In Ruins

Most comics who scream on stage are doing an impression of anger, but Eddie Pepitone sounds like a man whose nervous system collapsed during the commercial break. He paces the stage red-faced and sweating through his shirt, swinging between fury at modern civilization and panic over his own irrelevance. One moment he is reading the absurdities of Yelp reviews; the next, he is reenacting a banal laundry detergent audition that spirals into a full-throated harangue about the prison-industrial complex and vanishing species of frogs.

Directed by Steven Feinartz, the hour was recorded in June 2014 at The Bell House in Brooklyn. Pepitone had spent decades as an underground comics’ comic, known for his work in the New York and Los Angeles alternative scenes, recurring appearances on late-night television, and the 2012 documentary The Bitter Buddha. By the time he recorded this set, his first filmed stand-up special, he was already in his mid-fifties, arriving on camera with decades of club grit and zero interest in smoothing out his neuroses.

The rhythm relies on sudden drops in volume. Pepitone works himself into an apocalyptic lather over corporate greed and foreign policy, then undercuts the tirade by confessing that he talks to his dog like a therapist or stepping off the stage entirely to heckle himself from an empty chair in the audience.