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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Promotional art for One of the Greats
Cover image credit: via TMDB

One of the Greats

Chelsea Peretti

Netflix · 2014 · 74 min

A parody of the stand-up format wrapped around an actual set.

Chelsea Peretti treats the comedy special as a format begging to be mocked. Before she even tells a joke, she rides a motorcycle through the streets in a faux-dramatic intro, adopting a Christian Bale Batman growl to reflect on her fake history. Throughout the set, the genre’s standard visual conventions are dismantled. Cutaways to the audience randomly feature dogs, babies, and couples making out, while offstage, a clown-suit-clad Peretti heckles her own performance. The self-aggrandizing title is entirely the point, establishing an elevated, aggressively confident persona.<br><br>Beneath the meta-commentary, the actual material remains grounded in dry observation. She targets the agony of small talk, the egos of conventionally attractive women, and male comedians’ predictable approaches to sex jokes. Her delivery is authoritative, completely stripping away the uncertain, upward-inflection tone that plagues so many modern sets.<br><br>Filmed at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the 2014 Netflix release caught her right as her mainstream career was exploding. She was already a staple of the alternative comedy scene and a writer for television, but this hour coincided with her breakout run as Gina Linetti on Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Critics noted that the hour felt like a definitive bid for center stage, ranking her among the top performers of the year for putting out a special that genuinely matched its grandiose title.

The set list

6 bits

  1. Mock-grandiose motorcycle preamble and fake past specials

    Peretti rides a motorcycle to the Palace of Fine Arts while narrating in a Clint Eastwood-like voice, featuring a montage of fabricated hour-long specials from her past including HOBO's 'It's Go Time' wearing an Eddie Murphy-style red leather suit.

  2. Staged surreal audience cutaways

    Subverts standard TV taping cutaways by intentionally inserting staged audience shots featuring dogs sitting in seats, babies, couples excessively making out, and a man walking through the aisles with a leaf blower.

  3. Gender double standards in stand-up comedy

    Critiques the stereotype that female comics only joke about periods by arguing that if men bled monthly from their genitals, 90 percent of male stand-up would focus on it, and contrasts the ease with which male comics get laughs pantomiming sex.

  4. Social media culture and #nomakeup selfies

    Mocks the humble-brag of women posting photos tagged #nomakeup and satirizes the male commenters who ride in to validate them.

  5. Texting with her dog

    A modern observational routine exploring the comedic concept of exchanging text messages with her pet dog.

  6. Disdain for small talk

    Riffs on the misery of forced societal pleasantries and questions like 'Whereabouts do you hail from?'.

How it plays

Tone
Dark yet silly, sardonic, irreverent, meta, and observational.
On stage
Sardonic, silly, and brainy, blending bluntness and warmth with an off-center sensibility, elastic vocal delivery, and awkward quirks.
Pace
Energetic presence noted for sharp, seamless transitions and segues between disparate comedic thoughts.
About
gender roles and stereotypes in stand-up comedy, internet comment culture and social media, self-esteem versus ego, technology and smartphones, relatability and small talk, family and childhood memories

What the critics said

Universally praised by critics as an innovative, dark, and silly subversion of stand-up special conventions, highlighting Peretti's distinct voice, warmth, and strong observational writing.

In the room: A lively hometown theater crowd intertwined with staged, surreal cutaways featuring dogs, kissing couples, and offbeat interruptions that Peretti interacts with from the stage.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: rottentomatoes.com, themoviedb.org, eastbaytimes.com, netflix.com, avclub.com, vulture.com, nationalpost.com, thelantern.com, en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.

Backstory

Filmed as a Bay Area homecoming for Peretti, who grew up in nearby Oakland; at the time of release, she was dating comedian and filmmaker Jordan Peele.

Details

Released
Taped
Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco
Runtime
74 min
Where
Netflix
Director
Lance Bangs
Topics
Before
Comedy Central Presents (2011)

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