#Repertoire james acaster series
#Repertoire james acaster tv

She’s a lesbian who finds it hard to fit in “with her people.” I’m a genderfluid lesbian-ish person who is dating both a polygender person and a trans man. She was raised in the extremely homophobic society of late 20th century Tasmania, I was raised in the one-two punch of homophobic societies: the military and the Catholic Church. I have to come clean here: I can’t watch Hannah speak on these topics without relating to her personally. Like Repertoire, Nanette made waves at the Edinburgh Fringe, the festival for experimental one person theatre. Her miniseries Hannah Gadsby: Arts Clown, a four part art history lecture for the radio made me feel so smart, though I’m unsure how well radio works as a medium for art lectures.

#Repertoire james acaster tv

Her work on (possibly the greatest tv comedy of our generation) Please Like Me is phenomenal, and helped me overcome my struggle with self-harm. Hannah Gadsby is another comedian I have heard so much about. Is the ultimate punchline the lack of one altogether? Jokes have two parts: set ups, and punchlines. It’s a dangerous thing, laughter: it makes you so vulnerable, you take your guard down in order to laugh but its so easy for a performer to take advantage and punch you in the gut instead. You have to trust them to entertain you, you put your sensibility into their hands. The nonlinear storytelling breaks the contract every stand up comedian makes with their audience, the sort of intimacy only one person on a stage can muster. That’s what tips the stories from funny to heartbreaking: that moment you realize “hang on, I think he’s actually talking about himself here” peppered between conventional jokes about Dr.

#Repertoire james acaster series

In the very first hour, he cracks a joke about how he knows an undercover cop pretending to be a stand up comedian is weird, but “not as weird as a stand up comedian pretending to be an undercover cop! Imagine that LOSER!” The entire narrative is built on a system of deflection and projection, ultimately ending with a story of a duck talking to a decoy about how meaningful his life is, how fascinating higher powers are, in fact, he’s written a series of one-man shows about it. It sounds complicated, and it is, but Acaster acknowledges it. The fourth episode, possibly the most heartbreaking, includes the story of how he became an undercover cop through witness protection and how he met his wife through a game of flirty Twister, and how much he loves her and can’t see the relationship going wrong anytime soon. The third episode is centered around “a fresh start” and how a honey-based scam gone wrong has forced him into witness protection. In the next episode, he doesn’t mention any of this, instead focusing on his stint in jury duty and his complex relationship with religion, ending with a five minute long shot of him eating an orange by candlelight. He begins talking about how he is actually an undercover cop named Pat Springleaf undercover as a stand up comedian named James Acaster, and how his wife left him because he got too caught up in the case. Acaster mixes normal stand up with non-linear storytelling and unreliable narrators. I watched all four hours once or twice daily for a good two weeks.

His award winning series of four comedy specials, Repertoire, went live on Netflix this spring. I’ve been following his career for about five years now, starting with a set on Russell Howard’s Good News in 2013 where his name was misspelled behind him the entire set. James Acaster is a British comedian specializing in “low-key whimsy,” best known for his jokes about cabbages and ready to eat apricots. And just in the last few months, two works of stand up comedy have not only grabbed me, they’ve saved my life: James Acaster’s Repertoire and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. But for me, only one genre has the power to truly kick me in the back of the kneecaps anymore: stand up comedy.

Recently, these sorts of works have more or less been restricted to “prestige tv”: your Westworlds, your Breaking Bads. But sometimes, you watch something that grips you from the core and yanks you back and all you can think is I need to write about this I need to share this. I try to read up, to study my heroes’ works on Vulture or Buzzfeed. Nanette and Repertoire: The Disarming Power of Stand Up Comedy