John Early enjoys presenting himself as a character, whether in his co-starring roles in Search Party or The Afterparty, his Netflix sketch showcase for The Characters, or his projects with comedy collaborator and co-conspirator Kate Berlant. For his first solo HBO special, Early wants us to throw a different kind of party, asking us to see him as a full-on diva, singing and fronting a band called The Lemon Squares. Will you be rooting for an encore at the end, tho?
The Gist: The conceit here not only finds Early in concert with a full band and two background singers, but also in rockumentary mode, cutting back and forth from the concert to pre-show rehearsals, interviews, prayer circles and intra-band feuds. And the band isn’t just window dressing, either. Early fronts The Lemon Squares for at least four different songs over the course of an hour-plus.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Think Whitmer Thomas and his 2020 HBO special/documentary, The Golden One, mixed with This Is Spinal Tap.
Memorable Jokes: Arriving as this concert special does in the middle of Pride Month, Early, too, arrives onstage at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium in a big, bold, and unabashedly gay way, checking to make sure to microphone “is amplifying queer voices” and declaring his gratitude for coming back to the borough where he “wasted” his sexual prime. He also makes an excruciatingly obvious example of spotlighting his parents, seated in the balcony, to amplify any tension (real or fake) when he immediately and subsequently jokes about loving anal sex, and justifying the act through both science and evolution.
Much of the stand-up itself focuses on small observations and even smaller gestures.
These ideas converge when he finds ways to act out dance moves within the seemingly less-obvious subjects of bowling and Shark Tank.
At other points, he’s more than willing to settle in for exasperated emotional reactions to words and language, whether it’s “an entire generation of people pretending to hate the word moist” or his own fascination with an iPhone app prompt that reads: “ask app not to track.”
As for the musical numbers, Early does stop once to ask the audience if they have any Britney Spears requests for him and the band (so long as it’s the third single from her third album).
Our Take: Perhaps Early’s deepest observation tackles the shallow reality of the commonly-given advice to “be yourself.” If we truly followed it through, then we’d see billions of unique personalities, instead of the singular seemingly carefree tone that’s usually suggested by those two words of advice.
Of course, when do we ever knowingly see or hear the real John Early? We may catch glimpses of sincerity, but they happen so quickly before reverting back to silliness that we might even second-guess whether that older couple in the balcony were and are actually his mom and dad. That’s the wickedly zig-zag line he so often chooses, though.
Even the choice to have Early and The Lemon Squares perform sincere covers walks that line, not telling us too much directly about how he feels, while simultaneously allowing us to witness his take on Neil Young’s “After The Gold Rush” and his joy in over-the-top harmonizing with his backup singers on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Good.”
There’s one point in his stand-up in which Early uses his voice (both literally and metaphorically) to bring a fascinatingly different perspective to otherwise well-trodden Trump material, reframing his infamous Access Hollywood quotes as cover for a 12-year-old closeted version of Early trying in vain to convince his classmates in the locker room that he knows all about sex.
At other points, Early’s facial expressions and clowning feel like he might be channelling Berlant. Or was she channelling him? Perhaps they’re so simpatico and symbiotic that you’re getting the best of both of them, whether they’re onstage together or not.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Early’s Peacock project with Berlant, Would It Kill You To Laugh?, was one of my favorites of last year. This effort doesn’t quite rise to those heights. But it comes close.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.