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Daniel Sloss wants to talk about things that make people squirm, but his goal is not cheap shock value. The heart of the hour rests on the death of his seven-year-old sister, who had cerebral palsy, and his family’s use of humor to cope with the loss. By addressing personal tragedy on stage, he makes a case for comedy as a survival mechanism, challenging the idea that joke-writing about tragedy is inherently malicious. It is a show designed to test the audience’s boundaries, separating the people who want to laugh at painful realities from those who prefer to remain comfortable.

Filmed at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles, California, in February 2018, the show was released on Netflix as one half of a double-feature alongside his other special, Jigsaw. At twenty-seven, Sloss was already a veteran of the Edinburgh Fringe but relatively new to American television viewers, despite a string of appearances on Conan. Along with the heavy material about grief and religion, the set includes a painful anecdote about an ill-advised attempt to use mint mouthwash on his genitals, and a reading of an actual complaint letter from a previous tour. While some critics found his stage persona slightly pretentious, the hour successfully introduced his aggressive, high-concept style to a global streaming audience.