Long Jokes Are Good

Kyle Kinane has just wrapped up 15 minutes of Furious 7 plot recap, replete with a digression expressing skepticism about the characters’ ability to get aroused amid the movie’s nonstop intensity, when a brief lull sets in at Minneapolis’ Acme Comedy Club. The raucous laughter of the crowd’s reaction to the F7 bit has gradually subsided, giving Kinane a moment to take a beat before saying, “I’m just here to tell you one story.” At this point, 25 minutes have passed in Dirt Nap, his sixth hourlong stand-up special, which landed on YouTube on April 2. The setup is humble — Kinane, ever midwestern, is a humble guy — making it one of the most ridiculous undersells in stand-up history.

The comedian goes on to unleash a virtuosic, kaleidoscopic epic about moving to suburban Oregon during the height of the pandemic and taking in a stray cat. Kinane carries the story through a series of digressions, each of which ends up contributing to the larger narrative, while never losing the momentum of the primary arc. By the time he tells the audience “long story short,” the joke has reached the 47-minute mark, representing two-thirds of the run time of the 70-minute special. Bert Kreischer’s “The Machine” story, by comparison, was filmed at 16 minutes. Kinane’s Dirt Nap is the length of three “Machines”! It’s a high-wire act that is more than just a sprawling story told well; by keeping the audience engaged and laughing over such a span of time, it’s also a testament to the underutilized comic potential of long jokes.

The tradition of playing with length in stand-up dates back to the middle of the last century. In the late 1950s, 3o-something comic Shelley Berman bucked from prevailing joke conventions of the time, which mostly mimicked the length and rhythm of street jokes, by performing 15-minute one-man sketches and stories about his childhood. Bill Cosby, who started out in the 1960s, had jokes run upwards of 20 minutes; Richard Pryor’s story of setting himself on fire — arguably the greatest joke ever told — clocked at around 20 minutes; and George Carlin had a few pieces longer than 20 minutes, including a 21-minute chunk on cars in 1988’s What Am I Doing in Jersey.

These days, Bill Burr often has 15-minute bits where he tries to lose the audience at the beginning and win them back by the end while building to a larger point, such as a joke from 2017’s Walk Your Way Out that starts with him deriding how the word brave is used to describe plus-size actresses, moves to his own insecurities about how he’s seen in Hollywood, and ends with him arguing that McDonald’s serving breakfast all day is what’s wrong with this country. Tig Notaro’s bits about the many times she met the singer Taylor Dayne and pretending she’s going to bring the Indigo Girls onstage both run about 16 minutes. Sometimes long jokes can be deep and autobiographical, like Jerrod Carmichael’s 22-minute Rothaniel opener about his father’s infidelity, and sometimes it can be something like Gary Gulman’s 25-minute story about going to Trader Joe’s. Ali Siddiq regularly pushes 30 minutes by thematically piecing together collections of stories and observations about his life. Comedians such as Mike Birbiglia also tell long, winding tales, but unlike Siddiq and Kinane, they primarily perform one-person shows in theaters to an audience that expects that format.

Kinane has gone long in the past. His 2016 special, Loose in Chicago, ends with 30 minutes about having gout, and last year’s Shocks & Struts concluded with a 30-minute story about getting his RV stuck in Joshua Tree. But the sheer ambition of his joke in Dirt Nap makes it notable, particularly for the way that its epic scale enabled Kinane to create the best piece of comedy I’ve seen about the pandemic. Instead of just riffing on the usual clichés, he uses the space to capture so much of the distinct strangeness of his life during that time.

The story is less a this happened, then this happened yarn than a series of interconnected vignettes. Kinane introduces the idea of moving to the suburbs from the city up top, but first he explains that he comes from suburban stock. That leads into a vivid portrait of his mother, a woman who “tells a story like a Rube Goldberg machine cracks an egg into a frying pan … You’re going to get that omelet, but you’re going to take some unnecessary twists and turns,” and father, who he portrays eating his first veggie burger like “a gay guy reluctantly going down on a woman, just because that was the corner of the orgy he was stuck in when everything popped off.” That background is necessary to set up that this isn’t a Legally Blond–style fish-out-of-water tale but rather more of a Sweet Home Alabama, in which Kinane must confront who he has become and reconnect with his roots.

Eventually, he introduces the story’s hero, a zombie of a street cat he and his girlfriend took in and named Dirt Nap. (He explains why.) Kinane doesn’t just tell the audience how meaningful the cat was for him and his girlfriend — he demonstrates it through specific moments. Dirt Nap died while Kinane was working on the joke, which is how the special got its name, and the scale of the story communicates its significance. In the final ten minutes, all the narrative threads converge, resulting in a climax packed with callbacks to jokes and themes from throughout the story, including a moment of self-revelation that compels the audience to break out into applause.

Kinane built this joke, like all his longies, by telling a story and treating each detail as an opportunity to unfurl a one-liner, analogy, or extended flight of fancy. Every time he performed it, the joke would grow or shrink depending on the response on that given night. The audience enjoyed him comparing his dad’s eating to oral sex, so Kinane now spends two minutes describing that orgy. Do you need this much suburban-orgy material? Of course not. Like most longer pieces of stand-up, sections could be tightened, but the point of Kinane’s bit isn’t brevity. It’s about cultivating a certain kind of connection with the audience, and the length is necessary to achieve that.

If you follow Kinane online, you’ve probably come across short clips of moments from the story, which are as funny as anything else you’ll see in your feed. But what is lost is significant. Over the course of the story, Kinane constructs a portrait of himself and his life (and his cat) more complete than you could ever get from a series of clips served to you at random times in between videos of recipes and memes and whatever else the algorithm offers up. In an era when social media has amplified the expectation that jokes told in comedy clubs should be lean, short, and punchy, Dirt Nap shows what else is possible with the form. Not every joke should be 47 minutes long, but it’s important for comedy to be reminded that they could be.

Listen to Kinane discuss writing the joke on this week’s episode of Vulture’s Good One podcast below: