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Spit Take Saturday: Aziz Ansari

Comedy >

aab_pds_002_hWelcome to Spit Take Saturday, courtesy of Brown Paper Tickets’ Comedy Doer Julie Seabaugh and her professional comedy criticism site The Spit Take. Julie’s goal with the site is to “elevate the public perception of stand-up comedy to that of a legitimate art form, and to enable comedy criticism be taken as seriously as that of theater, film, music, food, even video games. No a**-kissing. No bias. No mercy. Just honest, unfiltered, long-form reviews written by professional, knowledgeable comedy critics.” 

Every week Julie will select an entry from the site to be included on our blog and hand-pick some related events happening that week that she feels all you comedy lovers out there will appreciate.

So, without further ado, let us introduce you to this week’s Spit Take Saturday!

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Plenty of comedians use marriage and children as sources for their material, but usually it’s because they themselves are married and/or have children. For someone who’s single and childless, Aziz Ansari has a lot to say about the subject, and while some of his relationship material is familiar, a lot of the perspective he offers in his new Netflix special Buried Alive is unique while also being immediately relatable. Articles about the choice to have or not have children, and to get married or remain single, have proliferated online and in print over the last few years, and Ansari seizes on that conversation to inject his own point of view as someone who isn’t married or having children, but is surrounded by people who are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua1vp0Y9ba4

The best material in the special comes up front, as Ansari bemoans the barrage of Facebook posts and other correspondence about his peers’ marriages and babies. His dismissal of bland baby videos (“I walk all the time; I’m not impressed.”) and other useless updates is a hilarious and brutally honest expression of the frustrations of single people, as well as a cutting analysis of the way that social media can celebrate conformity through gleeful promotion of traditional familial milestones. Ansari allows himself plenty of digressions while talking about the inherent absurdity of marriage and family, getting into the dichotomy between the working-class subjects of 16 and Pregnant and their rich, spoiled counterparts on My Super Sweet 16 (“Can someone impregnate this girl and ruin her life?”), and mining plenty of laughs from a married couple in the audience telling the story of their proposal.

After a while, it feels like Ansari belabors the same points, and his extended riffs on the unlikelihood of meeting your soulmate get to be a little repetitive. At the same time, he’s convincingly introspective about the subject, even with his lengthy tangents about ghosts or how much black people love magic tricks. It’s clear that Ansari has thought a lot about what it means to get married, to start a family, to knowingly take on all the trappings of a traditional life. He breaks it down so extensively that one of his strongest bits involves imagining how the idea of marriage would sound to someone who’s never heard of it. At his best, Ansari offers a kind of deconstructionist perspective on a subject most people take for granted.

He’s not always so forward-thinking, though; a bit about men sending women unsolicited pictures of their penises starts out as sympathetic before turning creepy, as Ansari recounts his attempt to test the response of a female friend to an unwanted explicit picture. Instead of expressing solidarity with women who are being harassed, Ansari puts himself in the place of the harasser.

His other missteps are more innocuous; in the last part of the show, he comes perilously close to Kathy Griffin-style name-dropping with lengthy, not particularly funny stories of meeting President Obama and working with Seal. After more than an hour of thoughtful, entertaining commentary on some of life’s most important decisions, the inconsequential celebrity fluff is a little disappointing. Ansari clearly has the talent to make worthwhile comedic insights, and for the most part in Buried Alive he puts that talent to good use.

By Josh Bell

Follow @SpitTakeComedy on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

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For more top relationship comedy, check out:

Thursday, November 15 I This Is Why You’re Single New York, New York  Meet Angela Spera (@speradactyl) and Laura Lane (@lauralanenyc). They know why you’re single. You probably do, too. So let’s bond over it together! Join these two New York girlfriends on a sketch show journey about the misadventures of besties, dudes and dating. You’ll see: Cuddling! Emojis! Douchebags! Pickup lines! Personal confessions! Beyonce! Beer! Marriage! Hotties! Love! Exclamation points! Cheerios! Zambonis! Friends! SKETCH COMEDY!

Friday, December 6 I Debra Cole Atlanta, Georgia  Although the ATL is her home, Debra Cole is a native of Waycross and a graduate of Valdosta State University where she studied music. She is known for smart humor that is delivered with her signature southern twang. In her show, she covers current events, public school, politics, relationships, bad customer service, motherhood, life as a comic, and much more. Sometimes edgy and always surprising, audiences are guaranteed a good time.

Saturday, December 28 I Robert KellyParsippany, New Jersey  From his early days as a kid growing up in Boston in and out of Juvenile Hall, Kelly’s unique, honest take on his own life and his relationships makes his comedy clever, abrasive, funny, but yet refreshingly vulnerable. Kelly has traveled across the country in the “Tourgasm Live” tour with Dane Cook and Gary Gulman and has performed at the Just For Laughs Festival (Montreal 2010). He was recently seen as Louie CK’s brother Robbie on FX’s Louie. His other credits include Comedy Central Presents Robert Kelly, Tourgasm on HBO, Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, and Premium Blend on Comedy Central. He also produced and starred in his first short film Cheat which debuted at The Tribeca Film Festival in New York. He also has a book coming out based on the movie and a top rated podcast called You Know What Dude? that can be found on iTunes or riotcast.com.