Seen him twice now, thankfully didn’t have to pay either time, because I found his schtick, voice, and delivery very lame and unfunny. A nice enough guy, however.
I’m about the same age as Kinane, and I grew up with joke machines and truly irreverent comics who blew you away with their persona as well as their material. To me he’s a pathetic, hipster-coloured marble-mouthed excuse for a comic.
I tried to listen to “Death Of The Party” and “Whiskey Icarus”, and like Lenny Bruce, he takes way too long to get to very little payoff in the form of a punch line… if there even isone! **
I suppose he’s just not my cup of tea, but perhaps somebody else can explain why so many critics are wetting their pants over him?
A lot of “hot” comedy of the moment is like music - if it isn’t weird, dissonant, offputting and just plain strange, it’s not worth serious critical attention. If you don’t like it, it’s your fault - “go back to your Rodney Dangerfield cassettes, you hopeless trog.”
Being smart, quick, insightful, confident and being able to work up fresh, sharp material is an elite set of skills, and like music or pro sports, you can’t get very far unless you can do it week after week after weary week, and still hold up - still make a mix of old and new audience laugh and want more. So the comedy stages tend to be filled with those whose schtick is being as different, weird and odd as possible - like fake abstract painters who can’t draw a cow.
This all is pretty much what goes through my mind whenever a new question about some super-hot comic of the week is asked. There’s real talent, and there’s legions who master a few moments of screaming HEY YOU FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME! Even when the scream is being such a pathetic loser it’s like watching someone slit their wrists in HD.
Well if it’s a comic trying to be fake edgy or just esoteric (he name-drops Hedburg quite a bit, which is an insult to Hedburg who had a plethora of one-liners), I’ve simply got no time for it. Pryor crafted stories like he was a modern-day Mark Twain, and the laughs never stopped. With Kinane, the laughter never started.
Ben Kronberg is another one who irks me to no end–in the quest for finding that elusive “persona” that they think will earn them a spot on some shitty sitcom, they’ve forgotten how to write jokes, if they even knew how to in the first place.
I think he’s funny. He tells stories, not jokes, so there isn’t necessarily going to be a punch line.
I think of Kyle Kinane as that guy you sit down next to the bar and start swapping stories, but his are waaaay more funny than yours.
De gustibus, etc.