In a Rare Miss, David Cross Stumbles on I’m From the Future
Image courtesy of Michael O'Brien Entertainment
When I was a junior in high school, the group of comedy-loving weirdos I hung around with would pile into my 1986 Chrysler New Yorker and we’d drive around the suburbs listening to David Cross. We’d spend our weekends watching DVDs of Mr. Show with Bob and David, the mid to late ‘90s sketch show with Bob Odenkirk from Better Call Saul. A year later, we would meet up every Sunday to watch Cross blue himself as Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development. We quoted him verbatim through the halls between classes and at our spot behind the stairs outside the cafeteria. We were more than a little obsessed.
Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, Cross’ Sub Pop debut, was the soundtrack to the school year after we all watched the Twin Towers collapse in the middle of second-period English class. We were frustrated, frightened, and fairly privileged white kids that didn’t know what to do with this newfound fear that our world could end at any moment. All we could do was laugh at how stupid the world seemed. The internet was young, so our options were to turn to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and a live double-CD by David Cross.
On the record, Cross waxed poetic about growing up with rednecks in Georgia, living in New York during the tragedy of 9/11 and our idiot then-president George W. Bush getting us into the so-called “War on Terror” (“You cannot win a war on terrorism. It’s like having a war on jealousy.”). He was angry, but knew the best ways to channel that into something spectacularly hilarious. Going back through the album, there are plenty of jokes that don’t hold up so well in 2022, but the energy he brought on stage at that time was what America needed. David Cross was our Bill Hicks.
A lot has happened to this country in the 20 years since Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! was released, and Cross has covered most of it over the course of his stand-up career. The problem with Cross’s new special, I’m From the Future, is that America has only gotten stupider since 9/11, and far more than we thought possible back then.
Cross has never been one to shy away from controversy, and in his stand-up, he’s the master of going to the extreme then ending a bit with an intelligent quip or well-thought-out point. In classic Cross fashion, he opens I’m From the Future by recounting the story of a woman about to die in Auschwitz to demonstrate how absolutely disrespectful and downright ignorant it is for anti-vaxxers to compare themselves to what the Jewish people experienced during the Holocaust. The audience can’t help but nervously chuckle at the serious bits because most comedians don’t kick off the show with a punchline that takes a few minutes to sink in. It’s a bold move, but one that pays off. Unfortunately, the rest of the special is mostly downhill from there.