Big Underwear

Louie Anderson sits down halfway through his set because standing up for an hour is tiring when you are in your sixties and shaped like a barrel. The rhythm of his stand-up had always depended on that kind of casual surrender, and by 2017, he stopped pretending he was going to turn into a fitness model. The centerpiece bit about his underwear tackles the logistical headache of hoarding 5X garments: wondering who will have to deal with drawers full of immense cotton briefs once he dies, and whether charity shops even want them.

Taped in November 2017 at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles and released the following spring, the show arrived while Anderson was experiencing a late-career surge. His turn as Christine Baskets on the FX series Baskets had earned him an Emmy and reintroduced him to critics who had written him off as a relic of nineties morning cartoons and game show syndication. He was forty years into touring clubs, and that ease shows on stage.

Most of the set stays in his comfort zone: gentle frustration with modern health kicks, Fitbits, and kale shakes, balanced by the familiar eccentricities of his Minnesota childhood. Anderson was the tenth of eleven children, and his impressions of his parents (a tightfisted father and the soft-spoken mother whose mannerisms he had borrowed for television) feel lived-in rather than practiced. When he jokes that a DNA test proved he was twenty percent alcohol and eighty percent butter, nobody in the room doubts the genealogy.