There's No "I" In "Self-Esteem"

Kermet Apio steps up with the posture of someone who would rather be on a couch doing a crossword. His premise is that ambition is mostly an inconvenience, and that his primary life skills are laziness and stalling. The centerpiece is his teardown of Hawaiian pizza: mainlanders think they are paying homage to the islands with ham and pineapple, but Apio points out that no Hawaiian is shaking Canadian bacon loose from backyard trees. If people wanted an authentic local pie, they would dump Spam on the crust—and definitely not Spam Lite, because nobody health-conscious bought Spam in the first place.

Taped at the Dry Bar Comedy club in Provo, Utah, in early 2017, the set caught Apio nearly thirty years into his stand-up career. A fixture of the Pacific Northwest scene and a past winner of the Great American Comedy Festival, he brought the relaxed rhythm of a road comic who stopped rushing his setup decades ago.

Apio works clean without adopting the bouncy cheerfulness that usually infects alcohol-free rooms. Instead, he speaks in a low, measured register about the lifelong nuisance of sharing a name with a Muppet, fielding questions from mainlanders unclear on whether Hawaii is a state, and the quiet physical indignities of turning 49.