When the stage lights turn on at the beginning of Ali Siddiq’s new YouTube special The Domino Effect Part 2: Loss, the comedian has already made himself comfortable. He’s seated on a straight-back chair, one arm slumped over on a stool beside him, waiting for the audience’s applause to die down. It’s an unconventional set-up. He’s not crouched over on a stool like Marc Maron, inviting the audience to meet him halfway, or splayed out on a folding chair like Jerrod Carmichael to confer naked vulnerability. It’s the demeanor of a person who has settled into a restaurant booth to tell you a long story, which, as anyone who has seen Siddiq before can tell you, is what he does: “Has anybody in here ever been duct taped and thrown in a trunk?” he begins. “Just me? All right, this gon’ be good.”
Directed by Eric Abrams and filmed at the Houston Improv in Siddiq’s hometown, The Domino Effect Part 2 weaves an interconnected tale of a series of losses the comedian experienced in his late-teenage years, from a girlfriend who moved away, to a grocery-store job he was fired from, to a sister who died of an unspecified sudden illness, to his freedom after being arrested. Like 2022’s The Domino Effect before it, it’s a virtuosic display of pacing, choreography, and character work. And time and time again, Siddiq returns to his dual chair-and-stool setup to enhance the power of his storytelling.
Consider Siddiq’s aforementioned anecdote about getting thrown in his car trunk. After breaking down the drug deal gone sideways that landed him in this predicament, Siddiq paints an excruciating picture of what it felt like to be trapped in said trunk for hours. “I was just in that trunk, and I didn’t put that tire back right,” he says. “I am on that tire, and I am madder than a motherfucker.” In an instant, he constructs the car trunk onstage, reclining diagonally backward from his chair onto his stool and writhing against it like it’s the spare tire jutting painfully into his back. Elsewhere, Siddiq continues this prop work: He pushes the stool and chair like they’re a collection of grocery carts, pantomimes eating off the stool like it’s a kitchen table, and simulates being dragged on the ground by the police by turning his chair sideways and using it to bump into his mic stand and stool.
When Siddiq’s not pretending these tools are other items outright, he uses them to assist his own shapeshifting by reconfiguring his posture across them to inhabit different characters. In one bit about meeting his girlfriend’s protective parents for the first time, he gets big laughs just by impersonating the different ways they were seated. He clasps his hands and legs tightly together, instantly becoming her mother. Then he leans back onto the stool as if he’s sizing someone up, transforming into her intimidating father.
At other points, Siddiq’s stool and chair become canvases he leans on, literally and metaphorically, to convey his own emotions. He sells a bit about his teenage girlfriend telling him that she has her house to herself just by straightening his back and tilting his head. He doubles over on his stool and raps LL Cool J’s “I Need Love” through melodramatic fake sobs when he recounts the story of this same girlfriend moving away. Later in the special, when he breaks down while talking about the death of his little sister, he collapses onto his stool, pressing his forehead against it while crying, and demonstrates the toll the tragedy continues to have on him today.
Siddiq’s particular brand of storytelling comedy is risky. The Domino Effect Part 2 is 90 minutes in length, vast in scope, and grounded in personal revelations. If he loses the audience at any point, he doesn’t have guaranteed one-liners waiting in the wings to win them back, so he needs to set their expectations at the outset. He has to maintain momentum by finding little laughs in his constructions of elaborate scenes. He needs the audience to invest repeatedly into minor characters from his life. And he needs to justify the entire undertaking by making the stakes feel weighty. Siddiq’s stool and chair are among the many instruments he uses to overcome these challenges, and he plays them like a classically trained musician.