The Big Picture

John Early’s HBO special, John Early: Now More Than Ever, is a multi-layered and complex mix of stand-up, mockumentary, and cabaret. The Search Party actor’s special is a cumination of over 10 years over performing and writing. John Early and Kate Berlant’s competitive, one-upping dynamic is rooted in their deep trust and friendship and is evident in their Peacock special, Would It Kill You to Laugh? Starring Kate Berlant and John Early.

There isn’t a comedian – or performer – quite like John Early. A distorted facial expression and an erratic hand gesture typically accompany the alternative comedian’s razor-sharp insights into modern culture and society as a whole. “Bowling is hell,” he says in a matter-of-fact, authoritative tone that attempts to prepare the audience for what’s to come. But what admirers of Early know and appreciate is that nothing he does can possibly be predicted. (Well, there is one glorious thing loyal fans look out for.) What follows after those three words is a demonstration of the sad reality of what happens when an adult bowls a strike, and the social contract that prevents them from truly celebrating their victory.

That’s just one of the many behavioral observations that can be found in John Early: Now More Than Ever, Early’s HBO special that had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in June. The special, like Early’s work, is multi-layered and complex. It’s part stand-up, part behind-the-scenes mockumentary that winks at rock documentaries of the 1970s, and part Britney Spears-infused cabaret with his house band, The Lemon Squares. In many ways, the HBO hour, which he taped at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium, is a culmination of the Search Party star’s decade of writing and performing in sketches and stand-up on stage and screen in New York and Los Angeles. It also feels like what will hopefully be the beginning of a comedy era where John Early is rightfully in the center.

During our 1-on-1 conversation, John Early spoke about the importance of an artist’s creative hunger, what he always manages to incorporate into his act, his love of “stupid” physical comedy, and the fun, competitive nature of his friendship and chemistry with long-time comedy partner Kate Berlant, which is on full display in their Peacock special, Would It Kill You to Laugh? Starring Kate Berlant and John Early.

Image via Greg Endries/HBO

COLLIDER: I have a ton of questions, because I’m a nerd.

JOHN EARLY: Yay! I’m thrilled! I truly didn’t get to talk about this special at all, so I’m so excited.

I rewatched it the other night and I’m like, “Ok, so I have abs now because I’ve been laughing for an hour.”

EARLY: [Laughs] Thank you!

So you’ve been performing for over a decade – writing and performing – is there something that you appreciate now in the creative process that you maybe took for granted early on, or vice versa?

EARLY: I think, you know, I took my hunger for granted. When I was first making things in my early 20s, I was, like, absolutely rabid. I was desperate to be seen and appreciated and that does really light a fire under you that does dim with age. It’s like something that every artist I think has to reckon with. [Laughs] And sometimes when you don’t have that fire, or when the fire isn’t as strong, it leaves a lot of room for doubt to creep in. [Laughs] Which was definitely the case with my special because, you know, I’ve been performing in that style with that band for like 10 years, but I used to do it back when I was… I just feel like I was more of a wild animal on stage and now that I’m just a little bit slower and dumber and my back hurts, there was just a lot of room for hating myself suddenly.

What’s something that you’ve been wanting to tackle in your act, a topic or something that you just find funny, but you still don’t know what angle to attack it from?

EARLY: One thing that I’ve tried to make happen for so long, and I was like, “Oh, and this is the perfect place to do it because I’ll have the band. There’s already this musical element,” I wanted to talk about the vocal tick that’s in a lot of contemporary singers from the past, like, 10 years, which is this kind of like… [Insert John’s hilarious mix of vowel sounds.] I mean, I don’t know how you’re going to put that in print but, like, it’s kind of… See? This is the problem. It’s so hard to describe it. But it’s a kind of mush where they change the vowel. A lot of young singers really do it and I feel like it came from, like, “YouTube singing.” No one uses their real voice anymore. I find that very, very strange. We’ve all just agreed that we’re going to change a certain number of vowels and it’s gonna have this kind of milky, back-of-the-throat quality and no one’s just going to give it to us straight anymore. And I really, I’ve been really trying to find a way to turn that into a joke, but I don’t know, I’ve never been able to do it.

