Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers

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source: Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers

I would say the first 40 minutes is an ordinary stand-up comedy, but the last 20 minutes is pretty deep and strong. Generally, i myself have always had deep doubts about political correctness, seeing it as an ideological forbidden zone more than a sort of understandable social pressure with good intentions. Because I always believe that even our most cherished and most sensitive values need to be challenged from time to time. If not, even if this kind of political correctness is correct indeed, it is as John Stuart Mill said: "Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth." And if even comedians are not allowed to implement the challenge, then who else can?

Anthony Jeselnik does dark, strange jokes about cancer, dead kids, child molesters, serial killers...and you laugh! Not for everybody, only if you appreciate dark humor and recognize it as just that, and not take it too seriously. Comedy must never be taken too seriously. I'm possibly going to Hell for liking this, but at least I'll be warm and the heating bill will be non-existant. I should be in amongst weird but funny company, this is receiving good ratings.

I agree that dark comedy must not be taken serious but this show had me feel offensiveness in my bones. I don't think this is something i would ever want to be encountered again.

Maybe it's a relatively good material, but the pathetic attitude of bad boy of a box office movie is intolerable. I couldn't get past the 15 minute.

I am not easily offended by off-color humor. I thought Sarah Silverman's irreverent Jesus Is Magic comedy special was hilarious. And the acerbic Bill Hicks was absolute genius. You can make fun of women, find humor in any nationality or ethnicity (to a point), you can poke fun of religions, you can mimic a surly teenager.. But you do NOT make a joke about Eric Clapton's little boy who died in a tragic accident! That is not funny. That is cruel. You can put any kind of spin on it, dress it up and put on the label of your choice.. but the only thing that "joke" was, was cruel! This so-called comic used just about the most heartbreaking thing he could think of as an opportunistic vehicle to establish himself as the crudest comedian on the circuit. Well congratulations Tony, you win the blue ribbon!

This was one of the funniest yet crudest comedy shows I have ever seen. Anthony Jeselnik even warns you about how vulgar he is so don't you complain about all the dead baby jokes and mocking tragedies such as the Boston Bombing, the 911 terrorist attacks and Eric Clapton's son. You will cringe, awkward laugh and be angry all at the same time. I think the best part of the show was seeing the audience reactions which is why they show the audience so much. Watching the men laugh at a sexist joke and the women just sit there with annoyed looks on their faces is one of the most hilarious things ever. The one thing I love a lot in the show other than the audience reactions is Anthony's plot twist humor. He always starts telling a joke, then you THINK you know what he is going to say next but then he switches the form on you which completely get you off guard which makes me laugh a ton. All in all, great performance by Anthony. Look forward to his future endeavors, hopefully he will do more stand-up one day...

Hadn't heard of Anthony Jeselnik before watching, and really wasn't a fan of this special. I didn't like the first 2/3s because the jokes were so repetitive. He'd say something shocking, string the audience along for a bit, and then say a concluding statement that was slightly more shocking. There was very little by way of structure or flow; it was really choppy and dull. He'd try to give the illusion that things were spontaneous by asking the audience very basic questions, but would follow the answers up with further jokes that were barely relevant. He changes things up in the final 1/3, but that material didn't really work for me either. I might be alone or in the minority, but if you want to make fun of people who say "thoughts and prayers" (yes, please do make fun of that attitude; it's less prevalent now but I remember when it was much more common), then make fun of those people. The jokes he referenced about the cinema shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing weren't really making fun of those sorts of attention-craving people, or at least I'd understand people not seeing the connection. I mean if I'd read those tweeted jokes out of context, I'd find them pretty tasteless in all honesty. As for the Shark Party thing... I'd never heard of it but it did annoy me. If the victim had been someone who'd murdered sharks, go ahead, make fun of him. But it feels misguided to make fun of this man's horrible death if he hadn't been part of the problem. Him being killed by a shark isn't some kind of ironic retribution, at least not in my opinion. If you want to make fun of people who murder sharks by the million, then aim the comedy elsewhere. As a somewhat relevant sidenote, I watched a Youtube video today where someone made fun of a guy who made a public Facebook post, denying the severity of a certain virus in April and saying it was overhyped by the media, yet died of it sometime in July. That's dark too, but it can be argued that that deceased individual deserves mockery. At least there's karma; a sense of him being brought down in a darkly hilarious way. I think overall that's my problem with this special, particularly the final 20 minutes. Punch up and punch up hard, and the cruder and more extreme to the people who deserve it, the funnier that stuff can be. There's similarly crass and brash standup comedy out there that I have enjoyed. But I don't really like where Jeselnik targets his jokes, at least not the ones he references near the end of this special. He may have good intentions, or he may have awful intentions and simply have used this special to try and explain that he had some greater purpose or some higher target beyond the victims. I don't know, maybe I'm just not a fan. Despite not enjoying it, I'm glad I watched it, because it's made me think more about what I find funny and why, but the humour in this just really wasn't for me. If I've missed the point, or overlooked some detail, I apologise. These are just my immediate thoughts (but no prayers) after watching this, and I had to get them out there.

This style of dark, edgy, quick fire jokes comedy is never funny. It gets boring very quickly.. You stop believing what the performer is saying.