Walking into comedian Anthony Jeselnikās home, a two-floor Hollywood apartment with wall-size windows, the first thing I notice is a large-format photograph hanging by his sofa. The photograph is from artist Rachel Hulinās Flying series, an image called Flight of the Scholar. It depicts a toddler in midair at the top of an imposing library staircase. Heās gazing upward, expression blank, his body at an off-kilter diagonal. Much of the work in Flying is placidly surrealist; theyāre images of Hulinās young son floating, unsupported, in various dreamlike spaces. Seen with her other work, Flight of the Scholar looks like part of a fairy tale. On its own, displayed in Jeselnikās apartment, it looks like a huge photo of a kid whoās about to take a catastrophic fall down the stairs. Itās the first piece he points to when I ask him to tell me about the art he has in his home. Heād seen the Flying series online, and Scholar is his favorite, he says, because āthat kid is going down.ā
Jeselnik has built a long and successful career telling the darkest, most disturbing jokes in stand-up comedy, and his new Netflix special, Bones and All, out November 26, is the result of 20 years on the job. Onstage, he plays a supervillain ā the kind of guy who can look straight out at an audience, tell a joke about pedophilia or murdered children, and barely flinch when the crowd groans in dismay. His jokes are obvious creations, full of cardboard-standee-style āmy fatherā or āmy brother-in-lawā or ālast week, I saw ā¦ā setups, but each one is designed to provide a fine-tuned calibration of the most surprising, offensive punch line possible. From his 2013 special, Caligula: āA month ago, some kids in my neighborhood were playing hide-and-go-seek, and one of them ended up in an abandoned refrigerator. Itās all anybody talked about for weeks. I said, āWho cares? How many kids do you know who get to die a winner?āā From 2015ās Thoughts and Prayers: āWhen I was a kid, my parents said they had to have a gun: āGotta have a gun to protect our five children.ā Of course, they eventually got rid of it. To protect their four children.ā āLast week, I saw a pregnant woman get hit by a bus,ā begins one of the jokes in Bones and All. āOr, as I like to call it, a gender-reveal party.ā
In his stand-up, heās both evil and arrogant, and the whole package is presented with the deliberative pacing of a meditation app. His stage presence is coolly predatory, emphasized by his leather-jacket-and-jeans look, wolflike features, and the measured way he moves. Comedian Sarah Silverman likens it to professional wrestling: āHeās the heel. And he takes it and makes it really highbrow.ā But underneath that performance, Silverman acknowledges that Jeselnikās act has an unnervingly unknowable quality to it. His first breakout performances were in roasts, especially the Comedy Central roasts of Donald Trump and Charlie Sheen in 2011. āThe conceit of the roast is that itās friends who adore each other tearing each other apart. Thatās not Anthony,ā Silverman says. Even in those early performances, before Jeselnik was a well-known comedic act, he approaches the podium with none of the genial, buddy-buddy glee of the other participants. He is calm, professional, and dispassionate. Roasts are designed to have the pretense of meanness, but for Jeselnik, Silverman says, āthe audience is also laughing because they suspect it might be true.ā
Jeselnikās persona has remained remarkably consistent over the course of his career, and he has no interest in changing it. āIt is not a defense mechanism,ā he says. āIt is an offense mechanism.ā Heās released three hourlong comedy specials and hosted multiple series (Last Comic Standing, Comedy Centralās The Jeselnik Offensive and Good Talk With Anthony Jeselnik). He sells out shows in the U.S. and abroad, with crowds that fill the Sydney Opera House and come expressly to enjoy his prince-of-darkness bit. He does not care for comedians who expose their flaws for public ridicule, and his allergy to self-deprecation has hardened into a worldview. āIām not letting you laugh at me. Iām perfect,ā he says. Sitting in his apartment, an hour into a conversation about comedic personas and what audiences want from a comedian, I ask him about Nanette, in which Hannah Gadsby describes their comedy career as realizing theyāve been punching themselves in the face. āYou wrote those jokes,ā Jeselnik says. āYou made this act. I donāt feel bad for you. I get that youāre saying that you donāt want to do that anymore, but also, you never had to.ā
