Could James Adomian become the first man to break through as an openly gay stand-up star? The thought popped into my head as he performed last month in front of an almost entirely male audience at the Rockbar on Christopher Street. In a hat, with a confident, wry smile and a thin mustache, Adomian, whose debut album Low Hangin Fruit was recently released, is a casually handsome performer who doesn’t come across as clearly gay or straight. He has a low-boiling energy onstage— confident, jaunty, but not aggressive— and his set features solidly constructed, verbally playful jokes enlivened by an uncanny ability to channel a subway crowd or a larger-than-life character.
Leaning into the microphone and looking ready to pounce, Adomian, 32, imagined what Disney World would be like if it was in New York City by transforming into a Type A shouter whose every second is defined by pointless urgency: “I want to be in Tomorrowland yesterday!” He did several sharp minutes about how popular villains always have characteristics that read gay, including a persuasive argument that the Transformers sound like catty, enraged drag queens (Megaaaatron! Shut up, Starscream!). His parody of crowd work killed: “So,” he shouted in a life-of-the-party voice. “Who’s in the closet?”
Revealingly, this joke did just as well two days earlier at a straight bar in the East Village. There were small changes, like specifying at Rockbar that an accent was from someone straight, but the sets were remarkably similar. This consistency is its own argument: just as some stand-up comics have achieved mass appeal with highly specific ethnic or racial points of view, a polished set from a gay perspective could do the same. The response was equally loud in both rooms.
Homophobia has long been a part of mainstream comedy, but attitudes have changed radically since 1983, when Eddie Murphy opened the concert film Delirious with a long gay-panic riff that included a joke about worrying about getting AIDS from a woman who kissed a gay man. Murphy expressed regret for that bit many years later, and last year Tracy Morgan took just a week to apologize for what was widely seen as an antigay rant in a show in Nashville.
Comedy has probably never had more openly gay performers and frank talk about homosexuality than it does now. The veteran comic Todd Glass made news in January when he came out of the closet on Marc Maron’s podcast. And while straight comics still make gay jokes rooted in stereotypes, there are also figures like Bo Burnham, a fast-rising straight 21-year-old who recently made a pilot for MTV. Years after turning a clip of himself singing My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay into a viral Internet hit, he said that he likes to keep his sexuality vague.
Of course mainstream comic actors and writers, like Neil Patrick Harris and David Sedaris, have found success. Yet there has never been that one transformative gay male comic, let alone someone of the stature of Anderson Cooper or even Frank Ocean, acknowledging his sexuality.
Early this year, the gay comic Ralph Hardesty wrote an article about searching for role models. “I wish there were a classic comedy special like Richard Pryor’s epic Live on the Sunset Strip that spoke directly to gay men,” he wrote. “It doesn’t sound like it would mean that much, until you realize you don’t have it.”
Last year was a watershed for women in comedy because performers like Kristen Wiig, Whitney Cummings, and Lena Dunham reached large audiences. They have followed pioneers like Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, and Sarah Silverman. And lesbian comedians like Ellen DeGeneres, Rosie O’Donnell, and Wanda Sykes have all found success as headliners, though each came out after achieving some fame.
“With gays, we still don’t have the first guy,” said Dave Rubin, a gay comic who is the co-host of the Sirius radio show The Six Pack, which often features gay celebrities. “Television likes their gay people as sidekicks on the Bravo network or as fashion experts. I’m just not sure how far we’ve come from one of my favorite Homer Simpson lines: ‘Marge, I like my television loud, my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming!’"
That’s not the case in live comedy today, where you often see stand-up that is less accurately described as gay comedy than it is as comedy from gay perspectives, among others. In his recent one-man show Numb, the popular young British stand-up Simon Amstell talked bluntly about his sex life in the charmingly neurotic vein of a young Woody Allen.
Gabe Liedman, a verbally clever comic who helps run the usually packed weekly stage show Big Terrific, treats his sexuality as a given in a deliriously absurd, intricate joke about accepting imperfection. “No one’s perfect,” he said last month, mid-riff. “Channing Tatum’s not perfect. Neither am I. Maybe we’ll date.”
Brent Sullivan, a defiantly understated 28-year-old comic with a calm NPR voice, said his only rule onstage was that he never come out. “Straight people don’t have to do that,” he said in an interview. “Why should I? It should be inherent in what I’m saying that I’m a gay man. If you stop making it a thing, then it won’t be.”
