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Brick Wall Comedy

Puppies and Heroin

Mike DeStefano

Stand Up! Records · Album · 2016

The final, abrasive stand-up recordings of Mike DeStefano.

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The late Mike DeStefano was not interested in comforting his audiences. This posthumous album, compiled from his final live performances in February 2011 at the Acme Comedy Company in Minneapolis, captures a comic who weaponized his own grim history for crowd amusement.\n\nDeStefano, who died of a heart attack just weeks after these shows at age 44, had recently found wider recognition as a finalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing. Freed from the constraints of network television, this performance shows him at his most abrasive, utilizing his background as a former heroin addict and subsequent drug counselor to confront the crowd with material most comics wouldn’t dare touch.\n\nThe set hinges on DeStefano’s friction with the famously polite Midwestern crowd. He tackles \”Minnesota Nice\” head-on, treating their good manners as a thin mask hiding the same darkness he lived through. Key tracks like \”Suck a Dick, Save a Life\” and \”Drug Addiction Is a Disease\” display his bleak outlook on suffering, but his delivery remains oddly therapeutic rather than nihilistic. Released by Stand Up! Records in September 2016, the 44-minute album compiles the material he had been preparing for an upcoming off-Broadway run, showcasing a comic who refused to soften his edge even as his career was finally gaining traction.

The set list

4 bits

  1. Mocking the niceness of the Minneapolis crowd on the opening track 'Minnesota Nice'

    Aggressively attacks the concept of 'Minnesota nice,' mocking public transit, the Mall of America, and local weather before turning cruel insults inward upon himself.

  2. Describing the sensation of doing heroin

    Jokes that heroin feels like receiving oral sex and having a puppy lick your face simultaneously, so anyone who dislikes those things should avoid it.

  3. Racism and ethnic stereotypes in 'Race Relations'

    Delivers provocative one-liners regarding killing Chinese people and feeling like a fat white girl because Black men love him.

  4. Hypochondria and predicting his own heart attack from the stage

    States from the Acme stage that he can feel his heart about to explode, joking that he quit smoking only to die of a heart attack from being fat, summarizing life as getting born, suffering, and dying.

How it plays

Tone
Crass, brutal, provocative, darkly honest, and confrontational.
On stage
Bronx-born comic with a thick New York accent and casually imperious stage presence; a smiling but obstinate tour-de-force of blunt, creative rage and harsh profanity who thrived on confrontation.
Pace
Lively, aggressive tempo likened to a 'grumpy hurricane' who seemed ready to scrap at any moment.
About
heroin addiction and recovery, drug counseling, cancer and illness, racism, wheelchair sex, mortality and hypochondria

What the critics said

Praised as DeStefano in his sharpest, most profound, and unblunted comedic form, fearlessly confronting sensitive and taboo topics with jar-dropping honesty.

In the room: Raucous and uproarious; the crowd grew increasingly adoring the more DeStefano attempted to insult and alienate them.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: standuprecords.com, theinterrobang.com, en.wikipedia.org, nickzaino.com, vulture.com, theseriouscomedysite.com.

Backstory

Posthumous release assembled from DeStefano's final recorded performances in early 2011 shortly before he died of a heart attack at age 44. DeStefano was a Bronx-born, HIV-positive former heroin addict turned drug counselor whose wife had died of AIDS. Label head Dan Schlissel and DeStefano's girlfriend Lois Tierney delayed assembly for years due to the emotional toll of hearing his voice.

Details

Released
Taped
2011, Acme Comedy Club, Minneapolis
Where
Stand Up! Records (album)
Topics

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