, that mostly relies upon self deprecating reflections about her own body, taken to such an extreme that the audience can easily believe that she does not actually believe these things about herself, and is instead using these anecdotes as an allegorical stand in for the moments we’ve all felt as though our bodies were something foreign to us, and something we are not necessarily in full control of.
It was only in the last few minutes of the show, a closing visualization / montage / game show, that there was the level of grotesque that I had expected, and was suitably put off by. I could have been more entertained by the material presented here, but I feel a little bit of it was actually derivative - for example, the body horror of pulling a cuticle taken to its illogical extreme stands out as a low point amongst the gory tableaus featured in Sarah’s closer that feels something like an Aristocrats joke for the modern era.
Overall, the special is driven by Sarah’s freight train energy throughout, and an impressively translates to the television not as something you watch, but as something that happens to you.