Title: Live at the Purple Onion
Year: 2006
The set-up: He's Alan in The Hangover. You know, the one who finds the tiger when he's having a whizz. The one Mike Tyson flattens. Him. Except, in The Hangover, Galifianakis is the hired oddball. When he's actually in charge of the show, as here, things end up much weirder.
As a standup, which he'd been for many years before that movie made him famous, he's a kind of comic poet of self-loathing and artistic angst. The problem, or the main one anyway, seems to be that he is a performer to his bones yet deeply disapproves of the performance industry (which he was about to triumph in). You can see it played out in Between Two Ferns, his superb series of uncomfortable interviews with famous actors.
Even his name is something he has not made peace with. At times he wears it proudly, remembering his uncle Nick, a politician, who was denied an election victory by a quasi-racist campaign. At other times, they're more like a necklace of millstones, all those syllables, which he feels has dragged down his career. His first joke after introducing himself – "I hope I've pronounced that right" – hits it exactly.
Funny how? At the very least, Galifianakis does new things. Like many of the cleverest comedians, he is a high-class long-pause merchant. (He's close, actually, to an American Stewart Lee.) Yet in this show he also embroils himself in direct confrontations with the cameramen filming him, going further than Lee does. He plays the piano idly, seemingly for no reason other than to amuse himself or distract his fingers, but never sings. The finale isn't grand at all, but it is entirely unexpected, and very funny. This DVD, which shows us a Purple Onion show with clips and sketches shuffled in, is a very welcome reinvention (not so far very widely imitated) of the standup film.
Beneath this, though, Galifianakis has a simple method, which has changed only a little down the years. He arrives on stage, he drinks, he delivers one-liners with long breaks in between them ("Getting fatter really sucks because I'm extremely claustrophobic") and he improvises brilliantly. No one I have seen deals better with slips of the tongue. Most just keep going. Some, like Eddie Izzard, rescue things with a charming ad-lib. Galifianakis turns the mistake into a great self-lacerating drama, which comes over about 60% real. The point is he's not slick, but utterly committed. It is his first live DVD, so far his only one, and it is like watching somebody diving perfectly deliberately down a flight of stairs. He even giggles at himself for trying.
We laugh, too – though not always. "When you have sex in a Greyhound bus it's called the 36-inch High Club." Is that, for instance, a good joke or a bad one? Catch Galifianakis in the wrong mood (yours or his) and this stuff, with his vicious snipings at the audience, seems adolescent. Catch him in the right one, though, and here and there he is a kind of genius.
Comic cousins: Sarah Silverman, Stewart Lee, Andy Kaufman, Charlie Chuck, Bobcat Goldthwait
Steal this: "I think that sign in neighbourhoods, 'Slow Children Playing', is so mean."