Itās easy to mistake many comediansā acts as representative of their private selves. Jim Gaffigan plays up the affable dad; Ali Wong is the snappish, sexually aggressive mom. Their comedy requires buying into those identities and accepting them as sincere. But Jeselnikās act requires cognitive dissonance. He cannot be wholly the person he plays onstage or it would all be too horrible to laugh at. And in life offstage, he is different. He is a deliberately, unusually slow speaker when he performs, often pausing for seconds at a time so the audience can sit with the discomfort. In conversational speech, heās faster, but his words have the same weighty, carefully chosen quality. He is thoughtful, polite, a little particular, and bordering on ascetic in his singular focus on stand-up as an artistic end. āPeople saw his persona as like, Man, this guy is an asshole,ā his friend and podcasting partner, Gregg Rosenthal, says. āBut it was harder for me to see because I knew he wasnāt that big of an asshole.ā As heās gotten older, Jeselnik says, tragedy and grief affect him more. āFriends getting cancer ā¦ There are things where youāre just waiting for the news from everyone. Iāll be 46 in a couple of months,ā he says. āA lot of things donāt make me laugh.ā
But that doesnāt mean heās not still drawn to dark imagery. Flight of the Scholar is not the only art in his apartment. Thereās also a photograph by Nadia Lee Cohen, even larger than the Hulin, that hangs in the entryway ā a young woman in full-glam hair and makeup sitting at a kitchen table and smoking a cigarette while breastfeeding an infant. Thereās a small painting of an upside-down shark submerged in water, the entire image washed in a lurid red. In the corner, off to the side of the Hulin and above Jeselnikās row of full bookshelves, thereās a small Pulitzer Prizeāwinning 1975 Stanley Forman photograph printed from the original negative, one that Jeselnik points out to me. āI love this a lot,ā he says. The image is of a Boston fire-escape collapse: a woman and child in free fall, seconds before the womanās death.
āIt almost looked like a trampoline at first,ā he adds, recalling the first time he saw the image. āAnd then I was like, Oh no. Thatās terrifying.ā He was so captivated by it that a friend gave him the print as a gift, and he hung it near the bloody shark, the young mother smoking a cigarette, and the child falling down the stairs, to be seen every day by an audience of him and his dog, a Jindo-Akita mix named Redrum. When I visit, Redrum (who Jeselnik calls Rummy) is not at home. Heās been sent to stay with Jeselnikās assistant for the day. Heās nervous, Jeselnik explains to me, and does not do well with strangers. He shows me Rummyās picture on his phoneās lock screen, and I point out that he looks exactly like Jeselnik. āYeah,ā he says. āEveryone says that.ā
Jeselnik grew up in Pittsburgh, the eldest in a Catholic family of five children. His mother, Stephanie Jeselnik, says that he was attracted to unusually dark topics from a young age. āDeath, dying ā he would always ask me questions. Even as a 4-year-old, it was graveyards, what happens when you die. He didnāt understand why people wouldnāt talk about it. And I would try to change the subject.ā He loved Bret Easton Ellis, the White Stripes, and āDeep Thoughtsā by Jack Handey on Saturday Night Live, and he had a reputation for saying things at school to get his teachers to laugh. āSitting down with his teachers was not always fun,ā his mother tells me. āThey would have a list of things they had to complain about. But he was always very funny.ā She also suggests that Jeselnik gets some of his dark humor from his father, Tony Jeselnik, a lawyer. (When I later share this with Anthony, he says he may well have gotten his work ethic from his father, but āto credit my dad for my dark sense of humor is bordering on libel.ā) As he got a little older, school became a battle for teachers attempting to correct his behavior while also trying not to laugh at it. āI remember the teachers saying they might laugh, but after they finished laughing, they were scared. I think I was just a lot darker than most class clowns,ā he says. I ask if they were right that he needed to be disciplined. āYes and no,ā he says. āIf you look at what I became, then no, they were wrong. But they didnāt know this was even a possibility.ā
After high school, Jeselnik attended Tulane as an English major with an interest in creative writing, where he says his college professors disabused him of the idea that Ellis was a good writer. (āThere are better writers out there. Read Donna Tartt.ā) But stand-up was never something he considered for himself, and his early-career aspirations were focused on finding a Hollywood TV-writing job. He interned at a small studio before his senior year of college, where he read scripts and took coffee orders. And after graduation, his father connected Jeselnik with his college friend Jimmy Brogan, a longtime writer for Jay Leno. Broganās advice ā that stand-up would improve Jeselnikās writing ā was the first time he considered performing onstage.
