Jim Gaffigan’s ‘Dark Pale’ Special Is His Best Yet
His tone had shifted by 2006, when he had his first special, “Beyond the Pale,” which included his signature bit complaining about Hot Pockets. This set the course for a career of food jokes, with so many of them about how the cheap pleasures of eating fast food overpower our knowledge that it’s bad for us. At its best, like his bit about McDonald’s (“Momentary pleasure followed by incredible guilt eventually leading to cancer”) he broadens his sights to make points about our disposable culture. When he applies his comic eye to hotels or hospitals, he sees the lengths we go to to ignore how the towels were used by thousands of strangers and the gowns worn by the countless deceased.
Gaffigan, now 57, can seem like Jerry Seinfeld (the pair are actually touring together this fall) in his sticky phrase-making — an elevator is a “casket on a string” — and the ordinariness of his subject matter. His focus on single subjects can be knowingly, preposterously long. Who else does 10 minutes on horses? There’s an element of showing off — look at how I can make foliage funny — but also the excessiveness, the stubborn commitment of it, gets its own laughs. Gaffigan’s comedy has always been meta. His new special starts with a moody nighttime landscape that pans back to reveal itself as being inside a picture frame.
He constantly interrupts his jokes to comment on them and plays with expectations through formal trickery. (In a stunt that could have shown up in an early Steve Martin bit, he had a piano onstage for his last special so he could fool us into thinking he could play it.) Another common move is saying he’s pandering before doing the opposite. My favorite of this genre is when he told the crowd in his reasonable moseying tone that he was salt of the earth before stating: “I just want a regular old private jet.”
Along with food, Gaffigan’s most consistent subject is religion. “Dark Pale” features an impression of a peevish, cocooned God shouting at his beleaguered assistant that his messages of climate disasters were not getting through (“I miss the days when you could send a plague and people would listen”). He sprinkles jokes about the Bible or Jesus into his specials. What he doesn’t do is organize them into a thematic, coherent hour, as if he’s making a grand statement. Gaffigan’s old-school act is allergic to anything that might seem pretentious, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t challenge himself. He plays with form by taking conventional bits that unravel into nonsense instead of building to a punchline and even turned his wife’s cancer diagnoses into material.
His new work reveals his move into more storytelling, elaborate act-outs and jokes built on deceptions (“My parents aren’t vaccinated. They’ve been dead for decades, but enough with the excuses!”). He’s also become slightly more political in the Trump era, even letting loose an uncharacteristic rant on social media addressing Trump supporters: “I’m sure you enjoy pissing people off, but you know Trump is a liar and a criminal.” His jokes make the point with a lighter touch, poking fun at how quickly we moved from panic to indifference over Covid. Gaffigan now performs the kind of interweaving jokes that only a seasoned comic could pull off. In his new special, he does bits about Starbucks, bells and diarrhea and then quilts them together. These are less like standard comic callbacks than variations on a theme. It’s the work of a pro.
Source: The New York Times
