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About comedy
With an emotionless look, the stand-up takes pictures of everyone and doesn’t say anything funny just to laugh. Now it’s about to explode, thanks to a Netflix special.
By Jason Zinoman
Comedy is like tennis: it helps start young, which is why many of its superstars (Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Dave Chappelle) started their careers in adolescence. But Jay, a lifelong fan and a standing student, offers a smart argument about the benefits of repressing himself. “I needed the confidence in my life to know what I meant,” he says.
Now 38, he’s one of the most exciting and provocative people in comedy right now, addressing dogmas-free disorders. He doesn’t belong in any camp. She shoots President Trump, but also tells him that America is no bigger than him. His #MeToo shots, the racism of the “white man’s ambition” and transgender identity reflect an eccentric brain running over the disorders, his strangely funny pneumatic hammer lines that emerge from an emotionless look.
His comedy is hard to categorize: profane and intoxicating, with the aim of provoking abdominal laughter, but he never seems desperate for them. Jay’s considered pieces have a cynical side, one that has already earned some lives of tragedy. Her late departure gave her career an emergency that led her to this moment, while she is on the verge of a primary escape.
His first hour, “3 a.m.”, which premiered Tuesday on Netflix, is one of the last specials filmed before the pandemic. Jay filmed it on February 22 and apparently tried to delve into the great unrest of the day, but inevitably suddenly it is less topical, as it is not about the virus, the death of George Floyd or any manifestation. On his balcony on the seventh floor, where we distanced ourselves socially, I asked him through a mask if this absence bothered him. Jay paused, letting the silence go long enough to make it a little awkward, a position in which she felt perfectly comfortable.
While the current affairs factor hung there, he went for a drink and when he returned, he advised – on the recommendation of his girlfriend, Yanise Monet Vincent – that we spend ourselves inside because it’s so hot. As we sat down, Jay repented, “Damn it,” she says, in a grave tone in her voice. “I hope my special doesn’t come to light and other people think that, as a black person, I chose not to communicate about it.”
If Jay has a scene character other than his offstage character, he couldn’t trip over him after talking to him for 3 hours. It projects a metal presence that periodically becomes a discordant vulnerability. Speaking about the transition from gambling every night in clubs to spending weeks without leaving the apartment, she said she enjoyed the breakup, but the news of police violence had despaired her: “There are definitely days when my daughter and I are just sad, when I only cry all day.
At the heart of his new special is the concept that true freedom means being out of the crowd. She starts with a self-criticism joke about the fact that, despite being gay, she used to have sex with men to have compatibility with her friends. And then he describes how he felt out of tune with white lesbians, before moving on to Jaden Smith’s birthday party. “Finally, we had a strange black boy,” he says, listing his eccentricities, adding dress up as Batman without shoes and making a song about the stars. Astonished by her choices, she expresses her punchline with admiration: “This is Martin Luther King’s dream.”
Experimentally, Jay even organized several standing exhibitions absolutely in the dark to lose the comics in the commentary component. (“You can avoid worrying about that because you can’t see them”).
Growing up in projects in Boston, Jay said, she was a strange black girl. He was aware that listening to Foo Fighters and Alice in Chains in his room can be viewed with suspicion through his hip-hop-loving brothers. “I had a friend who enjoyed ‘Seinfeld’ and we laughed a lot at him,” he said, noting that his set was intended to prefer ‘Martin’. “There are lines in the sand, brother. But I’ve dated kids like that.
“She said you didn’t have to lie,” Jay said. “It’s general to be angry with me. I’m your mom and I intend to do safe things, so don’t feel guilty. I cried and she hugged me. In six or seven months, he died.
Jay paused to think about what his life would be like if his mother hadn’t said that. “Who knows what trajectory this would have taken me on? She had this foresight to relieve me of that,” she says, drowning in herself. “She’s a flawless mom.”
When Jay herself was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 20, she became obsessed and terrorized to death, a concern that has recently declined in part because of professional success, but also because of what she described as a reflection. “When something like this bothers me, I have to deal with it mentally,” he says. “I want to sit on it. And I don’t forget to talk to my aunt, who said, the more you check to control something like that, the less you’ll have. Genuine control is acceptance.”
Jay’s special, which has the power and intimacy of a bar fight, seems more political than personal. It is also about his attitude to death and his dating with his girlfriend. Jay ends with a history of his years of training about excessive maternal love that serves as a kind of tribute.
Jay began betting after doing a series of jobs (Starbucks, Best Buy) for which he had no passion. “Stand-up was not easy at all, ” he said. “I was running in the mailroom and the most important thing I could be was the mail manager. You have to love anything strong enough to paint hard and status is the only thing I like. That was the only option.
Jak Knight, a comedian who is a smart friend, said of Jay admiringly: “You can’t move if you don’t move.”
The first time I saw Jay on stage, he told some jokes to a sparse, clumsy crowd at the club, shook his head and, without a note of anger, left the stage. “I don’t like to feel that way,” he said as he reflected on the episode. The members of the public are the customers, he admitted, but he does not believe that all the crowds are the same. “The comics put it to themselves,” he says. “If the audience isn’t good, it’s my fault.” No. Sometimes they just suck.
Jay even hesitated when he was introduced to a writer’s assignment on “Saturday Night Live” because he had no specific ambition or delight in comic book comedy. When asked if other people had begged her to do so, her friend in the adjoining room shouted “Yes!” and then laugh with her important adviser, Jay also stated that what she reported on her resolution was not to forget the moment Oberlin College tried to recruit her, but she said no because she seemed “too white. Repented. He joined “SNL” in 2017, and although the fit was difficult, getting to cut the comic strips (“I live in the cutting area”), he also wrote several songs that were released, adding a Velvet Jones to Eddie Murphy.
If I could shoot now, what would you say about the recent protests? Jay was devastated. She said she probably went there from various angles because she is encouraged by young people on the streets, but she also hates that the answer for other people is to throw “a Molotov cocktail.” Then he thought a little more and replaced the course, saying that he rarely saw white society as a violent boyfriend and that the other blacks just needed to move.
“I’m at a point where I’m not even in treatment for other black people because you can’t progress when you’re still living with your abuser,” he said, giving the impression that I was running a little for a set that probably wouldn’t take place soon. “There is no scenario in which a woman is beaten through her husband and said, “Go to treatment.” Then he added, “Get out of the house.”
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