TV

“I Am the Devil”: Why Anthony Jeselnik’s Act Is More Twisted—and Timely—Than Ever

With his new Netflix special, ‘Fireu003cemu003e u003c/emu003ein the Maternity Ward,’ Jeselnik keeps finding the humor in subjects other comics won’t touch. He pulls it off because while his sensibilities have evolved with the times, his dedication to pushing limits has not.

TV

“I Am the Devil”: Why Anthony Jeselnik’s Act Is More Twisted—and Timely—Than Ever

With his new Netflix special, ‘Fireu003cemu003e u003c/emu003ein the Maternity Ward,’ Jeselnik keeps finding the humor in subjects other comics won’t touch. He pulls it off because while his sensibilities have evolved with the times, his dedication to pushing limits has not.

By Robert MaysMay 2, 2019, 1:02 pm UTC • 16 min

About 15 minutes into his new Netflix stand-up special, Fire in the Maternity Ward, Anthony Jeselnik sets up his political material. After a punch line celebrating how Christian Scientists abstain from modern medicine—and a self-satisfied sip of water—the comic asks the audience to indulge him for a moment as he gets serious. For a solid minute, he talks about the importance of speaking truth to power, about calling out humanity’s wrongs, and about his disbelief that people in America can still obsess over the trivial with all of the horrible things happening right now. “For example,” he says, pausing for a beat. “Have you ever dropped a baby?”

This is trademark Jeselnik—a tension-building setup that ends with a twist of both the premise and the knife. No matter where a joke seems to be headed, a hard turn for the terrible is looming just around the corner. As so many other comedians recently have taken to focusing on politics, Jeselnik has preferred to use society’s wickedness as a vehicle to emphasize his own. “When you think I’m really about to go after Trump, I think that’s the opportunity,” Jeselnik says between bites of an uni roll at Katsuya in Hollywood. “The problem is actually an opportunity.”

Jeselnik arrives to dinner on this Tuesday in late April dressed in a charcoal-gray T-shirt and Saint Laurent denim jacket, still sporting the beard he wore during the special. He’s tall, with the build of someone who’s proud to say he works out a lot and a haircut that must have cost way too much. “It’s crazy that a guy that good-looking can put those jokes through,” longtime friend and comedian Jeff Ross says. “He really has the act of a fat guy.” Over sushi, Jeselnik speaks in the same matter-of-fact tone that he uses on stage, but instead of delivering jokes about blaming a collection of vintage porn on his dead grandpa, he considers topics ranging from the arc of his career to his relationship with the films of S. Craig Zahler. “He’s an authentic, very, very in-the-moment person,” says John Mulaney, who’s known Jeselnik for a decade. “I think I noticed that quickly. There’s nothing phony about him.”

Jeselnik’s previous special, Thoughts and Prayers, was released in 2015. That hour ended with a long rumination on how to approach and process tragedies on our social media timelines. In it, he ripped the people who feel compelled to rush online merely to tweet “thoughts and prayers” whenever devastating news breaks. “Do you know what that’s worth?” he asked on stage. “Fuckin’ nothing.”

Somehow, it now feels like that set happened in a different era. Over the past four years the public discourse has shifted, especially for a comic whose act viciously plays off the morality of his audience. Ideological battles increasingly happen online, and the ongoing culture war has made those eager to take down anyone who’s not on their side grow louder and more emboldened. Every word, phrase, or joke from a person’s past can be weaponized. With a trove of heinous material sprawled across the digital landscape, Jeselnik would seem like an easy target.

But even as online trolls have tried to shame him, Jeselnik’s razor-sharp jokes and hard-won status among his peers have allowed him to get away with risks that others can’t take. He’s comedy’s id. He has no interest in being the voice of reason; that’s why he thinks his twisted act resonates in such a twisted world. “I’m not playing devil’s advocate,” Jeselnik says. “I am the devil.”

Jeselnik’s Twitter presence is an extension of his on-stage persona. No topic is off limits. Within the past two months he’s posted jokes about a child being thrown from a balcony, Michael Jackson, and torturing a cat. “Anthony doesn’t just push the envelope,” Ross says. “He sort of rips it up, lights it on fire, and he mails it to an abortion clinic.”

Under every macabre missive, Jeselnik’s followers make jokes of their own. When they do, a surprising sort of oversight unfolds. As some fans respond with their best Jeselnik-style jabs, others are there to take the imposters down. “People are not getting mad at me,” he says. “They’re getting mad at jokes people are making underneath my joke. I love that I’m untouchable with this. I just get to do it.”

