Chicago’s Green Mill cocktail lounge has a long and storied history as a film set, including movies like High fidelity, The lake houseand Michael Mann’s first feature film, from 1981. ThiefIt’s now also the setting for John Mulaney’s directorial debut, showcasing the stand-up comedy of Langston Kerman.
LANGSTON KERMAN: BAD POETRYSTREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: You may recognize Kerman from her roles on the HBO series. Insecure or Prime Video The boys (played Eagle The Archer) and will have a recurring role on the new FX series, English teacher.
But he proved his comedic talents shine even brighter in collaboration with other comedians, as co-creator and co-star of the Peacock comedy. Bust down alongside Chris Redd and Sam Jay; as head writer and executive producer for HBO Break with Sam Jay; and as a writer and actor on Mulaney’s recent live talk show experiment, John Mulaney Presents: Everyone’s in L.A..
For his debut Netflix special, Kerman draws on his previous professional experiences as a teacher, which included dealing with mean teenagers, managing his mother-in-law’s dating apps and wondering what the best time of his life really was. And, as the title suggests, there will be poetry. Maybe bad poetry.
What comedy specials will it remind you of? Though Kerman has a couple of scenes in this hour that share comedic DNA with Mulaney and Jay, more often than not he displays his own unique, playful sensibility that defies such easy comparisons.
Memorable jokes: As memorable as his former students’ critique is — particularly as it inspired the title of his special — the Kerman routine that’s likely to stick in your memory is a recurring scene in which he demonstrates the lengths to which he’s gone to impersonate his mother-in-law while managing her dating app profile. “I’m pretending to be a 65-year-old woman,” he confesses, “and I’ll be honest, I’m having a blast.” It’s not just the flirtatious messages that appeal to him, but the ability of his mother-in-law’s potential male suitors to leave him voicemails, which he blasts out to the audience at random intervals during his performance.
And his own mother’s romantic history may be even more epic, as Kerman recounts that one of his four marriages so far included a flirtation with a disgraced NBA mascot. How could a professional sports mascot fall from grace, you might ask. He’ll tell you!
Kerman also capitalizes on the perceived fear that, as one half of a fully biracial couple, he and his wife might father “a surprise little white baby!”
And while Kerman’s love of McDonald’s might have had potential for a corporate collaboration, her fantasy of running away with the McDonald’s employee who gave her 12 McNuggets when she only ordered 10 pieces should give you pause.
Our opinion: But part of the fun of watching Kerman perform is that he actually decides to pause when and how most comedians do. Instead, he leans into a strange premise or returns to an earlier scene when you least expect it.
I mentioned earlier how a couple of jokes in Kerman’s 50-minute set demonstrate how he might be in the middle of a Venn diagram between John Mulaney and Sam Jay. Certainly his joke about being ridiculed by his high school English students, which thwarts his poetic dreams, recalls or echoes Mulaney’s own feelings about being put in his place by teenagers. But there’s another line from earlier in the set, where Kerman describes his helplessness at becoming a father and feeling “like a bird trapped in the airport,” which might recall Mulaney’s brilliant metaphor a couple of specials back in which he compared Trump to “a horse loose in a hospital.”
And just as a fun, comedic fact, it turns out to be a fun fact, in fact, to know that Kerman’s bit about getting high on mushrooms and witnessing park antics with friends not only involves Sam Jay as one of said friends, but crosses over into the same joke universe with one of Jay’s own jokes in his stand-up special about consuming mushrooms with friends in the park.
Now, if those jokes were ever found to exist in the same real-life experience as seeing Forest Whitaker at an IHOP, then maybe Kerman would actually have an argument to make for what might have been the best thing that ever happened to him, his own son notwithstanding.
Our calling: PASSES IT ON. Kerman may joke that he can test the limits of an audience’s patience just to deliver a good pun, admitting that “that’s one criticism I’ve heard, too long” to opt for a pun. But his brand of humor can also be the comedic spark you’ve needed in your life, saving you from having to put a metal can in the microwave and turn into Orville Deadenbacher.
Sean L. McCarthy is a stand-up comedian. He also posts half-hour podcast episodes featuring comedians revealing their origin stories:The comic book presents the latest and the first.
