Looking out at a quarantine-fatigued New York City audience for a new comedy special, Louis C.K. asked, “So how have you all been enjoying living the way I already was for the past couple of years?” Massive applause followed.
“Welcome to my life,” he added. “Can’t work, can’t go outside, can’t show your face.”
It was an ingenious way to remind everyone that COVID-19 is the apotheosis of cancel culture. Cancel life! Because otherwise, you might die.
C.K. and some other top comedians are coming up with solid-gold material as they riff on the (first two) plague years of our lives. Following Bo Burnham’s musical-comedy lockdown special for Netflix, Inside, and Dave Chappelle’s comedy Woodstock in 2020 and 2021 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which he turned into a still-unreleased documentary called Live in Real Life that is now getting bounced from film festivals because of the transgender controversy driven by, or manufactured from, his latest special, The Closer, several other smart standup specials recorded in the last few months are hitting the streaming services with reflections on the pandemic.
Jim Gaffigan turns in some top-shelf bits about COVID-19 in his new Netflix special Comedy Monster, as does Mo Amer, a Palestinian American Texan, in his Netflix special Mohammed in Texas. C.K.’s new special Sorry is not on Netflix because even though several of his previous specials are on Netflix, C.K. is not allowed to appear on Netflix, except when he is. So he’s selling the hourlong set, taped at Hulu Arena at Madison Square Garden last summer, on his website for $10 — cheaper than six weeks of a subscription to Matt Yglesias’s Substack!
C.K.’s special is the funniest because C.K. is the best standup working today — unless you still count Bob Newhart. But Gaffigan calls himself “the most underrated comedian in America,” and he’s absolutely right. His stuff is even funnier than his poppin’ fresh-shaped “dad bod” or his whiter-than-Tom Cruise’s-teeth skin tone.
Gaffigan’s set was recorded the most recently of the three, when the latest surge was already coming at us like Jaws 3-D, if Jaws were unkillable, one-billionth of an inch wide, and airborne.
“The pandemic is like a TV show you thought was canceled and then it got picked up by Netflix,” Gaffigan says. “I didn’t really pace myself for another season.” Gaffigan, who offers that he’s Catholic mainly because “I’m scared of my wife,” has scores of children at home and often relies on parenting metaphors in his bits. “It’s like changing the diaper in the middle of the night,” he says. “You’re exhausted. It’s disgusting.” But after you get your little one changed, and get the onesie back on him, and lay him gently back in the crib, “you hear the diaper fill up again. That’s what the year 2021 is. … It’s just a diaper filling up over and over again.”
Taping a set where he grew up in Houston, Amer blames Chappelle for giving him COVID-19 twice. (“Fauci: Only seven people in the world have ever gotten it twice. Bulls***! I’m special, but I’m not that f***ing special, Fauci!”) First, Amer got it at one of Chappelle’s comedy gatherings in Yellow Springs in 2020. He asked his pal how he managed to get a hold of so many testing kits. Amer says, “And he just went nuts! He was like, ‘[Dave Chappelle voice] I’m Dave Chappelle, n*****. Of course I got these!’” After one set, a strange lady came up to Amer and touched him several times and impolitely “coughed in my face. And she tested positive three days later. I was like, ‘I knew she was Israeli! I knew it.’ They were having a meeting in Hollywood, they were like, ‘This Palestinian’s getting too powerful.’” The second time, Amer says he caught the bug from Chappelle himself. The two drove around together smoking marijuana right before a show. Chappelle also coughed in his face, though this does tend to happen when smoking marijuana, so it wasn’t alarming at first. Then Amer dropped Chappelle off at the venue. Chappelle tested positive as he was going in. Amer says he got the news from TMZ, then confronted Chappelle about it. “And he just goes, ‘I’m sorry I gave you COVID, bro.’ And then he goes, ‘Walk it off. At least it’s not AIDS.’”
C.K. offered a simplified COVID management program: “We test everybody, and every time we find someone who has COVID, we kill them. That’s it. You won’t need another solution after that — that’s the final one.” Marveling at the death toll, he says we lack the imaginative facility to think about it, so we fall back on overused tropes. Last January, it became a cliche to say that we were suffering the equivalent of the losses on 9/11 every day. He asks, “When did we start measuring deaths in 9/11s?” The Holocaust, he adds, “was 2,000 9/11s.” So “9/11 wasn’t that bad, it was just one!”
In the spring, when people were relieved that the virus was subsiding, the COVID-19 death toll was still around 1,500 people a day, as it is now. “Better than January?” asks C.K. “Really? It’s half a 9/11 every single day. That would be like if on 9/11, after the first tower went down, you were like, ‘It’s not that bad. It’s just one. Still got the other one.’”
As all these comedians joke in their recent specials, this pandemic keeps almost ending and then persisting. It’s the Return of the King of plagues. But one sign people of all stripes may really be moving on is that we finally seem to be ready to start to laugh about it in public.
Kyle Smith is a critic-at-large for National Review.
