Stand-Up Favorite Kyle Kinane Talks Dirt Nap, Embellishment, and “the Unfinished Jigsaw Puzzle” of Potential Material

Even amongst comedians, a subset of artists expected to have some command over language, Kyle Kinane’s style stands out. He flavors his stories with rich turns of phrase and unexpected scene-setters that somehow feel both grounded and whimsical. At first glance, his material may seem niche or leveled at specific backgrounds and milieus. But there’s more to it than that. His on-stage summation of his appeal is, verbatim: “He looks like a jagoff but he talks about his feelings.”

Kinane’s presence pervades nearly every corner of comedy-dom. He was Comedy Central’s on-air voice for eight years; he has played one-offs in Bob’s Burgers, Workaholics, etc.; he voiced characters for multiple episodes of Adventure Time and Regular Show. The Midwest-born comedian remains a hot commodity in various corners of Hollywood, but his priority will forever be stand-up. A grizzled dispenser of unhinged diction, he doesn’t see himself as anything other than a guy who thrives on-stage. 

“I’m not really a multihyphenate. If somebody wants to make me a multihyphenate, okay, I’ll do it, but I’ll love doing stand-up. That’s what I’m doing,” Kinane tells me over Zoom. “That’s the job. That’s the career.”

Kinane’s latest stand-up special, Dirt Nap, draws offbeat parallels between vegan quesadillas and religion, calls bullshit on Vin Diesel’s post-mission sex drive in the Fast and the Furious movies, and applies improv rules to phone calls with his mother. It’s a reinforcement of form worth every laugh, every fleck of boozy spittle exploding from his audience.

I fell off the Kinane train for a few years, but when I came back ’round for some catch-up, I remembered why his comedy tickles me so. We anticipate his dispatches from the humdrum because he never loses touch with the threads all of us recognize, the through lines with which we all resonate. 

“You understand the power of details and language, and you’re not lying by saying something’s aquamarine rather than blue. You’re just, okay, I’ve just made a story more rich. And you could do that all over the place until it sounds like the most fascinating, whimsical, Tolkien-esque tale of going to the grocery store,” he says.

During the pandemic, he and his girlfriend moved from Los Angeles to the Portland suburbs. Uprooting proved an especially fruitful play for Kinane, who has since worked this top-five stressor into his rotation and found more than enough to fill a set. The back half of Dirt Nap is dedicated almost entirely to his relocation. It’s material like this that has helped him transcend his niche.

His audience still grows, too. He’s leaning even harder into more relatable material and he’s doing it with remarkable seamlessness. “I mean, I used to get the old aging punk rock folks to come out, because that was the same trajectory as those folks. That material kind of hit home, and now I am just playing more comedy clubs, not as many just independent like concert venues or anything, and so more people that are more average comedy club goers come out, which is good,” he explains. “I want to reach more people, and I think it’s still, I’m not doing anything so niche or so unrelatable that everybody can’t find something to laugh at in the hour.”

The conversation then shifts to the question of when and how comedians should exaggerate, which has been an especially hot point of contention for the past year. Kinane doesn’t mention specific controversies, nor does he invoke any of the discourse those controversies engendered. Instead, he tells me about the guidelines he uses when deciding whether or not to embellish: “I’ll only embellish if it makes me look worse. I mean, this is just my own rule. I don’t want to embellish if it makes me look like the hero or the victim, no. If it makes me look like the heel of the story, then that’s okay.”

Aside from that, Kinane says, very little is off the table. But framing and craft matter. If a joke isn’t working, there’s a good chance the devil’s in the delivery. “It’s an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. There’s no edges, so that’s what’s fun about it to me. Nothing’s done, there’s no subject matter that’s done. There’s no angle. There’s plenty of stuff you can talk about. That’s why I don’t really fall for the, ‘Oh, you can’t say anything anymore.’ Sure you can, you just have to be good at it. You have to be above the bar if you want to approach certain subject matters. You take cheap pot shots at stuff, yeah, people will call you out on it. Yeah. It’s not that you can’t say anything, it’s that you didn’t say it well enough,” Kinane says.

He elaborates: “I think that’s what’s really important right now is to take the piss out of everybody. I don’t want people just clapping because they agree with something. I’d rather get somebody to laugh at something that they disagree with than not laugh at a point they agree with. Like, oh, you clapped and said ‘Mm-hmm?’ That was a crummy comedy show if that was your only response as an audience member.”

Being funny is something Kinane takes quite seriously, and the consistency of his material absolutely reflects his love for his craft.

Dirt Nap is now available via 800 Pound Gorilla. Kinane heads on his “It’s Not a Tour, It’s The Job” engagement in multiple cities starting March 14.