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Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy

The Standups

Joe List

Netflix · 2018 · 29 min

A half-hour of highly neurotic, childhood-centric stand-up.

Joe List leans hard into his neuroses for his thirty-minute set, transforming childhood humiliations and adult social anxieties into highly relatable fuel. He spends a significant chunk of the performance breaking down the awkwardness of going to the gym, but the highlights are his deeply funny, specific memories of being bullied as a kid. He details a brutal encounter where a classmate explained the mechanics of making fun of him, defining it as ‘creating fun using your face, body, personality, and pant legs’ because List himself wasn’t fun. Filmed at the Globe Theatre in Los Angeles, this was released in March 2018 as part of the second season of Netflix’s showcase series. At this stage in his career, List was already a familiar face on late-night sets and co-host of the Tuesdays with Stories podcast, but this half-hour served as his largest platform yet. He also touches on threatening to sue a surgeon after a childhood tooth extraction and getting burned by a girl who told him his forehead looked like a ‘fivehead.’ Paste Magazine rated the set a 7.0, praising the inspired writing of his childhood anecdotes while noting the performance stays squarely within a singular, anxious lane.

The set list

2 bits

  1. Modern reactions to body shaming

    Joking that when he was young, body shaming was just called 'telling a person what they looked like to their face,' followed by anecdotes of people bluntly judging him at the gym, Starbucks, and Bloomingdale's.

  2. Grade-school bullies

    Turning past humiliation into comedy by mocking a childhood bully with a subpar taunting game.

How it plays

Tone
Neurotic, self-effacing, wry, and humorous.
On stage
Self-deprecating everyman uncomfortable in his own skin, candidly embracing anxiety and personal humiliation.
Pace
Measured and tightly structured.
About
Childhood bullying and middle-school taunts, Gym insecurities, Marriage, Childhood fashion faux pas, Body shaming and awkward retail encounters, Stolen teeth

What the critics said

Praised as fresh, funny, and showing List at the top of his game, drawing comparisons to Rodney Dangerfield for his confident self-deprecation.

In the room: Taped across two shows in front of a live Los Angeles crowd, with List noting the second performance went much better than the first.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: sidereel.com, theinterrobang.com, rottentomatoes.com, decider.com, vulture.com, en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.

Backstory

Part of Netflix's half-hour showcase series The Standups (Season 2), highlighting established comics with 30-minute showcases filmed over two sets at the Globe Theatre in Los Angeles.

Details

Released
Taped
Globe Theatre, Los Angeles
Runtime
29 min
Where
Netflix
Director
Troy Miller
Topics
Before
The Half Hour (2015)
After
I Hate Myself (2020)

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