I love the different ways of sculpting narrative space, creating world. In music that's Isaac Hayes. In cinema, Cassavetes and Lynch both do it for me.
The stand-up show is another way. It's all about how a narrator takes us into situations, how he moves into rooms that he conjures and voices the vexations of life. It's about being a jazzman who weaves illusion out of life, from the point of view that interests me anyway.
This is my first encounter with this guy. He has good form, voices and impersonations. He alternates between a smooth voice and hood outbursts and I like that he's relaxed, not particularly angry. Most of the show is about racial tension, played with dumbfounded disbelief at that life. Among jokes that work are a racist Sesame Street, a visit to the ghetto that is so bad a baby is selling weed in the corner. Needing a white guy in your group for when you want someone to talk to the police.
I like less the mind giving rise to situations. Women now would probably find it casually sexist or what have you. He doesn't slip into that self who is the funny guy in the group of twenty- somethings, he is that self without the distance of awareness. He was in his twenties himself so basically we get this one person and a lot at face-value. A bit thin overall but okay.