After moving to Los Angeles in 2001, Jeselnik crashed at a friendās place, worked at Borders until he could find an industry job, and watched comedians like Silverman and Andy Kindler at open mics. Borders stocked a book called Step-by-Step to Stand-Up Comedy, by Greg Dean, which Jeselnik read (āI believe I stole it,ā he says, ironic given that his job at Borders was loss prevention), and he discovered that Dean taught classes in Santa Monica. He took the class twice, built a ten-minute set that killed at the classās final performance, then had a panic attack at an Ice House open mic in March 2002, where he rushed through seven minutes of material in three minutes flat. He spent the next several months standing outside of open mics and not actually going inside, until he went to see Jerry Seinfeldās Comedian documentary on opening night and realized he needed to keep bombing in order to get better: āI immediately was like, Go get the bad out of you. Do as many bad sets as you can get, get them closer to good, and never look back.ā
In those early months, Jeselnik says, the cocky bravado that eventually became his trademark was the result of nerves. āIf the joke didnāt work and I said something very egotistical, it brought them back,ā he says. āBut the deadpan was, Iām terrified. Iām nervous. I only have these jokes. Iām not telling a story. Iām living and dying on these words.ā In the meantime, heād been fired from his job at Borders, but his business minor from Tulane allowed him to work as an accountant for the shows American Dream and Deadwood. āI was able to have these jobs that let me out at 6 p.m. to go to open mics,ā he says. āAnd when they ended, I had six months of unemployment, and having that was huge.ā
By 2009, his comedy career was taking shape. His half-hour debut comedy special for Comedy Central Presents premiered in January, and he joined the inaugural writing staff of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. The moment his comedic voice really clicked, he says, is when he wrote a joke heās talked about repeatedly in interviews. āMy girlfriend likes to joke sheās got a chocolate addiction,ā the line goes. āSo I put her in the car and I drove her downtown, and I pointed out a crack addict. And I said, āSee that, honey? Why canāt you be that skinny?āā He taped it for the Comedy Central Presents special, and while the crowd hollers in shock when the punch line arrives, Jeselnik pulls what will become a characteristic expression throughout his career: a shit-eating grin. Jeselnik describes this as āa mean, smart joke you couldnāt see coming.ā He was not making a conscious choice to try a specific personality onstage or carefully craft an identity; instead, it was his discovery that the unexpected punch lines he liked best required him to become a certain kind of narrator ā to be, as he puts it, āeffortlessly cruel for no reason.ā
The joke is so pivotal for him that he retells it in Bones and All as part of the specialās closing retrospective on the last 20 years of his work, and it gets as much reaction from his 2024 crowd as it did over a decade ago. The end of the joke is designed to outrage an audience, and it does that job well. But the reveal of it, the twist, is not that the girlfriend in that joke is annoying or that cocaine addicts are idiots. Itās that the teller of the joke is a jerk, even more of a jerk than the setup initially suggests. Offensiveness is often so predictable, following along rote, well-worn pathways of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other fears. Jeselnikās art is in finding ways to be such an astonishing asshole that the nature of the insult is legitimately surprising. His punch lines are cartographic: His