Comedy
Festivals
JFL Toronto Review: Jerrod Carmichael
Filed under: Reviews, Festivals
In 12 years of doing stand-up comedy, seeing this show is a moment that truly sticks out for me. I've never felt like I've seen the inside of another comedian's brain, as much as I did last night. Jerrod Carmichael is already one of the most intimate comedians working today. He is innately honest and very poetic in the way that he presents his material. Some of the shows at JFL can really show you how the sausage gets made. It's my favorite thing to watch. A lot of times they will book an act right after they've recently put out a special, so that performer will usually have the structure of a show, but in so many ways they're starting from scratch. I was very excited to see how Carmichael was going to handle it.
What happened next was so vulnerable that it almost felt voyeuristic. Even though he was still going off of a beat sheet of new material, the whole audience seemed struck by watching him process the emotion of the material in real time. He truly was processing right in front of us.
The set was mostly about navigating the intimacy of close relationships. At one point, he commented on how the audience was giving him "church laughter", and let's be honest, that can happen at Canadian comedy shows. We can be very conservative. However, that's not what was happening here. This was the silence of focused listening. Most comedians tend to be people who are deeply uncomfortable with silence. Jerrod Carmichael uses it as a way to control – not just the pacing, but the temperature of the room. He is training the audience for what type of show this is about to be. Some comedians take the temperature of a room, but he controls the thermostat.
My absolute favourite part of the evening was when he opened up the show to the audience, but very specifically. He asked the crowd if they had any relationship advice for him. It resulted in hands-down the best crowd work I've ever seen, because it forced the audience to be sincere and vulnerable right back. A lot of times audiences can also be uncomfortable in silence, or feel that if it's been too quiet for too long that the performer is struggling. That's actually when most people heckle – they sincerely believe that they are helping. Again, that's not what happened here, because Carmichael had expertly trained the audience and even managed to wrangle honest catharsis out of them.
Even after the crowd had offered up their morsels of advice, the audience held space for everyone and Carmichael really appreciated the weight of everything he had been told, giving it measured, articulate reflection and response.
Part of the reason that people still love live shows is that they feel they've had a unique experience with the performer. This went beyond that. Everyone left that theatre with a real sense of catharsis, not just for Jerrod Carmichael, but for themselves. I've never experienced anything like that before. Especially from a performer that was "just trying to work it out".
Tags: Jerrod Carmichael, JFL Toronto, Just for Laughs, stand-up comedy, Toronto, crowd work, live comedy
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