I feel like that’s the joke. Like you’re just going, “Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how to make that joke, but” and just explain the whole thing.

EARLY: [Laughs] Thank you, thank you. Okay, I’ll try it.

John Early Gets Groovy and Finds His Inner Bette Midler
Image via Greg Endries/HBO

And speaking of music, I love how long the musical opening was to your special. It felt very scrappy, like, “We’re just hanging out,” kind of thing. Did you always plan to have a musical opening or was that more on the spot?

EARLY: [Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)”] is one of my favorite songs of all time, and it’s a song that I’ve been doing with that band since like 2013. And I just find it… the sexual content of the song is funny, you know? It gives me a very clear task as a performer just to be kind of seductive and provocative and I think there’s something very… there’s a groovy vibe to the whole special, so it was important to me to start with a song that had a real clear groove. And we cut a whole verse out of that in the edit, so it was longer. It was longer in person. And I think people are always a little shocked by that, but I’m just, like, doing full songs and doing covers. But to me, there’s such a precedent for this, which is like Bette Midler, Sandra Bernhardt, these are people who did full song covers, not comedy songs. There’s such a great tradition of kind of consummate entertainers doing songs and comedy.

Something I’ve noticed throughout a lot of your work, I know you did it in Netflix’s The Characters, the book club sketch with Kate Berlant, and here –

EARLY: [Laughs] I know what you’re going to say.

Performative fainting is probably my favorite thing you do, and that’s saying a lot.

EARLY: Thank you.

I was so delighted to see it in the parallel storyline of the special, and I’m just curious, has that always been part of your act? Did something inspire it, or did you just start doing it and hope it sticks?

EARLY: [Laughs] I’m not sure. I’m so glad you like it because I’m just always… I’m always like, “Can we work it into this thing?” And I’m just waiting for someone to be like, “You’ve done it too many times.” But I think there’s something funny about making it my trademark kind of “deus ex machina.” I first did it in a video that I made for my old variety show in New York where I was telling my friends that I was moving to LA and none of them cared, and they changed the subject, and so then I just pretended to faint to kind of get their attention back. And I don’t know, I just was very excited by finding physical comedy — stupid, stupid, physical comedy — that could be psychologically motivated by something kind of contemporary, and that’s why I like it. [Laughs] I just love… it’s so fun to do, like, “the eyes rolling back in the head” and stuff.

And I imagine it’s not easy! Not everyone can do that. It’s so natural when you do it. It never gets old.

EARLY: Thank you. I love also hypochondria as a bit. I love to be hyper-vigilant about every little sensation in my body. Because when I’m fainting, it’s not just that I’m fainting, I’m also commenting on the fact that I’m fainting as it’s happening.

John Early and Kate Berlant Aren’t Afraid To Tear Each Other Apart
Image via Peacock 

Yes, exactly. And another thing that you do that I adore is your competitive, one-upping that you do with Kate Berlant. When you do it with her in particular, is nothing off-limits? You can just sort of go for it and go for the joke?

EARLY: A very beautiful thing about our collaboration is I think we both feel very safe with each other when we’re doing that bit. I feel like we both know what we can use in the other person’s real life and in their kind of psychology to make people laugh and make each other laugh. I’m not great in my real life at taking criticism, but when we are on stage together doing that, I feel like she could say anything. She could rip me to shreds and it makes me laugh so hard. And that is a very special form of intimacy because I would not let anyone do that.

Yeah, it’s kind of like, you can make fun of your mom, but if someone else does, it’s like, “Hey, hey, don’t talk about my mom.”

EARLY: Exactly. [Laughs] Exactly.

In your HBO special, there’s so many sharp insights into human behavior which I love, and one of the things that stuck out to me was the bowling bit. That might be my favorite part of the special.

