Award-Winning Comedy Special

Joe Mande wants to win the “American Humour Award,” a fictional trophy he invented for the sole purpose of his debut stand-up special. To make sure he gets it, he structures his performance like a gymnastics routine, keeping a literal tally of his applause breaks and standing ovations while a three-person panel of judges sits in the crowd scoring him. Before he even takes the stage at The Bell House in Brooklyn, the special opens with documentary-style skits where Mande seeks advice on how to game the system from comedians George Wallace and Bo Burnham, and shoots hoops with NBA star Blake Griffin.

In 2017, Mande was primarily known as a television writer, having spent years in the writers’ rooms of Parks and Recreation (where he also played Morris Lerpiss), The Good Place, and Kroll Show. That narrative background is obvious here. The hour is highly structured, using the award gimmick to bookend a set that relies on slow-burning, intricate storytelling rather than rapid-fire punchlines.

On stage, Mande works with a quiet, detached delivery, picking apart trash television and weird personal misadventures. He details a business concept for a specialized sex aid he wants to pitch on Shark Tank, analyzes the casual brutality of the MTV dating show Next, and recounts a childhood mistake involving bear feces at a Jewish summer camp. He closes the hour by detailing the time he accidentally got too high on edibles right before sitting in the front row of a live taping of Mike Huckabee’s Fox News program.