Henry Phillips

Henry Phillips walks on stage looking like a guy who was just asked to lower his voice in a diner. He wears an acoustic guitar strapped high on his chest and hunches over the microphone. The rhythm of his act relies on long, uncomfortable pauses. He will strum a soft, melancholy chord, let it ring out, and then murmur something petty about an ex-girlfriend in the exact cadence of a folk singer delivering a deep truth. He plays a man completely beaten down by the world, apologizing for the song he is about to play before his hands even touch the frets.

He occupies a very specific tier of cult appreciation. Other comics watch him to study his commitment to the bit of being an unredeemable failure. His indie films about the miseries of open mics act as a secret handshake for people who work in standup, while outside of comedy clubs, a different audience watches him methodically ruin basic recipes in his web series Henry’s Kitchen.

The guitar is a misdirection. Musical comedy often leans on the sheer novelty of rhyming, but Phillips writes actual standup jokes and hides them inside gentle fingerpicking. He will build up the emotional tension of a ballad just to detail exactly how a woman ignored his text messages.

He occasionally drops the sad-sack routine to show off real musical chops. He will tear through a complicated riff, get a cheer from the crowd, and then immediately retreat into his slumped, defeated posture as if the applause physically hurts him.