Garfield
A booming nineties club comic who delivers punchlines with blunt force.
1 special · 1993
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Art Garfield—billed simply as Garfield on stage—operates with the chest-forward authority required to survive the loudest rooms of the early nineties. He walks the stage with deliberate weight, gripping the mic stand to deliver setups with the presence of a disappointed security guard. When a crowd gets rowdy, he does not wait for quiet. He pushes his voice from his diaphragm and talks over the noise until the audience falls back in line. His punchlines are designed to reach the back wall of a massive theater, built on sudden spikes in volume and full-body exasperation.
Specials
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Def Comedy Jam (S3E2) with Sheryl Underwood, Warren Hutcherson & 1 more
Four young comedians test their material on a notoriously vocal crowd.
HBO · 30 min
On stage
He belongs to a specific generation of cable-television boom comics who eventually pivoted to the background of the industry. His surviving sets function as a time capsule of an era when a tight five minutes on Def Comedy Jam could launch a career overnight.
He does not tour heavily anymore.
He draws his best material from his physical size. He builds routines around the daily realities of being a heavy guy trying to maintain his dignity. He skips the self-pity, framing his weight instead as an exhausting chore. He constructs jokes with hard, right-angle turns, using his whole body to sell the punchline rather than relying on wordplay. If a bit stalls, he doesn’t quietly recalibrate the premise. He just hits the next punchline louder.
Raised in Queens, he learned to handle tough crowds by working as a house MC at a club in Alabama. That crowd-management muscle eventually translated into a career in New York morning radio, where he wrote prank phone calls for Hot 97.
At a glance
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