The beauty of Sean O’Connor’s stand-up lies in the fact that he sounds nothing like a stand-up. The L.A.-based comic delivers his material as if he were shoved up on stage during an open mic night just minutes before. Every joke he tells seems to have dropped out of the sky into his mind prior to telling it, and the rest are lived-in anecdotes that he has likely been regaling his friends and strangers with in bars for years.
To his credit, they are great stories. Or, as the closer of his hour-long set avers, “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Hard to argue that point when the tale is of him and his buddies deciding that the way to get girls is to take pictures of themselves where they look gay. They end up posting the pictures online under the heading “Gay Teens,” which were then quickly stolen by a shifty dude for his child porn site. It only gets worse and more hilarious from there.
The rest of O’Connor’s tales of personal failure are equally great, particularly his recollection of getting fired from Best Buy for refusing to let Jon Bon Jovi return a CD and his embarrassing attempt at a threesome (“As he was doing [her], he whispered to me, ‘Fuck her mouth.’ I was, like, ‘You don’t need to whisper, she’s right there. We’re not going to trick her.’”)
But O’Connor’s offhand delivery sometimes spells his undoing as he has a tendency to laugh at his own material and you can hear him stumbling over bits at times. Additionally, the shaggy nature of this set leads to some conceptual dead ends and bits of lag time (we don’t need to keep throwing poor Dave Matthews under the bus, right?)
But more often than not, O’Connor stays in a nice steady groove, pacing out his material perfectly and leading you to wish you had a drinking buddy with as many fucked up and side-splitting stories at his disposal. What do you say, Sean? Next time you make it to Portland, the first round of drinks is on me.