Faceman
A nineties club fixture who ran his sets at a dead sprint.
1 special · 1993
Get an email when there's a new special. You'll need a Google account.
Faceman works with the loud, immediate energy of early nineties cable television. He builds a rhythm around a rhetorical hook—asking the crowd about “things you hear about but you never see”—and uses it to string together a list of unrelated hypotheticals. He poses a question, waits a half-second for the premise to register, and barrels into the next one before the audience can settle. He paces the stage aggressively, throwing his entire body into the act.
Specials
-
Def Comedy Jam (S3E1) with Daniel Gardner, Chris Thomas & 1 more
A 1993 stand-up showcase featuring an early appearance by Tracy Morgan.
HBO · 30 min
On stage
He remains a piece of New York comedy lore. A fixture of Harlem clubs who performed on Def Comedy Jam and ComicView, he represents an era of standup where a comic could win a difficult room through speed and volume alone. He is a favorite of people who still trade unedited nineties comedy tapes.
His television appearances show a comic who treats structure lightly. He will establish a premise, lean on it for two minutes, and then drop it entirely to shout out relationship advice or perform a long, bizarre dance. His biggest laughs come from physical commitment. When he mocks the idea of getting someone pregnant by accident, he acts out a man literally tripping and falling into the act, thrashing around the floor to sell the mechanics of the excuse. The material is loose, held together mostly by his momentum.
His stage career was interrupted by a long battle with addiction. He appeared in the rapper Cam’ron’s web series Giles Investigation, smoking on camera and dancing for cash in a hallway. The footage is a sharp departure from the control he exercised on stage during his television sets.
At a glance
- Topics