Robert Kelly: Live at the Village Underground is the comic’s first hour-long special for Comedy Central, but he’s not some young up and comer. He’s been doing this for years. You might’ve seen him on Dane Cook’s Tourgasm show on HBO, or you might recognize him from his role as Louis CK’s fictional brother in Louie. I had never heard his stand-up before, but since he’s loud and from the Northeast and a semi-regular on The Opie and Anthony Show I thought I knew what to expect. I figured he’d be vulgar, aggressive, hypermasculine—the kind of guy who, if he wasn’t a professional comedian, would call up sports talk radio and wind up in a rant about “political correctness.”
Kelly’s definitely vulgar and a little aggressive, but he’s not nearly as angry as I had expected. (Also: no overt politics, which was refreshing.) Sure, he talks about farting in a baby’s face, but that was more of an accident, or at least an act of circumstance. He’s almost always the butt of his own jokes, but his material about his weight or his difficulty feeling emotions is delivered matter-of-factly, with self-awareness instead of anger or misery. He sounds defeated when talking about his struggle with eating, but he seems almost okay with losing that fight.
He deals in some of the same bedrock issues as his friend CK (and, well, almost every other stand-up comic ever), like the differences between the sexes and how men are inherently perverted. The internet has made his bit about men’s conception of sex being warped by porn more relevant now than when Kelly himself would’ve first masturbated back in the ‘80’s, making it both truer and funnier. His observations aren’t especially original, and his material can feel a bit by-the-numbers at times, but he delivers it almost flawlessly, a constant stream of words that never slows down but never really speeds up either. He’s consistent.