Trampoline in a Ditch

Kyle Kinane is at his best when he is taking the minor indignities of middle age and inflating them into surreal, logic-stretching crises. He spends a significant portion of this set grappling with the realization that he is now a forty-two-year-old man named “Kyle”—a name that carries a very specific, monster-energy-drinking, drywall-punching connotation that does not quite fit a guy who just wants to go camping without getting a hangover. Kinane has always had a gift for turning beer-koozie-wearing, blue-collar observations into surprisingly eloquent, dense paragraphs of prose, using his gravelly delivery to discuss his own physical decline and the bizarre eating habits of his father.

Originally captured at Comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin, in March 2019, the material first reached the public as an audio album in 2020 before its video release in 2022. The production is refreshingly minimal, offering a fixed-camera view that mimics the actual club-going experience. This lack of flashy editing keeps the focus entirely on his writing, particularly his knack for inventing bizarre figurative language. When trying to describe his exhaustion, he casually drops the instant classic idiom of being “more tired than a big-dick bat,” proceeding to explain the precise evolutionary cardiovascular strain such a creature would face while flying.

The set also serves as a purge of older, long-form stories, including an extended, twenty-minute saga about getting banned from entering Canada. It is a loose, idiosyncratic hour and twenty-three minutes that finds room for segments on service dog etiquette, his mother’s bizarre cosmic beliefs, and the simple tragedy of a trampoline lying abandoned in a ditch.