Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Neal Brennan: Blocks’ On Netflix, The Comedian As Swiftian Anti-Hero. Hi, It’s Neal. Neal’s The Problem. It’s Neal.

For his first Netflix comedy special in 2017, Neal Brennan moved back and forth behind 3 Mics to symbolize three different ways of communicating his comedy to us. For his second Netflix special, Brennan ditched all of the mic stands, but now has props. Colorful props! Carved blocks arranged on shelves on a back wall for the comedian to pluck from and use as talking points. But is there something blocking Brennan, though? Ay, there’s the rub.

NEAL BRENNAN: BLOCKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Brennan perhaps still may be best known to casual viewers as the co-creator of both Chappelle’s Show and Half Baked with Dave Chappelle. That, in and of itself, might be enough to have Brennan second-guessing himself and his career since then as a director of comedy specials (for the likes of Seth Meyers, Michelle Wolf and Al Madrigal) and as a stand-up comedian in his own right.
In fact, Derek DelGaudio, the magician and star of Hulu’s Derek DelGuadio’s In & Of Itself, directs Brennan here, but it’s not to engage in any magic tricks or mystify us with any illusions about Brennan. When the comedian toured this hour Off-Broadway and across America in 2021, he’d called it “Unacceptable.” Now it’s called Blocks, which points more toward the carved objects that form the literal and symbolic centerpieces onstage behind Brennan. They include blocks for his dog (a pit bull named Keith), a donkey (for his perceived liberal Democratic tendencies), a marijuana leaf (for his stance toward drugs and alcohol), a woman’s heeled shoe (for his failed relationships), and more.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: For better or worse (mostly better!), Brennan has adapted what made his previous Netflix special work, then added the showmanship from DelGaudio’s special to allow his storytelling to engage more deeply with the audience.
Memorable Jokes: The blocks represent areas of Brennan’s life where he feels he needs improvement.

Grabbing the dog block, he whips out a series of jokes backing up his solid premise that he’s either clueless about owning dogs or he’s arrived at a genius understanding of our relationship with them, asking us to reimagine dog owners not as rescuers or as parents, but as dognappers!
Brennan worries he might “lose liberals” with his routine on guns, but most everyone can find humor in his gag imagining the U.S. military calling gun hoarders on their bluff with an annual “NRA-Military Showdown,” complete with play-by-play commentary and field interviews with both sides of this ridiculous play on the Second Amendment.
The donkey block allows him to at once mock his appearance (“I look like Rachel Maddow with a beard”) while also mocking liberals for seemingly judging each other too harshly. This section includes his take that even trying to have a take on transgender issues in 2022 is akin to playing “conversational Jenga,” complete with a sly reference to how it’s proved its pitfall to Chappelle. Although he earns an applause break for it, I’m not sure his line (“Don’t go out like your boy.”) would play if he’d pitched his voice lower or in a Southern accent. As he acknowledges later during a bit about white privilege, Brennan wonders aloud how one particular joke about white privilege might be received completely differently at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
And when Brennan suggests that at 48 (now 49), never married with no kids, friends and audiences alike might not trust him as much someone with a wife and children, he deftly stops the audience in its tracks by citing some famous comedians who’ve become infamous thanks to their histories with love and marriage and parenthood, including at least one name that’ll stick in your craw.

Our Take: Don’t get too caught up in the potential artifice of the production, as I almost did at first when Brennan seemed to suggest his set designer had played a trick on him. Because he has a bigger point to make than simply a play on putting square pegs in round holes, and worrying about screwing up at life in the process.
But he’s just scratching the surface at first. These early block topics feel more like the one-liner microphone or the observational humor microphone, when there’s much deeper thoughts and issues to get at below his surface-level joke-writing.
His first major revelatory moment comes when he asks rhetorically at the end of his gun routine: “Do you see why I think myself into isolated asshole-y positions?”
I’d love to argue with him over some of them, such as his premise that liberals judge each other while Republicans welcome anyone. Liz Cheney would like a word. But unlike Brennan, who’s stumped by the proverbial fork in the road of “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” I’m much more content at this moment to avoid unnecessary arguments. Even as a professional critic.
I’d much rather key in the nifty trick of adding quick-cut editing when Brennan describes the negative headspace of his inner monologue. Or how we see inserted quick-cuts of Brennan actually trying all of the different therapies (from talk to shock to ketamine in between) he’s describing in his attempts to reverse his self-negativity. “Dude, how did you turn self-help into self-harm?” he wonders.
It’s almost as if he tapped into the same vein Taylor Swift did when she wrote her new single, “Anti-Hero,” singing “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem: It’s me.”
There are a couple of shockingly funny reveals at the end which further prove his point, including one I can safely describe: Brennan questioning why he doesn’t just do regular stand-up comedy.
But who’d want to see that?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Brennan worries why he won’t show himself kindness or grace. Even just by asking these questions and telling funny jokes along the way, even if some of them may back him into “isolated asshole-y positions,” that still puts him ahead of many other stand-ups in his age group and tax bracket.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.