Outer city
There's another Chapelle show from DC a few years before that I prefer by a slight margin; this one he taped in Fillmore. Both shows are hit or miss, some jokes work for me, others not, the way it always is. More than jokes however, it's the base layer fabric that connects jokes that really interests me in stand up, how a narrator carries himself up and down a world he conjures, all that imperceptible presence - a self - that holds everything together to which the jokes are really tips of the iceberg; mannerisms, posture, air, pauses of empty space, all these no less a part of 'joking'.Jokes are years in the making in most cases because they're working on all those things; but so is the self, the narrator, it's the work in progress of learning to be the person you are, growing (or not) in how you inhabit yourself. Louis CK, who is my favorite, is a pleasure to watch for this, he can inhabit himself without compunctions; Louis channels being a slob in body and behavior but he's not a slob in mind.
So he struck me as smoother in DC, or maybe it was that the distance between the twenty-something guy on stage and the twenty-something guy who lives in his jokes felt much closer, like he had just drove off from the streets he depicts and landed on that stage. He's more of a professional here. I still like him as a presence, the sense of goofing out on the sidewalk at night, bite without snide, but I'm a visual creature and I would also like more world.
score /10
chaos-rampant 16 April 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3452511/36039
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