Jim Gaffigan’s Quintessentially American Comedy Gets Darker and Better
He’ll still joke about fast food. But on “Dark Pale,” his 10th stand-up special, his evolution as a comedian is apparent.
Have we gotten Jim Gaffigan wrong all along?
A Midwestern-born father of five, Gaffigan is known for clean, family-friendly stand-up on the most inoffensive subjects (kids, food). He’s safe enough to open for the Pope and regularly grouse on “CBS Sunday Morning.” But his consistently funny new special “Dark Pale,” his 10th, pushes against that vanilla image. The pandemic, he tells us, has made him question mortality, and in one wonderfully macabre bit, Gaffigan, dressed in a black suit and shirt, imagines his own funeral. He wants an open casket, with him sitting up, crumbs on his shirt, arms occasionally rising like a marionette while a recording of him says, “Don’t worry, I’m in a better place” before adding, “Just kidding. I’m here.”
It’s an unexpectedly creepy visual, and after telling you about cremation, Gaffigan adopts his signature second voice, a gravelly whisper that operates like a critic in the crowd, asking: “When is he going to do the food jokes? READ MORE