18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Alt Comedy Is Dead. Long Live Alt Comedy!
If Nathan Fielder performed stand-up comedy, he might look something like Brent Weinbach.
It's not only that Weinbach maintains an impenetrable deadpan or seeks out awkward silence ('Round of applause if there are any gay people in the closet here tonight') or builds jokes around overly elaborate setups. His new special, 'Popular Culture' (YouTube), also exploits the central conceit of Fielder's 'The Rehearsal,' including several bits where Weinbach prepares for a future event with a practice run. To get ready for fatherhood, for instance, he acts out responses to discovering his daughter smoking marijuana. Things get weird.
Weinbach's hour, a very funny collection of eccentric impressions, oddball advice and flights of fancy, would have once been quickly classified as alternative comedy. So would the new special from Eddie Pepitone, 'The Collapse' (Veeps). That term has fallen out of fashion in part because it became too vague, and yet I increasingly find myself missing it. All genre designations rely on simplifications, but they provide a useful shorthand that helps audiences navigate a vast culture.
Alternative comedy meant theatrical novelty to some, indulgence to others. But for a couple of decades starting in the 1990s, it signaled something more specific. Weinbach and Pepitone, both Los Angeles-based comedians, are wildly different in sensibility, not to mention volume. Weinbach's equanimity evokes that of a TV weatherman; Pepitone projects the chaotic energy of a thunderstorm. But they share the spirit of classic alt comedy: experimental, self-aware, at odds with conventional style and notions of success.
Weinbach's first special, which closed with his pitch-perfect impression of generic stand-up, was called 'Appealing to the Mainstream' (2017). Pepitone made 'For the Masses' three years later. These titles are tongue-in-cheek, pointedly.
'I'm not a mainstream guy,' Pepitone says more directly in his new special, later adding that people ask him if he has seen the new Marvel movie and he balks: 'I only watch extremely independent movies from places with no drinkable water.'
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