‘Pale Tourist’ and ‘Rogue Trip’ debut
A larger-than-life everyman frequently pictured while eating, Jim Gaffigan has carved out a nice little comedy niche. Strenuously unsexy, unabashedly PG, admittedly churchgoing and exuberantly average, he still manages to sneak some fairly cerebral material past his audience. But this isn’t grad-school stuff. It’s the kind of deep thoughts that might amuse a room of high school cutups.
His approach is on full display in “Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist,” now streaming on Amazon Prime. Don’t go looking for a Gaffigan travelogue. It’s essentially a series of standup performances in different corners of the world. In each, he tells his audience that (insert country name here) is his favorite place. Once the applause dies down, he admits that he’s lying, and the audience loves it.
His riffs before a Canadian audience essentially boil down to a series of jokes about geography, culture and food. Gaffigan’s the kind of comic who can mine observational humor about Newfoundland’s penchant for deviating from the time zone by 30 minutes. Musings about the pronunciation of Regina and poutine (Quebec’s artery-clogging culinary treat) are about as “blue” as Gaffigan works.
In his Canadian adventure, he basically delights his audience simply by being an American curious enough to learn about their culture and use those crib notes in his material. In doing so, he makes larger points both about American indifference and Canadian deference, and does so without really mentioning either.
He recalls that Canada was the very first place he encountered the metric system. And then admits that only later did he realize that Canada was merely following the standard accepted by most other countries. And then muses aloud how the entire world could be so “wrong.”
Gaffigan’s tour was obviously completed before our recent COVID crisis. But in light of it, his purposely obtuse pride in such American “exceptionalism” takes on a certain sting.
› For viewers in search of a more traditional travelogue, there’s “Rogue Trip” streaming on Disney+. Host Bob Woodruff may be best known to viewers as the ABC News correspondent grievously injured during the Iraq War. In “Rogue Trip,” he returns to some of the world’s hotspots and exotic locales, not to cover wars or terrorist horrors, but to showcase the culture and people often obscured by crisis-focused journalism.
He also takes his son, Mack, along as they visit Colombia, Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Ukraine. His mission is to show his son, and his audience, that they needn’t view the rest of the world with fear, but with curiosity and a sense of wonder. This being Disney, the cultural revelations come laden with scenes of “bonding.”
› A showcase for horror, psychological terror and experimental storytelling, the anthology series “Room 104” (11 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) enters its fourth and final season.
› Original movies streaming today include the teen romantic comedy “The Kissing Booth 2” (Netflix); the historical drama “Radioactive” (Amazon Prime), starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Curie; and “French Biriyani” (Amazon Prime), a Kannada-language comedy starring Danish Sait.
Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken mostly in Southwest India.