material lives along the lurking boundaries of cultural taboos, and the act of crossing them makes those lines brightly visible. Comedian Nikki Glaser, who started in the L.A. comedy scene not long after Jeselnik, was drawn to his work because of its similarity to her own sensibility. āMy favorite game to play when I watch his specials is, after the setup, to try to predict the punch line. I never can,ā she says. āSo many of us feel pressure to reinvent ourselves, or to get more honest, or reveal more about ourselves. Heās kept it ā¦ You know, you canāt pin down what heās about.ā
Glaser recalls seeing Jeselnik perform at an open mic early in his career, long before any crowd could arrive knowing what to expect from him. āHe had his notes up there with him, and he said, āI donāt have these notes because I donāt know my jokes. I brought these notes onstage because I donāt respect any of you.ā That was a formative moment for me,ā Glaser says, āto witness someone be that bold and aggressive onstage and have it work.ā When I ask him about that line, Jeselnik is both pleased and annoyed: āThatās one of my favorite jokes. I always do it when Iām trying out jokes, and then in the fucking Showtime documentary about the Comedy Store that Mike Binder fucked up, he used that without my permission. He put it in there. And listen, no one saw that thing, so I can still do it.ā
He is brutally honest in his assessment of the state of stand-up comedy as he sees it: āI would guess that most of my comic friends think Iām a better comic āĀ that Iām more pure, that I do things they would not try to do.ā He is annoyed by the current wave of indie-scene clowning comedians: āItās influencers who decided stand-up was going to be too hard.ā Bringing a guitar onstage, he says, is like bringing out a ventriloquistās dummy, a way to make the comedy easier. āOne of my gifts is that Iāve never tried to make it easier. Iāve always kept it hard,ā he says. āIf I show up and do a silly dance? I couldnāt operate like that. Too much pride.ā On the topic of Matt Rife, a comedian with a growing popularity and a reputation for being offensive: āI truly believe all roads lead to me. I just donāt know why you could eat steak and you would want to eat cow shit.ā Does it bother him that audiences are so drawn to Rifeās work? āIām sure Gordon Ramsay doesnāt lose sleep at night because McDonaldās sells billions of hamburgers. I also take exception to the idea that the country prefers Matt Rife over me. Thatās like saying the country prefers James Patterson over Sally Rooney. Popularity is not a metric I use to measure myself against other artists.ā
When I meet him again in late October, he is gleeful at the prospect that the Madison Square Garden Trump rally, where Tony Hinchcliffe joked about Puerto Rico being a āfloating island of garbage,ā might be the end of Hinchcliffeās career: āHe thought the Brady roast was his big moment, even though I think those jokes were hack as hell.ā When I ask him later how heās thinking about comedy after Trumpās election win, he says that his job āis the same whether itās raining or shining. Everything is an opportunity.ā His opinion of Hinchcliffe remains unchanged: āHe is a troll, basking in the shadow of Joe Rogan.ā He has no patience for displays of vulnerability or intimate disclosure, either ā the Edinburgh-style one-person show that reveals a traumatic backstory. āThereās no comedian who tells me what their life is like where I give even the slightest semblance of a fuck. I do not care. Youāre wasting time. I get that there are people who are interested in this, but itās not what I want to do. I have an hour up there; I want to pack that hour in with pure ingenuity and brilliance,ā he says.
