Leo Reich Gets Down and Mirth-y in Debut HBO Special Literally Who Cares?!

And so it begins with an interrobang: That subtle yet slyly loaded ?!—a mark of the rhetorical slippage between query and clamor—in the title of Leo Reich’s debut HBO comedy special, Literally Who Cares?!, might be the show’s most valuable player. Not literally, of course—obviously, that honor goes to Reich (“the youngest comedian ever!”) himself. But, in thinking about this astoundingly ambitious show—a veritable id overload—even the littlest of details, the slightest of symbolic figurations, hold weight and are worth parsing.

Starting as he means to go on, Reich immediately disabuses the audience of the notion that he’s in any way a reliable narrator. “If there’s a topic or an issue that I don’t mention during the show, please don’t read into that,” he states waggishly. Not much seems to be off limits, though. Across the hour, Reich careens from the “liminal space between sponsorship and the grave” to “the layered poetic symbolism of anal”—here he is suffused with bisexual lighting, there he goes bounding across the stage in an outfit that can only be described as himbo-athleisure-luxe, hyperpop-raver-lite—striking out the synaptic gap between what is thought and what is felt. Of what we ask and what we assert. It’s a chromatic and kinetic display of warring impulses. It’s also deliriously silly: I’d give one of my ribs for someone to shrink my head and explain to me why Reich’s exaggerated pronunciation of “Zoopla” and “Dua Lipa” sends me so; hell, my entire rib cage for a reason why a word of Reich’s own invention—set to be defined as either a “crushing loss of innocence” or a “rice dish”—has me in hysterics nearly every time I hear it.

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The special’s balance of pure nonsense—of earnest disclosure cannily and consistently diverted—and plainly first-rate writing has been months in the making. I first caught Reich’s solo material at his work-in-progress show, Oh No! etc., early last year. The brittle yet bombastic man-boy of Literally Who Cares?! staring into the abyss of impending planetary and in-real-time identity collapse—with his sublime mise en abyme of queer growing pains and an incompatible ex-boyfriend who remains outsized in the imagination—wasn’t quite there last February. Oh No! etc was clever and, of course, funny, but it wanted for an archness, a point of abandon. In the here and now, though—or, rather, in September when the Literally Who Cares?! was taped—those initial shades of doubt have given way to dauntlessness.

Reich ramps up his disdain for heterosexual “smugness” in a way that’s blistering and brilliantly observed—vaguely approximating a Steve Martin-esque vocal affectation (“Well, exu-u-use me!”) on the joke’s tag: “I find it to be performative and I find it to be fake!” He also transforms a formerly hedged bit about an avoidant attachment style into the vampy bop, “Fucking Someone Who Hates Me.” The latter can, in no small part, be credited to the songcraft of Toby Marlow, whose Tony Award-winning compositional savvy pays dividends across the special’s five original musical numbers. And so it goes: the heightened stakes feeding the camp of the set pieces, the high camp metabolizing the wryness of the humor.

The biggest laugh lines unspool from Reich’s shifting perspective and personae: from to that of a self-appointed (albeit through denial) “thought-leader,” to that of a “worthless drain on our culture” (akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe). He self-effaces then simpers, he commits to being as non-committal as humanly possible, he baits and he switches; the result is a patchwork of frenetic despair and febrile delusion to rival 30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney or Search Party’s Elliot Goss. These shifts also fuel some interesting readings of Reich’s performance: a smattering of applause and some affirmative hollering arrives at the set-up one of the special’s most barefaced piss-takes—a clutch of audience members, seemingly, responding to Reich as though he were a firebrand youth pastor or fresh-faced parliamentarian. Or, more accurately, one of their online faves with a sizzling hot take. Taking him literally. Reading him like the open book he is not. It’s high-key bemusing, low-key jarring—a surreal reaction to witness amid the ever-mounting surreality offered up by Reich. I’m still processing it. Is it a testament to Reich’s undeniable command of the stage, his irrepressibility? Or is it a tell of how easily imbibed the right series of hollow yet hallowed words (see: “gaslit” and “gatekeep”) are from the right kinds of (read: well-spoken) voices? I’m thinking it’s both, but I’m feeling it’s the latter.