EARLY: Thank you!

I was in a bowling league in high school, because I’m cool.

EARLY: [Laughs]

And that just hit so close to home. Did that come from you just observing people or did you realize like, “I want to celebrate a strike, but I can’t, because I’m an adult.”

EARLY: There’s always been something so funny to me, like I used to feel this feeling when I was a kid and I would be on basketball teams, like a really young kid, and you would score a point and then you have to run back to the other side of the court, and you’re family, your parents are cheering in the crowd. And I remember the feeling of trying to hold in my smile and trying to look like you’re so focused on the next play that you’re not even going to celebrate. That is the kind of thing that I’ve always found so funny. And yeah, in bowling, I don’t know, I just always found it so humiliating. I also just want to liberate people, like it’s okay to care! [Laughs.] It’s such a giant… the ball is so heavy and it really is such a major thing to get a strike. You shouldn’t feel self-conscious about truly jumping up and down. And yet, here we are. We have to ironize it.

When you said, “Does anyone want a beer?” That’s when I almost died. Also, the Rick Moranis painting. Did that really happen?

EARLY: I have to say, I did say it somewhere and I thought, I really thought it was in such a strange coffee shop in Williamsburg that was also a gamer meet-up place. And I just thought, oh, this is some kind of obscure thing. And then the woman who painted it saw the special and she posted about it and I felt truly, truly awful. But it is real. And by the way, I want to say, obviously I was not going to say this in the special — it would have really killed the joke — but it is a very, very well done painting. It’s very good. The painting is good. But to me, like, there’s something I find a lot in contemporary culture where of people just kind of have these really empty conversations where they’re referencing ‘90s movies or ‘80s movies and they’re pretending to have these strong opinions about Ghostbusters, and they have these kind of like fake, ironic fights about, like, “Bill Murray or Rick Moranis?” To me, what I was trying to say is just, we live in such a cultural wasteland. We have no kind of collective great works of art anymore. We are just left with these scraps of empty, empty nostalgia. Also, there were some people who thought I was making fun of Rick Moranis. I think he is such a brilliant, brilliant actor and extremely sexy. I love him. But that is absolutely not what the joke is about. The joke was just about when we actually talk to each other face to face, we have nothing to fucking talk about. We’re just talking about ‘90s nostalgia. I don’t know.

Image via Greg Endries/HBO

What was your favorite part of the special to hone?

EARLY: My favorite part is that stretch of material right before the Neil Young song. That was the newest thing. A lot of the other songs and a lot of the other jokes I had done over the years and this was a new kind of cabaret. This was my first time kind of being honest with myself about just wanting to be a cabaret artist. [Laughs]

I love that!

EARLY: Before in my live shows, the songs and the stand up were so separate from each other and this is the first time I let the emotional content or the mood of the songs bleed into the stand-up and it was the first time I ever kind of grouped material together in a way that had somewhat of an emotional throughline. And that was really kind of scary for me. Michael Hesslein, who is my keyboardist, he went on the road with me, and we really worked on that together, like streamlining it and making the transition to the song a nice surprise. I really, really loved working on that and learning over the course of doing it, because it really made me squirm at first. Singing that song really made me squirm. But I knew it would be much more effective if I just stood my ground and went into it. That was I think the most fun part, was building up the courage to sing that song.

What a lovely answer. Very important: Is Vicky with a V doing anything for Thanksgiving?

EARLY: [Laughs.] This year she is exhausted and is just ordering family style from Maggiano’s. But she’s making cocktails, but she’s getting, like, big family-style trays of food.

I feel like she likes mulled cider.

EARLY: Yes, she does. [Laughs.] She does.

And denim.

EARLY: Barefoot wine.

John, I truly can’t thank you enough. This is a dream come true.

EARLY: Thank you for caring and asking such gorgeous questions! I really appreciate it.

John Early: Now More Than Ever is available to stream on Max.

Watch on Max