Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Promotional art for Wallpaper
Cover image credit: Source: cdn.shopify.com

Wallpaper

Adam Cayton-Holland

YouTube · 2023 · 48 min

A Denver veteran confronts fatherhood without becoming a conventional family comic.

Watch on YouTube(opens in a new tab)

Adam Cayton-Holland's first release since Performs His Signature Bits (2018). Released , on YouTube.

Most comics who start families drift into comfortable suburban routines, but Adam Cayton-Holland is openly terrified of turning into one of them. When a neighbor pushes a child toward him to tell a joke about a ghost eating booberries, Cayton-Holland does not nod politely. He punches it up into a grim monologue about the ghost’s deceased wife and the cruelty of the afterlife, then dismisses the kid by name.

The title refers to the realization that having small children turns a parent into background furniture in their own house. Rather than pretending fatherhood made him a softer person, Cayton-Holland treats domestic life as a sequence of small absurdities, from inventing fake animal sounds to deceive his toddler to catching the boy repeating his own bleakest internal thoughts.

Filmed at the Bug Theatre in Denver, the long-running home base for his trio The Grawlix, the 48-minute set was directed by longtime collaborators Evan and Adam Nix. By late 2023, Cayton-Holland had spent two decades on the road and published a grief memoir, leaving him with zero interest in softening his act for easy club approval.

The hour builds to a surreal conversation where his three-year-old lectures him on industry politics, warning him away from cynical podcast networks and telling him to write what he knows.

Notable bits & set list

5 bits

  1. Punching up a child's ghost joke

    When a kid tells him the 'booberries' joke, he goes on an absurd, dark tangent about peaches being the ghost's deceased wife's favorite fruit to demonstrate the cruelty of the afterlife.

  2. Teaching his son that giraffes say 'hort'

    Not knowing what noise giraffes make, he and his wife invent the sound 'hort' for their son, eagerly anticipating the day a teacher bursts his bubble.

  3. Men are the worst and joke foreshadowing

    Observing his son mimicking blue-collar workers and talking to women at the park, Cayton-Holland calls out the audience's hesitation by asking if they hate the joke or simply hate foreshadowing.

  4. Defund Paw Patrol

    Mashes calls to defund the police with an absurd critique of the children's animated series and warns his son away from toxic masculinity podcast culture.

  5. Becoming wallpaper and the LVP

    Reflecting on his father's designation of himself as the 'least valuable player' (LVP) and realizing fatherhood means fading into the background of family life.

How it plays

Tone
Playful, insightful, self-deprecating, slightly dark, and surreal.
On stage
Thoughtful, silly, self-deprecating, and sharp, combining poetic phrasing with surreal and strange details.
Pace
Immaculate timing; begins the special exhausted and lying face-down on the backstage floor.
About
Fatherhood and parenting, Parental exhaustion and aging, Lying to children, Children's humor and cruelty, Male behavior and foreshadowing

What the critics said

Praised for impeccable timing and razor-sharp insight, avoiding hackneyed family comedy tropes by bringing edge, poetic wit, and relatable surrealism to fatherhood.

In the room: Strongly enthusiastic and receptive, from sold-out theater crowds to younger twenty-something audiences in run-throughs.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: themoviedb.org, 800poundgorillamedia.com, actoragecheck.com, eponymousreview.com, cpr.org, preprod.denverpost.com, adamcaytonholland.com.

Backstory

Transitioning into middle-aged parenthood and raising two young sons amidst societal turmoil (the pandemic, western wildfires, and protests), navigating exhaustion and shifting from being the protagonist of his own story to background 'wallpaper.'

Details

Released
Taped
The Bug Theatre, Denver
Runtime
48 min
Where
YouTube
Director
The Nix Bros.
Topics
Before
Performs His Signature Bits (2018)

More from Adam Cayton-Holland

Similar specials