This Is Cool, Right?

Wheelan’s act works best when he recounts childhood horrors or bad adult decisions with the bemused calm of someone who got away with it. The centerpiece of the material is a memory from age seven, watching his father finish off a trapped possum with a sledgehammer in an Iowa garage. Rather than playing the trauma for cheap shock, he treats it as a sudden realization about family dynamics and an early heads-up that he would eventually have to talk about it on stage. The release arrived shortly after his departure from Saturday Night Live, where he had lasted a single season in the 2013 to 2014 lineup before being dropped and confirming it with a deadpan tweet. Left to rebuild his momentum on club stages, he assembled an hour that avoided television industry bitterness in favor of biographical embarrassment, from abandoning a biomedical engineering job testing heart valves to pulling absurd household pranks on his older brothers and accidentally taking ecstasy at Bonnaroo during a Skrillex set. Comedy Dynamics released the hour as an audio album in early 2015, where it topped the iTunes comedy chart and picked up year-end recognition from Paste and The A.V. Club.