Comedy Central Presents: Joey Kola

Joey Kola belongs to a specific, grueling class of comedy: the elite audience warm-up act. By 2003, he was the guy keeping studio crowds alive for Rosie O’Donnell, David Letterman, and live television finales like Survivor. On his own half-hour installment of Comedy Central Presents, taped at the Hudson Theatre in New York City, Kola brings that same relentless, blue-collar energy to the front of the stage, working the crowd like a man who has twenty minutes to make two hundred tourists care about his home life.

It is a fast-paced set built on the kind of domestic frustration that was the bread and butter of early-2000s club comedy. Kola bounces between classic complaints: his outright hatred of diets, his brother-in-law, and the basic trials of modern fatherhood. He wanders briefly into broader territory, questioning why we are funding the space program when there is so much left to solve on Earth, and lists the only four things men actually need to survive. It all builds to a characteristically loud, unabashedly lowbrow closing declaration about the divine origin of flatulence.