X

Daniel Sloss spends the first forty-five minutes of this set doing exactly what his fans expect: swaggering around the stage, talking about his own ego, and making crude jokes about sex and gender politics. But the real reason to watch is the final twenty-five minutes, where he intentionally drops the comedy entirely to tell a sobering story about how he and his friend group responded when a close male friend raped another friend. It’s a jarring bait-and-switch that uses a metaphor about boiling crabs to argue that quiet complicity is what keeps toxic behavior alive.

Filmed at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, Australia, in April 2019, the show served as Sloss’s first special for HBO. He was riding a massive wave of momentum following his 2018 Netflix specials, Dark and Jigsaw, the latter of which became famous for causing thousands of relationship breakups. With X (the title representing his tenth solo show), Sloss used his elevated profile to tackle the #MeToo movement and the structures of toxic masculinity, positioning himself as both a critic of peer culture and an active participant who had to learn the hard way.

The response to the special reflected its polarizing structure. While many critics praised the ambition of using a comedy stage to deliver a serious essay on sexual violence, some comedy fans and critics felt the dramatic tone shift abandoned the premise of stand-up entirely. Sloss, however, remained unapologetic about the choice, framing the uncomfortable silence as the entire point of the exercise.