3. Todd Barry – The Crowd Work Tour
Crowd work is not easy, and if it ever looks like it is then it is entirely due to the skill level of the comedian doing it. There is a lot of bad crowd out work there—something I’ve written about elsewhere—which relies on a handful of hacky jokes that can be broadly applied to basically any audience. Bachelorette party in the front row? There’s a misogynist joke for that. Two bros sitting next to each other at a table? There’s a homophobic joke for that. Only one black guy in the audience? Yeah, things are about to get uncomfortable for him.
Todd Barry is a seasoned pro, though, and his crowd work is at a whole other level. Doing an entire tour of all crowd work and no prepared material took a lot of guts, and he pulled it off without resorting to hacky jokes. Granted, he had the help of some generous editing with The Crowd Work Tour, since it was based not on a single show but a whole series of them. The live shows themselves were undoubtedly more of a mixed bag, because that’s just the nature of crowd work, but when it works, it really works. The final product is an hour of footage that rivals some of the best hours of other comics’ prepared material. That’s no small feat.
Where to find it: Louisck.net