Jeselnik realized early in his stand-up career that he sought the laughs that people couldn’t help, the ones they couldn’t hold back. He noticed how the energy in a room would change when he’d talk about every day explaining to a 90-year-old neighbor with Alzheimer’s that the man’s wife was dead. And he delighted in leaving that same crowd in stitches when he’d say the interaction was worth it—just to see the smile on the man’s face. “It’s a more guttural laughter because you’re not supposed to be laughing at this,” Jeselnik says. “But I don’t think there’s anything funny about the things I’m joking about. I’m just using the tension and the punch line to get a different kind of laugh.” For friends, observing Jeselnik’s antics is akin to watching someone walk a tightrope 100 stories above the ground. “It’s the thrill of seeing someone who’s refused to live according to the rules of society,” says Mulaney. “That is a very powerful thing to see.”

One of Jeselnik’s college roommates, Mike Valdes-Fauli, has always related to his friend’s comedic tastes, but understands the risks inherent to them. Valdes-Fauli works in crisis management for large corporations. To this day, he’s astonished that Jeselnik has managed to get away with all that he has. “He’s almost been grandfathered in to this politically correct world in which we live,” Valdes-Fauli says. “Where he’s afforded a little bit more leeway and flexibility than others because he’s gone through a hard-earned process to own that.” When Erica Tamposi took a job last year producing The Jeselnik & Rosenthal Vanity Project, a weekly podcast he cohosts with his friend and the NFL.com writer Gregg Rosenthal, she assumed the person she saw on stage would seep into how Jeselnik treated his friends and coworkers. Instead, she found Jeselnik’s views are so far removed from those expressed in his act that the absurdity functions as a sort of armor. “Every kind of joke that he has, I feel like he has the opposite stance on it realistically,” Tamposi says.

Finding the humor in pain feels deserved for Jeselnik because his process for crafting punch lines is itself painful. The structure of his jokes and the nature of the subject matter has always meant that bombing horribly when trying out new material—both at the beginning of his career, when he was doing open-mic nights across Los Angeles, and now—comes with the territory. “He’s earned the respect of the audience, of the comics, of the industry by doing it,” Ross says. “He’s not a flavor of the month. If you’re going to do provocative material and talk about the subject matter that Anthony takes on, then that’s a hard journey.”

The original inspiration for Jeselnik’s act was filtering Jack Handey through the mind of Satan. Rather than weave long-winded narrative, Jeselnik wanted to concentrate on sets that featured nothing but constant jokes that all felt like home runs. For observational comics who rely on stories as much as structure, every punch line doesn’t have to hit. By contrast, Jeselnik’s one-liner approach leaves little room for error. “My jokes are kinda like clocks,” he says. “They either work perfectly or they don’t work at all.”

Jeselnik has recently been working on 20 new minutes of material at the Comedy Store in Hollywood. If he has a lackluster performance, he’ll retreat to his nearby apartment, often fueled by a 2 a.m. deliveries from Postmates, to tinker with a joke until it lands precisely how he wants. He thinks the care he puts into creating each mechanism of a horrid joke affords him a clearance to touch on controversial subjects that other comics lack. “I see it a lot: ‘[If] Jeselnik can do it, why can’t I?’” he says of his dark style. “Because you don’t have the skill. If Jackson Pollock can just drip paint on the canvas, why can’t I? Because you didn’t go through what he went through to get to that. It’s not the same thing. It really is the nuance.”

The day Jeselnik’s career took off was the day Donald Trump shook his hand. A veteran writer for the Comedy Central celebrity roasts, Jeselnik was elevated to performing for the network’s Trump edition in March 2011. The godfather of the roasts, Jeff Ross, had known Jeselnik for years, and felt that his friend’s brand of villainy would be perfect for the setting. “When you have an original voice like that, it kind of fit the format,” Ross says. “He would have had an amazing career without the roast, but I think the roast, it put him on. It gave him a license to kill.”

Jeselnik followed Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino, who bombed in such spectacular fashion—replete with resounding boos and a need for Ross to calm the crowd—that several people in the room wondered whether the night was doomed. Yet Jeselnik stood up and skewered Ross and the others on the stage, and then turned his sights to Trump. “I got up and did so well that Trump was happy,” Jeselnik says now. “The only joke that I think upset him was the one about his casino business failing. The others, he was fine with.”

As Jeselnik walked back to his seat, Trump thanked him. “He knew that I had saved the show,” Jeselnik says. “I was like, ‘Maybe he’s misunderstood and not that bad of a guy.’ And then like the next day, he said, ‘I want to see Obama’s birth certificate.’ I was like, ‘Fuck, man. That’s the dumbest of the dumb.’”

