We recently went to see Josh Johnson, one of the hosts of The Daily Show, perform his standup act. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with the experience. It was a perfect storm of problems, some of which were not his fault.
The Environment
The show was at the Fox Oakland theater, seating over 2,800 people. It’s a stunning and impressive venue with a long, rich history. We were sitting about 10 rows from the front all the way to the right side. The first problem was the temperature. It was absolutely freezing. We all had jackets on but were shivering the entire time.
The second problem was our seat neighbors.
- Left – Woman kept opening her phone to write emails. Like every 5 minutes non-stop. Bright screen.
- In front – Woman with a tablet scrolling through Facebook during the entire show. Bright screen.
- Front-Left – Woman got up, left, came back. 6-8 times
- Above the giant speakers were right in front of us, so everything was extremely loud
All together it made the experience really distracting.
The Standup
I have been a fan of Josh Johnson for quite some time. I love him on the daily show and his TikTok and YouTube content is quite good. Almost all of his content is related to current events. Commentary on the happenings of the day is his bread and butter. Unfortunately, the sum total of current event commentary in his show was exactly zero.
I got the distinct feeling that he was trying out new material for the purpose of putting together a Netflix special. The bits had no through-line or theme. It was just a random collection. The biggest problem was that none of it was funny to me. In fact, several of the bits were making me feel anxious and unhappy.
Without detailing all of his bits, I would summarize by saying he was making fun of people who were bullied by others. Additionally, he had a strange series of physical humor gags. He would sit weirdly on the stool or swing his arms wildly. It was clearly not something he was known for, but more importantly, it just didn’t make me laugh the way someone like Jim Carey doing the same thing would.
Ultimately, I didn’t really laugh and didn’t perceive the audience as laughing all that much either. It felt patently un-funny. I was terribly disappointed because I have been a fan of his. This post is more to journal when this happened than to make a grander point about comedy.
Maybe next time we will try something in a smaller venue.
Whatya think?