January 3rd

TJ approaches American culture with the quiet, skeptical detachment of someone who arrived as an outsider and learned English as a third language. Rather than chasing easy applause, he speaks at an unhurried simmer, letting the oddities of domestic habits hang in the room until the crowd recognizes how strange they sound out loud.

The set was filmed at Littlefield in Brooklyn and released in late 2020 through Comedy Dynamics after the comic self-funded the five-thousand-dollar production. At that point, the Haitian-born stand-up had spent several years working through New York club lineups like the Comedy Cellar while publishing guest essays for The New York Times.

Much of the material hinges on linguistic misunderstandings, including the initial panic of mishearing the word “penalize” when English is a third language after Haitian Creole and French. Other routines look at the geography lessons needed whenever Americans ask where Haiti is on a map, dating during the MeToo era, and the peculiar local habit of obsessively categorizing race.