Sadder Than Most Horses

College ethics courses love impossible hypotheticals, but John Deming’s objection is purely logistical: if a car crash forces someone to choose between saving their brother and preserving the world’s only vial of a cancer cure, whoever manufactured just one vial deserves to be fired on the spot. Entrusting it to an undergraduate Spanish major and a musician brother only makes the planning worse.

Filmed at the Dry Bar Comedy club in Provo, Utah, the 25-minute set caught Deming after years working the Salt Lake City circuit with BYU’s Humor U and ComedySportz, right around the time he was balancing comedy with a day job in student debt collection. He works within the venue’s strict clean rules, but grounds the performance in dry frustration rather than church-basement optimism.

He details early marriage on a nonexistent budget, which involved paying for groceries in loose dimes and accepting burritos from strangers at commuter train stops. He also makes a pragmatic case against animal sympathy, noting that houseflies spend half their brief lives deliberately testing creatures capable of swatting them dead.