Everything Bad, Comedy Special Good

One of the first jokes in Gavin Matts’s new YouTube stand-up special, Progression, is about people who use the cliché “All things considered, that’s pretty good” to graft silver linings onto predicaments where none exist. “I feel like you’re not considering all things,” he points out. “Sure, you’re considering some things. But you’re not considering all things — you’d be crying right now.” It’s a theme he returns to repeatedly in Progression: Happiness and awareness are incompatible states, which makes it a particularly “hard time to exist” right now since everyone is more informed than ever. This is a dark special, dense with jokes about the dying oceans, suicide, overpopulation, and the possibility that we could all have cancer right this second, and Matts offers no hope for deflating all that heaviness. What he does offer is enough laughs to keep the nihilism from becoming overwhelming. Take his fantasy about the life he would have if he could rid himself of all awareness, one in which he “trusts companies” and their claims that they look out for “the little guy.” “I want to retweet my bank,” he says. “I genuinely want to give my bank a retweet, like, ‘What you guys are doing on social media over at the bank? I love it. You’re killing it.’”

At several moments in the special, Matts not only neglects to offer hope but punctures the temporary relief people turn to when seeking it, such as the shattering of the glass ceiling (“It’s not even the roof? So you’re just breaking through to, like, another level of misogyny?”) and viral videos of soldiers reuniting with their families after a war. He plays out a “good-news, bad-news” situation in which a child is about to die because of America’s broken health-care system but is granted a Make-A-Wish consolation in the form of a FaceTime call with a celebrity: “Jayden’s got the mesothelioma real bad. It’s stage four. Only the musings of Anne Hathaway can help him now.” Whenever his material threatens to get too bleak, Matts flashes a mischievous grin and reels it back in. “That’s women’s plight. I don’t speak for women,” he adds after the glass-ceiling joke. “You guys keep doing the damn thing. I’m so proud of you.”

Matts never attempts to offer easy solutions to the seemingly insurmountable issues he raises, and he doesn’t stress the need for optimism when cause for it is limited. He stands onstage for an hour and openly acknowledges how bad things are. The fact that we often have to go on as if things weren’t this bad, as he makes clear in this special, is very funny. All things considered — well, some things considered — that’s pretty good.