Bag of Tricks
YouTube · 2023 · 59 min
A dry, cynical stand-up set about the miseries of modern life.
Django Gold’s debut stand-up hour relies on the patient, deadpan precision of someone who spent years writing for The Onion and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The show leans into a dry, paranoid worldview, capturing the perspective of a man slowly ground down by modern life. Gold focuses on specific, mundane anxieties, like the quiet intimidation of high-tech toilet seats, the subtle flex of owning multiple garden hoses, and the catastrophic failure of trying Dry January. He delivers his set with a patient, Norm Macdonald-adjacent cadence that relies on pacing and slightly off-kilter phrasing rather than high-octane performance.\n\nFilmed at The Gutter, a bowling alley in Brooklyn, Bag of Tricks marked Gold’s transition from behind-the-scenes writer to front-of-house stand-up. Despite his low-profile status as a performer at the time, the self-released hour gathered significant critical attention. It landed on year-end best-of lists from The New York Times, Vulture, and Paste, with critics praising his deliberate timing and weird sensibility.
The set list
-
Struggles of modern dating and sending normal dating app messages
Contrasting polite small talk about 'The Office' with a horrifying nightmare about a dark horseman setting a dead field ablaze.
-
Going to movie theaters alone as a single man
Ordering one ticket for Ant-Man and contrasting Brad Pitt's classic movie star build with Timothée Chalamet looking like a forest elf traveling by dandelion.
-
Wanting to be cool and masculinity as a prison
Explaining how cool guys say they 'passed out' rather than went to sleep, and imagining how actual prisoners would react to hearing 'masculinity is a prison'.
-
Dislike of confident people ordering appetizers
Detailing how someone taking an unfair share of mozzarella sticks becomes a sworn enemy who will be lured into a labyrinth.
-
The libertarian belief system
Summing up libertarian philosophy as letting an elderly woman die when struggling to put a bag into an airplane overhead bin.
How it plays
- Tone
- Cynical, bizarre, darkly humorous, and unapologetically irreverent.
- On stage
- Deliberate, deadpan stage persona portraying himself as an awkward, uncool nerd with cynical and darkly humorous thoughts.
- Pace
- Old-school comedic rhythm and throwback cadence reliant on zingers, with audience laughter serving as an ellipsis between punchlines; compared by critics to Norm Macdonald's delivery style.
- About
- modern dating and dating apps, masculinity and coolness, confident people vs. nerds, incels, libertarianism
What the critics said
Praised for an old-school comedic rhythm prioritizing joke-jokes and zingers over personal confessionals, featuring poetic specifics and a delivery style evoking Norm Macdonald.
Backstory
Reflects the paranoid thoughts and pressures of modern life, modern dating, internet trolls, and contemporary cultural anxieties.
Details
- Released
- Runtime
- 59 min
- Where
- YouTube
- Director
- Eytan Millstone, Dan Bricker
- Topics
If you liked this
-
Dan Cummins Don’t Wake the Bear
Prime Video
-
Joe Mande The Half Hour
Comedy Central
-
Ryan Goodcase Maybe They're Dead
YouTube
-
Daniel Humbarger Funny Bones
Stand Up! Records · Album
