It’s an interesting cultural moment for the man-child, and this was only proven further by Kyle Kinane’s Sunday comedy set at the Royale.
The mid-2000s, with the sudden omnipresence of the Judd Apatow brand in both film and television, was a period of pop culture revival for the adult male slacker. Of course, this archetype was never off the radar entirely. There has always been an audience for stoner comedy and the gentle derision of aimless, immature thirtysomethings, but when films like “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” began dominating the cultural conversation, a quiet shift took place.
Suddenly, a sense of unironic affection accompanied these characters. Some patronization lingered, but largely, their lives were presented without the knowing lens of maturity that drove affection for someone like Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
Sure, their arcs usually bent toward maturity — save for Jason Segel’s Peter in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” who concludes the film by producing a Dracula puppet musical — but there was a pervading sense that their wifeless, childless lives weren’t so pitiable after all.
Now, we’ve been saturated in that climate for a decade or so. Understandably, the onslaught has stretched public tolerance to near-invisible thinness, and the troubling sexism of the whole enterprise (why are men the ones that get to have childish fun while women are shrews who nag them to abandon what makes them happy?) is counterbalanced by hits like “Trainwreck” and “Broad City.”
This leaves us with a sense of general disdain for the man-child and an immediate predisposition to anything or anyone whose material lives in that world, regardless of whether or not they’re actively fighting for its continued vitality. Enter Kinane.
Kinane is a standup act and a ubiquitous presence on a slew of comedy podcasts, and he also happens to be the official voice of Comedy Central. Most recently, he appeared in the first few episodes of “Love,” an Apatow-produced Netflix series, as reformed cocaine addict Eric. His profile is steadily rising, and it’s a profile built rather soundly on his man-child persona.
Kinane performed his set downtown with a brief warm-up set by his friend Shane Torres, a Texas-based standup act. Torres’ fast, funny, mostly successful 20 minutes very much set the tone for the evening. His material brimmed with the wordplay and unusual syntax that characterize modern comedy while settling comfortably into the contours of classic slacker comedy.
When Kinane took the stage, though, he added some notable wrinkles to the template.
His set, which he confessed was a new material trial run for an upcoming Comedy Central special, was built around a quiet subversion of the standard man-child routine. Far from self-conscious, he paired his propensity for ghost hunting and skateboarding, despite being in his late-30s, with a level of social awareness and sensitivity that critics often berate this type of comedy for lacking.
He questioned why anyone would want to hear about what was going on with him, as a “straight white dude for whom things are going fine,” and steered entirely away from standard talk of sexual prowess and casual misogyny.
Of course, Kinane doesn’t deserve an award simply for not being a jerk. It helps that he is also a gifted comedian.
The longest and most successful bit of the night involved him being “one Netflix documentary away from becoming a vegetarian,” which launched him into a laundry list of micro-jabs involving Korean seafood markets and the inherent loveliness of cows and the shocking ineptitude of fish. His best material succeeds because he finds the delicate balance between confusion, outrage and a sunny lack of fatalism that he marries to surreal musings that stem from mundane observation.
Another key component of Kinane’s charm is his graciousness that feels genuine without defanging his comedy. He opened his set by railing against comics who attack their audiences for getting up in the middle of the show to grab a drink or take a phone call, especially if they’re sitting in the front row, citing the fact that he’s lucky people are paying to see him tell jokes at all. That same sense of indebtedness without groveling pierced the majority of his material.
To close out Sunday’s show, Kinane did an extended joke that revolved around the personal betrayal felt when one hears their “sex noise” out in the world, and he incorporated a famous State Farm commercial. Filled with left-field bursts of medieval language and successful self-deprecation, he managed to approach the comedian-worn topic of sex from an angle of utter solipsism, not belittling anyone in any way but himself.
In doing so, he seems to signal a new (or emerging) type of comedian — all the agency and tradition rejection of your typical adult adolescent without the self-satisfaction and chauvinism that the archetype usually engenders. In short, Kinane works because he’s man first, child second.
