LIVE REVIEW:
CHRIS GETHARD & FRIENDS (Knitting Factory Brooklyn, April 22. 2014)

by Jim Testa

The only thing missing from the “Chris Gethard & Friends” show, celebrating the release of the comedian’s debut comedy album on Don Giovanni Records, was enough Chris Gethard.

The lovably nerdy host of The Chris Gethard Show on Manhattan cable (and the Internet) packed Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory on a Tuesday night, selling out the venue a few days early. When I arrived just before showtime, I could barely get in the door, the enthusiastic crowd mixed with wide-eyed teens, millennial hipsters, Jersey punk rockers, giggly co-eds pretty much reflecting the devoted demographic of Gethard’s underground but much-loved faux-talk show.

While technically we weren’t there for The Chris Gethard Show (no LLC house band, for instance,) members of the show’s cast and quite a few recognizable regulars visibly peppered the crowd. Gethard’s longtime colleague Shannon O’Neill (the only cast member remaining from the show’s origins as a live UCB skit) opened the night with an improv bit in which she portrayed a Greenwich Village sketch artist whipping up 5-minute caricatures of people plucked from the audience. If you know anything about O’Neill’s comedy, you know the jokes were gross, scatological, obscene, and – it goes without saying – hilarious.

Musical guests included a solo/electric Mikey Erg (who sometimes plays with the LLC, and drummed in the much-missed Unlovables, which featured Gethard’s fiancé Hallie Bulleitt on vocals,) Don Giovanni labelmates Shellshag (doing a fairly ragtag acoustic set,) and comic/singer Mal Blum, who does a duet with Gethard on the album. But the big guns were the standups: Don Giovanni honcho Joe Steinhardt (who was somewhat surprisingly hilarious, doing a bit about being a grownup,) Brooklyn comics Mike Birbiglia and Eugene Mirman, and a surprise set from Hannibal Burress. They all killed, as they say on the comedy circuit; I was literally sore from laughing so hard.

Gethard – whose persona is a mix of Woody Allen’s intellectual ahedonia and crippling self-esteem issues resulting in jokey self-deprecation – hosted the show with Steinhardt and did a short (and, as he admitted, somewhat unsuccessful) bit at the end. I was actually hoping for a full on standup set; not material from the album, obviously, but something to give me a taste of Chris Gethard the comedian.

The lovably nerdy talk-show host? That guy I already know.

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