He’ll still joke about fast food. But on “Dark Pale,” his 10th stand-up special, his evolution as a comedian is apparent.
Have we gotten Jim Gaffigan wrong all along?
A Midwestern-born father of five, Gaffigan is known for clean, family-friendly stand-up on the most inoffensive subjects (kids, food). He’s safe enough to open for the Pope and regularly grouse on “CBS Sunday Morning.” But his consistently funny new special “Dark Pale,” his 10th, pushes against that vanilla image. The pandemic, he tells us, has made him question mortality, and in one wonderfully macabre bit, Gaffigan, dressed in a black suit and shirt, imagines his own funeral. He wants an open casket, with him sitting up, crumbs on his shirt, arms occasionally rising like a marionette while a recording of him says, “Don’t worry, I’m in a better place” before adding, “Just kidding. I’m here.”
It’s an unexpectedly creepy visual, and after telling you about cremation, Gaffigan adopts his signature second voice, a gravelly whisper that operates like a critic in the crowd, asking: “When is he going to do the food jokes?”
It’s easy to miss if you aren’t a fan, but Jim Gaffigan has been on a roll. Already prolific, he’s become more so, putting out five specials in six years, with this new one on Prime Video the best of the bunch. Instead of resting on his laurels, he’s getting more ambitious. There are still jokes about chain restaurants (he calls Starbucks “an upscale unemployment office”). But the bristling tone and intricacy of the jokes demand attention, if not revaluation. He’s telling us in the title (his third using the word “Pale”) that he’s got heavier things on his mind than fast food. After revisiting his deep trove of material released over the past couple decades, what’s clear is that he always did.
Gaffigan’s patient delivery was there from the start, but his early albums might surprise those who only know his famous persona. He cursed, talked about sex and came off more as an annoyed son than a grumpy family man. In a 2015 interview with Marc Maron, Gaffigan said his earliest acting experience was pretending to be happy when his dad came home. This hints at his most fertile theme: The endless American capacity for denial.
His tone had shifted by 2006, when he had his first special, “Beyond the Pale,” which included his signature bit complaining about Hot Pockets. This set the course for a career of food jokes, with so many of them about how the cheap pleasures of eating fast food overpower our knowledge that it’s bad for us. At its best, like his bit about McDonald’s (“Momentary pleasure followed by incredible guilt eventually leading to cancer”) he broadens his sights to make points about our disposable culture. When he applies his comic eye to hotels or hospitals, he sees the lengths we go to to ignore how the towels were used by thousands of strangers and the gowns worn by the countless deceased.
Gaffigan, now 57, can seem like Jerry Seinfeld (the pair are actually touring together this fall) in his sticky phrase-making — an elevator is a “casket on a string” — and the ordinariness of his subject matter. His focus on single subjects can be knowingly, preposterously long. Who else does 10 minutes on horses? There’s an element of showing off — look at how I can make foliage funny — but also the excessiveness, the stubborn commitment of it, gets its own laughs. Gaffigan’s comedy has always been meta. His new special starts with a moody nighttime landscape that pans back to reveal itself as being inside a picture frame.
He constantly interrupts his jokes to comment on them and plays with expectations through formal trickery. (In a stunt that could have shown up in an early Steve Martin bit, he had a piano onstage for his last special so he could fool us into thinking he could play it.) Another common move is saying he’s pandering before doing the opposite. My favorite of this genre is when he told the crowd in his reasonable moseying tone that he was salt of the earth before stating: “I just want a regular old private jet.”
Along with food, Gaffigan’s most consistent subject is religion. “Dark Pale” features an impression of a peevish, cocooned God shouting at his beleaguered assistant that his messages of climate disasters were not getting through (“I miss the days when you could send a plague and people would listen”). He sprinkles jokes about the Bible or Jesus into his specials. What he doesn’t do is organize them into a thematic, coherent hour, as if he’s making a grand statement. Gaffigan’s old-school act is allergic to anything that might seem pretentious, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t challenge himself. He plays with form by taking conventional bits that unravel into nonsense instead of building to a punchline and even turned his wife’s cancer diagnoses into material.
His new work reveals his move into more storytelling, elaborate act-outs and jokes built on deceptions (“My parents aren’t vaccinated. They’ve been dead for decades, but enough with the excuses!”). He’s also become slightly more political in the Trump era, even letting loose an uncharacteristic rant on social media addressing Trump supporters: “I’m sure you enjoy pissing people off, but you know Trump is a liar and a criminal.” His jokes make the point with a lighter touch, poking fun at how quickly we moved from panic to indifference over Covid. Gaffigan now performs the kind of interweaving jokes that only a seasoned comic could pull off. In his new special, he does bits about Starbucks, bells and diarrhea and then quilts them together. These are less like standard comic callbacks than variations on a theme. It’s the work of a pro.
The only time you see Gaffigan strain is in his personal material. When he moves into stories about his childhood in the second half of the special, you wish he had a director to draw him out. Then again, his buried anger is such a source of his comedy that you wouldn’t want him to go too deep.
In some ways, Gaffigan’s work gives you a better picture of the country than it does of himself. His comedy, rooted in a performance of buffoonish arrogance, is quintessentially American, a mixture of cynicism and innocence, cheerful salesmanship with an undercurrent of despair. Exploiting his wholesome image, he reserves his fiercest and most ridiculous anger for classic but mundane Americana. Last special, he raged against marching bands; This time it’s hot air balloons. If Gaffigan was a musical, he’s be a high-concept revival of “The Music Man” that teases out its bleaker themes.
In one bit that really resonates from this latest special, he considers a recent plane crash. He tells us that it took three minutes from nosedive to impact. In a minimum of words for maximum impact, Gaffigan places us inside the ill-fated aircraft, imitating the passengers screaming and screaming before pausing to wonder whether they could actually keep it up.
“Three minutes is a long time,” he said, his voice turning from yells to croaks to quiet. “You know someone on the flight rang the flight attendant button.” Then he impersonated a woman asking for a free drink before plummeting to her doom.
It’s a nice metaphor for how Americans handle crises. We scream for only so long, then we find ways to move on. Is this delusion or realism? Probably both.
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