Many young stand-ups treat coming out offhandedly or divorce it from sentiment or trauma. Adomian uses it as a springboard for a series of jokes and mock swagger: “I’m gay. Sorry, ladies,” he says, pausing for a small leer. “You’re welcome, fellas.” It’s a stark contrast from more familiar stories full of humorous anxiety and fear of disapproval.
The middle-aged veteran comic Kevin Meaney came out in 2008, and the experience remains a part of his act. “How do you tell your wife you’re gay?” he asked with exaggerated exasperation at a recent show at Ella Lounge in the East Village. “Honey, I’m homo!” Meaney also sang several songs, including one as Ethel Merman. Mario Cantone, who is probably the best-known openly gay stand-up working today (he played a recurring character in Sex and the City), also sings in his act, something straight comics rarely do.
This style seems old-fashioned to many of his colleagues. Along with the writer and comedian Eliot Glazer, Sullivan stars in the elegantly made, very funny web series It Gets Betterish, which portrays them as pathetically unglamorous gay men in a world that expects them to be more flamboyant. The scripts, including one about futilely trying to convince people they don’t like Lady Gaga, tap into the general appeal of being an outsider, even in your own subculture. Glazer is preparing to shop It Gets Betterish to television networks but understands the challenges. “In our culture it’s acceptable to talk about women and men, or even women and women, but it’s still seen by some as icky to talk about two men,” he said in an interview. “But it’s a generational thing. For many it’s no big deal.”
The stage star Nathan Lane, who started his career in a comedy team, said: “It’s hard for stand-ups to be totally honest about your life and not alienate audiences. It’s easier, I think, for a woman, especially if you have a daytime talk show.”
The stand-ups say their challenge is not just that straight audiences will not relate to gay sex, but that gay comics also have trouble appealing to gay crowds. At a show I attended last year, Cantone asked a Gotham Comedy Club audience who in it was gay; the response was but a smattering of applause. Female comics like Kathy Griffin and Margaret Cho, however, have loyal gay male audiences. “When they are, like, ‘You are my gays,’ it’s a marketing tool,” Glazer said. “It drives me insane.”
In a solo show at the Upright Citizens Brigade, Sullivan slyly skewered the antigay activist Fred Phelps, using understated, extreme reasonableness. Sullivan said later that he couldn’t get any gay media to cover the performance, and that the vast majority of his alternative-comedy audience was straight. “I don’t think it’s chic to be a gay nerd yet,” he said.
When the first breakthrough gay male comic arrives, chances are he will have received a boost online. Gay performers like the former Groundling Drew Droege, whose video impressions of the actress Chloë Sevigny have gone viral, and Billy Eichner, whose Fuse channel game show has become a cult hit, have had success without help of gatekeepers at comedy clubs or network television.
Adomian has already become a star of sorts in the podcast world, in which he regularly does a dizzying number of cameo impressions on Comedy Bang! Bang! and Sklarbro Country. His characters— including Gary Busey, Tim Gunn, and Paul Giamatti— are so hilariously realized that it’s surprising that he hasn’t been picked up by Saturday Night Live. His best is probably a pitch-perfect Jesse Ventura, former wrestler and Minnesota governor, as a mindlessly argumentative, conspiratorial kook with the confidence of someone trained in a fake sport.
So far, Adomian’s character work has somewhat overshadowed his stand-up. His debut album may change that. It uses his gift for mimicry in the service of observational jokes, capping a bit about the hypermasculinity of beer commercials with a gravelly baritone impression of the actor Sam Elliott. Capturing the outdated showbiz lingo of graying musicians, he says in a mock-Dean Martin style, “He’s all jacks and no aces.” While the voices first get your attention, it’s the economy, accuracy, and flair of his writing that makes them stick.
To become a star, Adomian will probably need to ensure that his own voice emerges even more strongly. His most vivid material touches on gay themes. It’s here where we see why diversity in comedy is not just about fairness, but quality too. A straight or closeted comic could not get the laughs that Adomian does out of the homoeroticism of pro wrestling or comparisons of gay bars, let alone a personal story of gay bashing.
Striking a delicate tonal balance, Adomian transformed being assaulted into a cuttingly funny yarn without diminishing its horror. Responding to a punch, he fights back by saying he will alert the press. This works, even though, in an aside, he concedes it’s a ridiculous threat. He illustrates the point by imagining an old-school print editor dreaming of the story as tabloid gold. In rat-a-tat, hard-boiled cadence, he imagines the headline:
Poof popped in the lip: Fisticuffs on the Yellow Brick Road.
Rico says he doesn't care what their sexuality is, as long as they're funny...
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