Much has already been made of Reich as a generational voice. Here he’s a slayer of the Gen Z dragons of self-absorption and scattered attentions; there he’s a snarer of our Gen X and Baby Boomer elders’ hypocrisies and misapprehensions. I’m largely uninterested in unpicking these loftier appraisals, but I will say this: the satirical coherence of a work like Literally Who Cares?! doesn’t just hinge on what Reich attends to, but also what he avoids; in turn, the coherence of an appraisal of such a work relies on someone having the want to apprehend these gaps—from the structural affordances that underpin the (Cambridge) Footlights to (Edinburgh) Fringe success pipeline, to the increasingly stark asymmetries in commercial viability, show visibility and critical value across the scene—along with the will to shake down their own comfort with that which remains unsaid.

For Literally Who Cares?! doesn’t so much as shift the Overton window as, simply, lower the blinds. This isn’t, necessarily, an indictment. In fact, it’s entirely consistent with the intention of the hour. At a press conference ahead of the special’s release, Reich revealed that he wanted to ensure Literally Who Cares?! had “no full message [nor] political standpoint.” In eschewing a standpoint, Reich serves us a sterling unburdening—a showcase of immense capability that stays with you—at the expense of satire that interfaces with the harder edges of reality, social commentary that rewards the risk of intimacy, or a special that issues a challenge to the rest of us, not just us at our very best and our very worst.

Reich isn’t the first to find a spin on high-minded but weak-kneed moral abstraction, although he certainly renews it by remaking it in his own splintered yet many-splendored image. It’s a popular approach—the preferred mode, even—for a good number of really talented comedians. But it’s also, ironically, the vanishing point between not-so-good and not-quite-good-enough claims about how we live now: an evacuation of political conviction that induces an endless retreat to surreality. An ellipsis that really ought to be an exclamation or a line of enquiry. A favorite of those who’ve never asked for anything because they’ve never wanted for anything. A fallback of those who last had to interview for something the winter before matriculation. A feint made by those with, simultaneously, everything to lose and everything to gain.

Ultimately, what Literally Who Cares?! asks of us and what it asserts is one and the same: see me. Reich hasn’t made a confessional show hampered by matters of representation. He has, however, made a show that consciously yearns to be recognized—for its intricacies, its atmospherics, its effort—while paying absolutely no mind to the politics of how, why, and by whom we are seen. The show’s many allusions and aesthetic choices—Joyce and Keats; Luca Guadagnino and Richard Curtis; glimmers of the Dada-esque; shimmers of Y2K pop girly excess—don’t so much as casually surface as strain under the the cover of glibness. Reich ensures that you know that he knows what he’s doing: That he’s making deliberate choices; that he cares deep down albeit discriminately; that he’s destined to keep doing him—sorry not sorry.

It’s all very Thundercat per the outro of No More Lies, the bassist’s smooth-as-anything track with Tame Impala: “I tell you the truth because I care / But I also lie to you because I care / … / I live in LA, sweetie, what did you expect?” Reich—who describes himself as a “lonely genius in the metropolis” in the special’s cool quip of a cold open—has great expectations and equally guarded intentions. But when he cries out, “Leistung aus leidenschaft!”—which roughly translates to “a passion to perform”—the surreality of the special finally gives itself over to the reality of watching it. It can’t be unseen, nor can it be denied, so it has to be said: Reich’s a born performer who’ll go all the way for the bit—he’ll cut it short then he’ll call it back, he’ll prefigure it then he’ll reconfigure it—but, it seems, he’s also the kind of performer who’ll downplay the journey in order to make his passion for what he does palatable and the optics of what he makes inscrutable. “Keep distracted!” he announces, abruptly, at one point—knowing we can’t quite look away. Whatever you say, Reich. Or, rather, whatever you don’t.

Tara Okeke is a writer and researcher from London. She is missing one of her ribs—genuinely—but she’s pretty much fine now, thanks for asking. You can find her on Twitter: @taraokeke.