Comedy’s ‘Satan is squeaky clean’
Anthony Jeselnik’s Netflix special is as dark as ever, but the ethics of his standup is carefully considered
In his ruthlessly funny new special, Fire in the Maternity Ward, which debuted on Netflix on Tuesday, standup comic Anthony Jeselnik muses nostalgically that you never forget the first time you had sex.
“You know those stories you hear about kids who lose their virginity to a hot babysitter?” he says, holding the silence a beat. “I was the babysitter.”
Jeselnik’s punch lines are like NBA star Kyrie Irving’s crossover dribbles: You know they’re coming, have a good sense of the direction, and yet you’re still surprised. “Even comedians who know the violent twist is coming, we still fall for it,” said John Mulaney, who has known Jeselnik for 14 years. “I don’t think I have ever guessed one of his punch lines.”
A joke writer in the tradition of Jack Handey and Steven Wright, Jeselnik is a master of misdirection, and if his act is the “comedy version of a horror movie,” as he explained to me at a downtown restaurant in November, the day before he shot his special, he clearly plays the monster.
Prowling the stage with a feline gait, Jeselnik, in a leather jacket and jeans, never breaks character: a preposterously confident jerk with the cool indifference of a sociopath. His attitude veers from contempt to condescension as he tells macabre jokes delighting in death, dropped babies and casual murder. If we are living in such a sensitive and politically correct age, as comics often remind us, how does he get away with this?
“Comedy is under a microscope today, but because my career has been going on long enough, I’ve been grandfathered in,” Jeselnik, 40, told me. “Not to put myself on that level, but I’m the new Don Rickles. Rickles could get away with things because he’s Rickles.”
His reputation does precede him, but in three hours of conversation, he came across not as an insult comic or reckless taboo-buster, but as a thoughtful, progressive-minded artist whose pinpoint provocations are the result of careful consideration and clever sleight of hand.
Over the past 16 years, his slow delivery has become comically deliberate, and his act more stylized and self-aware, with a running commentary on his jokes. “That was pretty much the greatest opening joke of all time,” he says after the special’s inaugural punch line. When I asked him why he had said “pretty much,” Jeselnik responded that he had released three previous specials. In such moments, Jeselnik displays the same swagger offstage as he does on.
Because his jokes rely on the existence of moral lines to cross, he never complains about political correctness — “Complaining in comedy is the worst. It’s uncool. I wanted to be cool” — and even sees it as an esthetic asset. “P.C. culture is a good thing, and I could not do what I do without it,” he said.
Despite joking about the most controversial subjects, he rarely becomes the target of the wrath of Twitter. When I asked why woke comics don’t criticize him more, Jeselnik said, “I think because they know that I’m woke.”
This might surprise some people, especially considering that his new special includes immaculately constructed jokes in meticulously bad taste about murder-suicide, spousal abuse, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, slavery, dead babies and a trip to an abortion clinic that is his 15-minute closer.
“The character is such a monster that you know I’m on the right side of things,” he said of his alter ego.
But he also realizes that not everyone is in on the joke. In the same way that Dave Chappelle described being unsettled by a white person’s laugh over a racial stereotype, Jeselnik has heard laughs at offensive things he said in character that have stopped him and made him readjust. He softened a joke about racism, he said, because of Black Lives Matter, for instance. And he discarded one of my favourite lines from his recent tour — “Why is it a hate crime if I love to do it?” — after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. “I don’t even want to pretend to be on that side right now,” he said.
At the beginning of his career “there were a lot of jokes about my girlfriend and you hear the misogynists laugh a little louder,” he said. “If I talk about race, racists laugh a little louder. It’s why I have gone darker. If you talk about death, everyone’s in the same boat.”
Tall and trim, with the sculpted features of a model, Jeselnik appears far too handsome to be a comic, and in some ways, his good looks set the course for his career. When he started, he said, he quickly realized he couldn’t make self-deprecating jokes about not being able to get a girlfriend. “They hated me the second I walked onstage,” he said. “So I just pretended to be an evil genius.”
His big break came at the 2011 Comedy Central roast of Donald Trump, but he doesn’t perform on roasts anymore. “I don’t know if you will see me on a roast unless they have Louis C.K.,” he said. “I’d have to come back. It just seems too fun.”
Jeselnik said he found it funny that the comics who were celebrated as “moral centres” like Louis C.K. or Aziz Ansari were the ones facing #MeToo accusations. “I don’t have skeletons in the closet, and I employ solely female openers,” he said. “Satan is squeaky clean.”
Jeselnik said he had no interest in comedy that tells the truth, calling himself a “nihilistic entertainer,” but he is preoccupied with finding jokes that surprise.
So wouldn’t the biggest shock be if he discarded his persona and showed some vulnerability? He said it sounds good in theory. “I’ve tried jokes that are silly and absurd, but the laugh is different and I don’t like it as much,” he said.
But he did say that it was hard for him to imagine doing the same kind of standup in a decade. Toward the end of our lunch, he returned to the subject of how he could evolve and said perhaps the most shocking thing I had heard from him yet. “I like the kind of villain that I am,” he said about his persona. “But I’d like to find a way — this is going to sound corny, I’ll probably regret it — to use it to be helpful,” he said.
“I think I can make a difference,” he added with a startling earnestness, “because of what I have done and the fear I can instill. I can do positive things with this. I hope I can do that in the future.”
“If you talk about death, everyone’s in the same boat.” ANTHONY JESELNIK COMEDIAN