Weird Mouth Things

Brian Hicks works with the settled exhaustion of a suburban father whose remaining ambitions have shrunk down to beating the checkout queue at Kohl’s. He spends his stage time picking at the quiet indignities of domestic life, from the panic of buying Valentine’s Day cards at the eleventh hour to wondering why flat housing subdivisions give themselves regal, wooded names.

Taped at the Dry Bar Comedy club in Provo, Utah, and released in 2021, the half-hour set features a veteran Chicago road comic operating within the constraints of clean comedy. Hicks spent years touring theaters as an opening act for magician Michael Carbonaro, and that road discipline shows in his pacing. He moves methodically through bits on mediocre dentists, family card games, and the bodily decline of middle age without raising his voice.