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Cover image credit: Thumbnail: YouTube · Colin Quinn

Our Time Is Up

Colin Quinn

YouTube · 2024 · 50 min

Colin Quinn performs stand-up for an audience of actual psychologists.

Watch it free on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Colin Quinn took one of the most notoriously difficult bookings in stand-up, the corporate gig, and turned it into a self-styled therapy session. Filmed in Washington, D.C., at the 2024 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, the show finds Quinn performing to an audience composed entirely of psychologists and psychiatrists. The premise allows him to lay out his grievances with the modern world as if they were psychiatric symptoms, treating the crowd of mental health professionals as his collective therapist.

The 50-minute set targets the fragile state of the national psyche, the obsessive curation of online identity, and the modern urge to over-pathologize everyday life. One of the strongest segments breaks down the layers of modern ego: your persona is what strangers think of you, social media is who you think you are, and your search history is who you actually are. He also argues that society has overcorrected on conflict, humorously suggesting that a baseline level of mild bullying is actually a necessary evolutionary tool.

Quinn released the special on YouTube in May 2024. While corporate audiences are usually where stand-up sets go to die, the professional crowd here plays along, letting Quinn treat his own neuroses, and theirs, as a public service.

The set list

4 bits

  1. Society as a psych ward fueled by cell phones

    Compares modern cell phone habits—talking to imaginary people, taking daily meds, and believing the government is monitoring us—to living in a psych ward.

  2. The five layers of identity and browser history

    Breaks down identity into legal government status, friends' view, strangers' reputation, social media aspiration, and actual reality revealed only by unaltered internet browser history.

  3. The authentic self versus HR departments

    Argues society and spouses actually hate our authentic depressed selves, while HR functions like the mob or law enforcement stopping people from being real.

  4. Therapists diagnosing Colin Quinn

    Interacting with the symposium audience to offer running psychiatric diagnoses of his psyche, ranging from sociopathy to folie à deux.

How it plays

Tone
Satirical, reflective, pointed, and self-deprecating.
On stage
A sharp-witted man at the end of his rope, ranting about societal breakdown while dissecting modern absurdity.
Pace
Ranting, observational cadence with engaging storytelling.
About
mental health and therapyspeak, self-diagnosis and the DSM-5, social media and modern psychology, the myth of the authentic self, corporate HR culture, identity versus browser history

What the critics said

Praised by Vulture for effectively realizing the potential of performing for a specific subset audience, and by Comedy Lens for incisive, thought-provoking satire.

In the room: Composed entirely of licensed mental health professionals who are trained not to laugh, engaging as armchair evaluators.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: comedylens.com, standupd.com, justthecast.com, vulture.com, imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org.

Backstory

Filmed in front of an audience of professional psychologists and therapists at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, reflecting on modern society's fixation on therapyspeak, digital culture, and self-diagnosis.

Details

Released
Taped
2024 Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Washington
Runtime
50 min
Where
YouTube
Director
Mike Lavin
Topics
Before
Colin Quinn & Friends: A Parking Lot Comedy Show (2020)

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