Lower Your Expectations

Dov Davidoff’s nervous, high-speed energy on stage, pacing like a man who has had too much coffee or too many bad thoughts, translates into a set that feels like a series of erratic confessions. His comedy works because he leans into being deeply flawed, asking the audience to expect very little of him, or the world, and then delivering cynical, fast-paced logic from that gutter-level starting point.\n\nFilmed at the Vic Theatre in Chicago, the hour was originally taped in 2016 and widely distributed as an album and video release by Comedy Dynamics in late 2019. By this point in his career, Davidoff had built a reputation as a comic’s comic, a veteran of the club circuit known for his roles on shows like HBO’s Crashing and NBC’s Shades of Blue, as well as his memoir Road Dog.\n\nThe set works through a cynical view of contemporary culture, media exhaustion, and modern relationships. He avoids easy political posturing, choosing instead to find absurd angles in bleak news stories. The standout sequence of the hour is his defense of the ‘Horse Man,’ a bizarre news story about a man who had sex with a horse, where Davidoff argues that the guy’s sheer, terrifying calm under pressure makes him exactly the kind of person you want next to you in a military foxhole.