For a short period in 2014, Jeselnik was developing a show for FX that would have been more personal. He had left his short-lived Comedy Central late-night show, The Jeselnik Offensive, the year before, and he was āsick of talking about the news every week.ā The FX series, which he describes as āa bisexual Louie,ā would allow him to switch gears ā flesh out a narrative, explore multiple characters, āspend a year shooting it, and then put it out there.ā But he didnāt get very far into the process, he says, before changing his mind. He gave back the money heād gotten for the deal, even after the network offered to let him write the script without starring in it himself: āI said, āYou know what? I donāt even want to work on this anymore. I donāt want to do a narrative, I donāt want to talk about sexuality. It doesnāt really benefit my comedy.ā Writing the story, writing all the characters, it was like, This is too much.ā I ask about the idea of a ābisexual Louieā and if the protagonist was based on him or a character he created. āA little of both,ā he says. āIt wouldāve been someone figuring out their sexuality later.ā Was that an experience he had? āSure,ā he says. āYeah.ā I note the bookshelves that line his wall, which include works by Philip Larkin, Raymond Chandler, and Jonathan Franzen, as well as Hanya YanagiharaāsĀ A Little LifeĀ and Jeremy Atherton Linās social historyĀ Gay Bar. But he didnāt want that to be part of his comedic identity? āI didnāt really have a comedic angle on it,ā he says. āIt was like, Oh, maybe Iām gonna try this out. Then I was like, No, I donāt really have anything to say about it, so maybe itās someone elseās story to tell. Or just ā¦ Yeah, it never really came together, and no one really gave a shit.ā
During my first visit with Jeselnik in September, heās in between two legs of an international tour. His apartment has been carefully cleaned, but there are some items that donāt belong to him. He recently broke up with his long-term girlfriend, a photographer who works at the Comedy Store, and heās hoping she can come pick them up while heās in Europe. His fridge is nearly empty; thereās a Trader Joeās salad he bought that day, distilled water, and some condiments he says were also left by his ex. Heās spent years recording a chatty podcast with Rosenthal, but he says heād like to end that podcast soon: āIām just over mixing podcasts with stand-up.ā I ask him about other hobbies or interests. He cites his dog and also that he reads dozens of books a year. We discuss Lev Grossmanās Bright Sword, which he loves. He asks me for my top-ten books of the year; he recommends I try Kevin Barryās The Heart in Winter. But he says the books are in service of the comedy. āI really, really love comedy. I think I understand it in a way I donāt understand other things.ā
Bones and All opens with seven minutes of material about gender, trans people, and the recent anti-trans obsessions of comedians like Dave Chappelle. Part of the gambit comes from Jeselnikās framing. He tells the crowd that heās about to tell them a joke that used to be his closer until a woman informed him it was too offensive and could upset trans people in ways he might not intend. In the special, he tells the joke anyway, now as the opener. Itās a series of lines comparing trans people to pregnant women, and then he offers the twist: āI love trans people. You know what I hate? Pregnant women.ā As stand-up, it accomplishes a challenging rhetorical maneuver, positioning Jeselnik as the badass rule-breaker who tells a joke that crosses a line and then swerves by finding an even bigger line to cross. When Jeselnik tells me the story in person, it is earnest to a fault. He talks about the trans woman who really did come up to him after a show to say the joke might bother trans audience members, and how by the next night, he had reworked the material in response to her critique. The experience of the story is different as Jeselnik explains it to me sincerely rather than as an onstage jackass. When he tells it to me this time, itās not a story about breaking rules. Itās a story about receiving feedback and adjusting to make the material better, about being curious and remaining open to change. But onstage or off, the takeaway is identical: Jeselnik is immensely proud of his work. It is still an upsetting joke, but now heās sure that itās offensive in a way he truly intends it to be.
But intent can be ambiguous. When I ask him about the number of photos in his apartment that depict children in uneasy or perilous positions, Jeselnik is surprised. āItās not like I went into a store and bought all of those at once,ā he says, pointing out that he has several pieces that are a completely different tone (including a painting of his dog). Surely, I offer, the fact that these images have all ended up here together without him realizing it is just as suggestive as if heād gotten them all deliberately as a set? He starts to tell me more specifically about the Stanley Forman fire-escape photo and why heās so drawn to it. āIt looks like everythingās going to be okay, and itās not,ā he says. āItās like a punch. Itās not an aw; itās like a fuck.ā Itās not that the darkness is more real, he says, but he does think itās āless of a sellout. Everyone else is like, We gotta have a happy ending. I donāt think itās unfair or untruthful. I just think itās boring.ā