After raising his profile with the Trump roast, Jeselnik expanded his audience and eventually landed his own Comedy Central late-night show, The Jeselnik Offensive, in 2013. The network pulled the plug after just 18 episodes, but the show’s demise allowed him to redirect all of his efforts toward stand-up. In the ensuing years, he resurfaced on shows like Roast Battle and Last Comic Standing, but Ross says that the source of Jeselnik’s mystique is that he’s willing to disappear into the lab longer than many comics would. “[That’s] Anthony at his best, when he really, really thinks through the material and works it across the world until he’s ready to tape it, memorialize it, and present to his fans and future fans,” Ross says. “[It] isn’t going to happen every year. It’s only going to happen when Anthony’s had time to have new life experiences and digest them and mold them and sculpt them.”  

In the years since Thoughts and Prayers was released—a stretch that coincides with Trump’s campaign and presidency—Jeselnik has reconsidered the way that he approaches more delicate subjects. He still takes pride in delving into topics that might frighten others, like a prolonged bit from Fire in the Maternity Ward about his interest in murder-suicides, but he’s made an effort to remove material from his act that elicits what he views as the wrong type of laughter. After a deadly shooting at a synagogue in Jeselnik’s hometown of Pittsburgh last October, he cut a joke referencing hate crimes from his set. “It would get a huge laugh,” Jeselnik says, “but [I would ask] ‘Why are people laughing at this joke?’ I don’t want to have a joke that makes people think hate crimes are cool. I don’t think I would have [removed it] 10 years ago. But now with the way the world is, some things just aren’t funny to me.”

Perhaps more complicated than how Trump’s presidency plays into Jeselnik’s material is how that material plays to both Trump’s supporters and his own. He knows that many of his fans are Trump fans, and some have engaged in online debates about whether the comedian is liberal or conservative, an argument he finds amusing. “Name me any other conservative who would make that many jokes about dead babies,” he quips. He’s hinted at his true political leanings on The Jeselnik & Rosenthal Vanity Project, and when some fans have gotten a glimpse of them—like when he made fun of Trump for the fast-food menu offered to the Clemson football team at their championship visit in January—the reaction has been harsh. “Those guys acted like I was a traitor,” Jeselnik says. “They acted like I was on their side and their comedian.”

In February, alt-right Twitter troll and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich attacked Jeselnik for tweets the comic had sent in the past. But unlike other targets of Cernovich’s mob, Jeselnik was unfazed; he’s made a career out of blowing past the boundaries of what’s acceptable and extracting the humor in topics most would never touch. “It felt like I was wearing a bulletproof vest, and someone shot me with a water gun,” Jeselnik says. “It’s like, ‘You guys, I’m not the guy you can get with this.’”

In 2015, not long after Fox canceled his self-titled sitcom, Mulaney met Jeselnik for lunch at Café Gratitude in Los Angeles. Before the two even had a chance to exchange pleasantries, Jeselnik said that he was happy when Mulaney got yanked off the air. “[It was] the first thing he said,” Mulaney says. “He goes, ‘Because I realized that there was nothing wrong with me if your show could be canceled. We’re both good at what we do. And it made me feel better about [The Jeselnik Offensive] being canceled.’ I took it as a compliment.”

Jeselnik is notoriously blunt, to the point that he’s grappled with how to grin and bear it when the situation demands. When he first got his Comedy Central show in 2013, he found working under the constraints of television to be difficult. By the time it was yanked, that struggle hadn’t gotten easier. “You work so hard as a comic to be able to play by these rules,” Jeselnik says, “and then you get a show, and you have to play by the same rules as everyone else.” Toning his personality down isn’t easy for Jeselnik, and having to smile and gladhand parties full of executives felt torturous. “Social norms and elegant niceties are almost allergic to him,” Valdes-Fauli says. “He feels like he doesn’t suffer fools or bullshit.”

When Jeselnik says that Fire in the Maternity Ward is the best work he’s ever done, then, he means it. Fifteen years ago, when he’d prowl the stage and chastise audiences for not getting one of his depraved jokes, the bravado was artificial. These days, it’s genuine. “He’s very comfortable in his own skin—in his own leather jacket, so to speak,” Ross says. Rosenthal has watched his friend’s sets for more than two decades; no matter how exaggerated the on-stage persona can be, there are always elements to Jeselnik’s unapologetic nature Rosenthal recognizes. “It is Anthony,” Rosenthal says. “It’s just like cutting out all the warmth, and everything that goes along with it.”

Warmth may not be a term that comes to mind for those who’ve seen Jeselnik’s act, but it’s one of the first descriptors used by those who know him well. “He’s one of those comics who looks your wife in the eye and is nice to her, and there aren’t many,” says Mulaney. As someone who says he’s long obsessed over the way others process what he does, Mulaney is transfixed by the way Jeselnik can seemingly not care about any of it. But when it comes to his craft and his career, Jeselnik has the capacity to care more deeply than most.

