Jim Gaffigan takes whitebread comedy to new heights at Rogers Place
Thousands of well-dressed suburban upper-middle class white couples in Edmonton decided to venture out in the cold for evening date Friday night in the company of fellow thoroughly white American comedian Jim Gaffigan – smack in the middle of his “Quality Time” Tour.
They made a wise choice. Gaffigan reasserted his A-list status at Rogers Place Friday night, using a flawless act to make thousands of white folks laugh incessantly. I counted six people in the audience who were not white, and they were laughing, too.
Many feel that “clean” comedians need to be that much better because they aren’t relying on crass or edgy material. Gaffigan’s act is so clean that its edges had to have been rounded out years ago – but that doesn’t matter. His material is so much about the suburban heterosexual white male experience that it makes you wonder what he would’ve come up if he’d grown up a poor black lesbian in Chicago – but that doesn’t matter, either. Gaffigan is so good that race isn’t an issue. Like Seinfeld, he’s funny no matter what.
His timing was so spot on it was like witnessing a Master’s Class in how to stand out as a stand up. The hook upon which Gaffigan hangs the success of his observational comedy are his razor sharp one liners, which are slowly and methodically metered out, instead fired out in rapid succession as with many other comics. Like a leisurely day on the links in Mesa with his snowbird vacationing buddies, Gaffigan sauntered from one topic to the next, on his own time, with the confidence of knowing whatever he was going to tee up, whatever he said, the shot would be heading out 250 yards straight down the middle of the fairway. He had some oddball material – and it all worked.
Like atrociously poor historical Swedish shipmaking skills?
“That’s why they make furniture. It floats.”
What he learned about the human body after having an emergency appendectomy?
“Doctors don’t even know what the appendix does. It’s like a Kardashian.”
And his closer, a long hilarious riff on that staple of the North American suburban diet and of his live act – the Hot Pocket. We have them in Canada, too. “I thought Canadians were smarter,” he said. The familiar routine was like the blow-out guitar solo at the end of a concert, a barrage of jokes.
For typecasters and other naysayers, Gaffigan’s material is banal – riding horses and going to movies with his large extended family and eating cheese and hearing Winnipeggers apologize for the poor weather, and (not) running marathons and watching NBC Dateline on Friday nights. This is his personal experience, and he’s able to construct a set of consistently hilarious material. There were no sex jokes, albeit one brief and perhaps humble bragged reference to his (allegedly) large member, one cuss word that isn’t a swear anymore (“bastard,” for those keeping score) and leaving the only shit joke until the very end (surely some kind of record in stand up comedy) – and he was still able to hit a grand slam over the course of his 70 minute set.
Gaffigan is world class talent, a fine reason to ditch St. Albert, the kids, the man cave and-or the wine-book club for a couple hours of great live comedy on a cold Friday night.
If Seinfeld was there to see it, no doubt he’d be saying “That’s my boy!”
