Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jim Gaffigan: Dark Pale’ On Prime Video, The Comedian Takes On Death, Diarrhea And Dad Life

For his 10th stand-up special, and sixth in just the past six years, Jim Gaffigan has defected from Netflix to Amazon for a second time. Only this time, Gaffigan’s move is also accompanied by a move into more darker comedic territory.

JIM GAFFIGAN: DARK PALE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The comedian who became a mainstream success thanks to jokes about Hot Pockets and manatees has expanded his performance palette. In recent years, you’ve also seen Gaffigan as the leading man in the sci-fi drama, Linoleum, and co-starring in this summer’s limited series from Steven Soderbergh, Full Circle, on Max.

He’s also set to co-star in Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix film based on Seinfeld’s Pop-Tart joke, and the two stand-ups are touring arenas together this fall.

As a solo act, each of Gaffigan’s seven previous specials also has earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album. He filmed this hour in Tampa in February, directing it himself, as he joked about how the past three years of the pandemic have changed all of us as a society, and how that’s made him think more about life and death.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: In his obsessiveness with mining a seemingly ordinary topic or premise for as many jokes as he can, Gaffigan shares that trait with Seinfeld, so it makes perfect sense for the two men to co-headline an arena tour this fall.

Memorable Jokes: Gaffigan lets us know we’re in for a different type of hour right from the start. After a fun little misdirect or two regarding why he’s wearing a mask for this Tampa audience, he references the late 2002 monkeypox scare with a joke about how it may sound like the name of a children’s cereal, and yet: “What’s the prize inside? Sex with men.”

Then he reminds them and us how much we’ve numbed ourselves into moving on with life, three years into the pandemic. “We were like, ‘Hundreds of people have died today!’ Now we’re like, ‘Hundreds of people have died today — let’s go to a comedy show!” That might sound cynical to some, but then he paints a broader picture by re-enacting what it must’ve been like inside a plane crash in which the aircraft nose-dived for three minutes, more than long enough for some passengers and crew alike to stop screaming and start behaving weirdly, perhaps?

If the lesson of the pandemic is a reminder that we’re all going to die, then Gaffigan has some mischievous suggestions for his own funeral, from turning it into a surprise party for his guests, to dressing him in pajamas and prop him up in a sitting position, rigging his hand to raise, and perhaps recording an announcement, too. Gaffigan earns his first true applause break for a joke about how Catholics are supposed to kneel and pray at the funeral casket, and what they might actually be saying in said prayer.

But that’s not all! He’s also got jokes about why dead men wear suits and makeup, and even has a reality TV pitch. Groan all you want. But as Gaffigan adds, at least it’s falling in line with your expectations for him: “Dead or Cake is a food joke!”

He similarly has plenty of punchlines for premises as basic as Montezuma’s Revenge and Starbucks; for the former, he manages to compare Montezuma’s supposed superpower to the Avengers, to Oprah, and to Liam Neeson’s set of skills in the Taken film franchise.

And in perhaps his most inspired move, Gaffigan later manages to impress with a Jimmy Stewart impersonation that also serves as a double callback.

By the 23-minute mark, even Gaffigan’s trademark inner voice critiques his act: “His entire show was death and diarrhea.”

Not quite. Because there’s still more than a half-hour left, marked most memorably by a foray into the Old Testament, wherein Gaffigan imagines and re-enacts God coming up with the Biblical plagues and chastising his assistant, and then our current society, for somehow not getting the messages he’s sending down to us today with global warming and the pandemic.

Our Take: Some of the premises in the latter stages of this hour, ironically the parts where Gaffigan’s material gets lighter relative to the earlier bits on death and diarrhea, might not land punchlines quite as hard because of them. Who hasn’t questioned the sanity of a hot air balloon basket? Who hasn’t thought of how little we use our cell phones as phones now, or how our cell phone cameras make buying photos from strangers somehow obsolete?

George Carlin might’ve beaten Gaffigan and most everyone else to the punch 15 years ago by joking about how long to keep your dead friend’s phone numbers, but only by now could you also find a comedian such as Gaffigan to remind us that strangers will invariably inherit those phone numbers, and might wonder how they ended up in your family’s group chat. Over the end credits, Gaffigan also shows us a photo of his dead aunt referenced in that bit, along with photos and birth/death dates for his other dearly departed friends and family, all accompanied with yet one more callback.

And yet, for all the deep-digging into death, it feels as though Gaffigan could’ve gone further than he did with some of the ideas brought up by his family, such as the notion of who and what gets classified as white trash.

At the rate he’s churning out specials, perhaps we’ll find out more about that next year, though.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t be mistaken. This “dark pale” version of Gaffigan has always existed in our comedic universe, at least as far back as his Mr. Universe special more than a decade ago. Within his new bit about God, Gaffigan notes that He sent down 10 plagues, and comparing them to albums, imagines if God might plan a retrospective of some sort. Of course, Gaffigan himself is on his 10th stand-up special. Whenever he does his retrospective, he might find himself regarding Dark Pale as perhaps his best work since Mr. Universe.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.