One of the ways that Jeselnik is able to transform into the ruthless character he plays on stage is by internalizing each of his prior professional slights. After The Jeselnik Offensive was canceled, Rosenthal saw a newfound fury in his friend. “He uses antagonism as fuel, so he loved it, on some level,” Rosenthal says. “After that happened, it seemed like he just sort of got back in the gym and just wanted to fucking destroy everyone.”

Jeselnik’s most recent disappointment came in 2015, shortly before he was set to tape Thoughts and Prayers. Following Seth Meyers’s departure from Saturday Night Live, the show set about revamping its Weekend Update segment. After being recommended by Jimmy Fallon (for whom he’d written early in his career), Jeselnik was granted an audition. “I went in with my own jokes, and I knocked it out of the park,” Jeselnik says. “They were like, ‘It’s impossible to get laughs.’ And I was getting laughs. I walked out, and I was like, ‘Fuck, I think I just took this.’” But when the call finally came, the news was heartbreaking.“It hurt so much to get that close,” Jeselnik says. “[I said] ‘I can’t let this be the end of my story.’ My only revenge is success. ‘I need to make this special so amazing that I’m glad I didn’t get that job.’”

The darkness that pervades Jeselnik’s stand-up may be a creation, but it’s rooted in an edge that’s very real. As his act has evolved, its driving force hasn’t. “You think I don’t care, but I care so much that I need you to think I don’t care,” Jeselnik says. “I’m not going to go out there and bomb. The audience is more important to me than anything.”

Jeselnik’s Hollywood apartment isn’t far from Katsuya, and by now he knows the menu inside and out. “They have a great steak,” he says. “And the baked crab hand rolls are a must.” He spends most of his time in the small radius of L.A. that encompasses his apartment and the Comedy Store. For a while, a personal trainer came to his place so he wouldn’t have to venture to the gym. He recently joined a members-only club for creatives and artists—but only because it’s located a few blocks from his home. “I’m 40 years old,” Jeselnik says. “I’ve been in this business for 17 years. I’ve got a lot of money. All I think about is comedy. I might be the most unrelatable person in the world.”

For a long time, Jeselnik avoided weaving any semblance of his real life into his stand-up routine. He’s recently softened that stance. One of the jokes he’s working on now concerns a lesbian couple who asked him to be their sperm donor only to rescind the offer when their first choice changed his mind and accepted. “Wait, you don’t want my baby?” Jeselnik says, showing glimpses of the megalomaniac he embodies on stage. In search of new jokes and in an attempt to avoid eating his own tail, he’s become a reluctant social creature. “I say yes to every party that I’m invited to,” Jeselnik says. “And I hate parties. But I’m like, ‘Maybe I’ll go and get something out of it.’”

Fire in the Maternity Ward closes with a 17-minute story, the basis of which actually happened. Last year, Jeselnik took a friend to get an abortion, and, with her permission, decided to use the experience to frame a series of classic Jeselnik one-liners. Every aspect of the trip—including the name of his friend, whom he calls Jessica—is fictionalized. But the idea that he’d use a real anecdote to close what he considers his best material yet is the ultimate sign that he’s begun to play with his format. “I don’t know if I can write better jokes than the ones I’ve already written,” he says. “But I can still surprise people. It just has to come in a different way. I’m like an aging pitcher now. I’ve got to throw a little snot on the ball.”  

As Mulaney watched Jeselnik tape the special at the Town Hall in New York, it struck him just how well the material was suited to this era of comedy. “At this time, when things are very hard for people, are there still people who are completely insincere on every side? Yeah,” Mulaney says. “And I think that Anthony’s jokes mainly cut through that and at their best, embarrass the audience by taking them on a sincere ride where they think they’re going, with a twist at the end.” After finishing a bit about finding his mother’s corpse buried next to his pet turtle, Jeselnik says it was the worst day of his life—because “I loved that turtle.” The special closes with him denigrating a fictional audience member for her misguided outrage—one final way to convey that he’s poking fun at people’s reactions to delicate topics, rather than the topics themselves.

He’s trying to find levity where there shouldn’t be any, to create a laugh in a place that shouldn’t be funny. Before the credits roll, a black card with red text flashes onto the screen: “For Jessica, with love”—a nod to Jeselnik’s friend for allowing him to bring comedy to a subject few ever would. Nearly two decades into his career, stand-up’s prince of darkness is finally letting the light in. “I can be nice and sweet, but it’s not a vulnerability,” Jeselnik says. “Because I can bite your head off if I need to. And I think that’s the best possible way to live.”

Robert Mays