Hi. Hello. I’m alive!
Kind of.
In some desperate bid to inspire myself to write, I watched Nick Kroll’s new Netflix stand-up Little Big Boy. I was hoping it would make my blood boil long enough to motivate a sentence. It worked. I have written about the cultural position and power of irony before, brifely touching on Kroll & Mulaney. If you hang out with me in person, you know how often I talk about the denigration and fall of stand-up comedy, how it was a tool of expression for the working class and how it has been perverted to death, become a theatre of self-indulgent bourgeois performance.
The son of billionaire Jules Kroll, Nick’s life and caste define every part of him. So it’s not surprising that a pathological need to infantilize himself has formed, an anguished attempt at eliciting sympathy from people around him. It’s survival: running away from the target on your back. I’ve talked about the bourgeois' desperation to shake off the markings of his caste. Comedy is the perfect place to hide, the stand-up stage being used as some equalizer.
While he used to lean into it lightly — he had a sketch on Kroll show called “Rich Dicks” (which I cannot find a single clip of but definitely existed) — as his fame rose, Kroll fully embraced the Baby in him, taking advantage of a depressed and regressing audience. One who, flattened by the violence of every day, wishes to depoliticize entertainment, to make it neutral, to justify their parasocial attachments. He plays with nostalgia as though that too serves as an equalizer, childhood being the significant commonality:
“I don’t want to brag, but we owned the Plymouth voyager. It’s not a big deal.”
An insidious little line, here he is giving the illusion of a level playing field like he’s up there because he deserves it, and you both started on the same footing. He winks at middle-class nostalgia, re-invents and re-writes his isolating reality into something that can reach people.
Few things irk me more than the veneer of self-awareness, especially how it has been used over the past few years, the secret ingredient to the parasocial magic trick. In Kroll’s “Little Big Boy,” he tells the story of being dumped by his ex-girlfriend for “not being attractive enough.” The immediate sympathy this elicits, the awws from the audience. The paused laughter leaves room for a moment of simulated sincerity; a pretend intimacy to form. From there, it’s easy to say just about anything. It’s barely even a question of winning the audience over, either, since a Netflix-produced comedy hour won’t be inviting people off the street. Fans, ripe with anticipation and bias, are the Perfect audience for such a non-performance. The bar is lowered by the audience itself, years of eroding critical thought through unquestioned fanaticism. Allow me to quote Carl Jung just this once:
“Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt.”
A few days ago, I posted some thoughts about Kroll on Instagram. I received a few angry/incredulous dms from people. One girl, who has apparently never heard of Google, demanded I explain how Nick Kroll is a billionaire. Another person asked me to please consider the difference between Nick Kroll’s private wealth and his father’s. The olympian mental gymnastics that we perform with such intent are proof of that doubt, how we run away from it as though our lives depend on it. And in a way, our lives have come to rely on entertainment. On the clowns that we make rich in order to be able to turn it all off for a second. Our incapacity, or disinterest in turning to each other or ourselves for anything, has rendered us forever watchers, immobile but content.
The magic trick is this: Kroll has somehow managed to convince you there’s a difference between him and Bezos, Musk or Gates. Whereas most of Twitter would relish in Musk getting dumped for being too fucking gross, we aw at Kroll. I hesitate to call our reluctant class awakening anything other than a mere distraction, a way to make distinctions where there are none, to create a class of dangerously powerful yet charming billionaire entertainers, the acceptable faces of wealth hoarding. Rhianna, too, benefits from her socio-cultural veneer of credibility and exceptionalism, but that’s for another time. She’s not a comedian…..yet.
The parasocial bonds are forged, tightened, and consolidated in the false intimacy of the performance; within the walls of the theatre, what we clap for isn’t talent but the ability to make us forget the con, the absolute racket of so-called entertainment.
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