I have a new pet peeve. And it happens to be white American male comedians in their late forties and early fifties. I call it “new” because it has only been months since I’ve started to write about stand-up, mainly the specials that come on Netflix. And these comedians rule that space. People mostly love them and laugh with them. But I find most of them problematic, boring, and unfunny. That obviously comes out in my articles, and one time I got into an argument with one of these comedians. I won’t go into details, but sometimes I just check my messenger, run through the conversation, and sigh at it. Naturally, it’s normal for me to be apprehensive about Chad Daniels: Empty Nester, the latest Netflix comedy special that has a fifty-something white American male comedian at the helm of it. But ten minutes into it, I realize this guy is different after all. That’s a big sigh of relief!
Daniels’ comedy set is called Empty Nester. The title is a reference to the loneliness that comes with living alone. Daniels gets there by telling the story of how he felt after dropping his daughter off at college and then coming back to his home, all alone and miserable. So much so that he ate a pizza without cutting it and dropped some of the grease on his bare thighs. He realizes that loneliness is going to kill him, and he can’t sustain it. So in two weeks or so, he ends up getting gratified by someone. That’s the first genuinely funny joke out of the gates. But the whole thing might also be scarily relatable for many.
The relatability factor in Daniel’s stand-up set is pretty high. By that, I don’t mean everything he says; every joke he makes is something that I relate to. But all of it is relevant, and most of it is actually funny. Daniels is very good at telling a story and then articulating it before bringing the joke out of it. It’s almost like the three-act magic trick structure from that Chris Nolan movie.
Daniels starts by tossing around a bunch of jokes, which don’t really land. But then he gets into the stories—of him and his son stumbling onto a brother and sister at a restaurant who are kissing each other on the lips. That’s a jibe at incest, of course. He looks at the audience, asking a woman what she would do if she got kissed by her brother. She is inaudible. Daniels points out that the ideal answer has to be murder here. He asks the same of another woman. She says her brother has a different mother and then hesitates with a “so!” There you have the joke, which may or may not be scripted, but the comedian clearly delivers here. He also subtly brings in inappropriate touching and how one should never do it. Daniels’ example is his own daughter Olivia, whom he has never kissed on the lips. Not to mention, he asked the same question to both his daughter and son. The daughter said she would murder him, and the son’s reply was that he would kill himself.
Moving on, I was very glad to see Daniel proudly announcing himself as anti-religious. Well, he only targets the Catholics here, which is even better in my book. One of Daniel’s jokes in this segment is about people arguing that churches have been responsible for doing good for people as well. Daniels agrees, but he has an argument too; the good is definitely outweighed by the bad. His example? Someone might make a bake sale, but then a kid might have trouble sleeping with the lights out. It’s a dark joke and pokes at the whole pedophilia culture in the Catholic church, and it’s always great to see an artist actively trying to make people aware of it. Kudos!
Daniel’s final joke is the second-best of the set. He was at a hotel for four days and extremely lonely. A football game was on, and he was very much invested in it. Suddenly he heard a knock, and it was two armed policemen at his door. What was the matter? There was a report of domestic violence against him. So he let the police search his hotel room and bathroom. What exactly happened, though? It turns out a woman was next to his room because she heard Daniels screaming at someone using the “b-word.” She heard it right, but Daniels was only watching the match and shooting at a player. The joke is effectively a simple one, but Daniels is at the top of his game with the situational comedy; that helps him end the set on a high.
One of the many issues I have with the old white male comedians is how easily they bring their wives or partners into their performances and slander them in the name of comedy. It’s supposed to be funny, but I mostly cringe when it happens. So when Daniel mentions his current girlfriend, Kelsey, I was thinking the man might lose the plot from here on. But that doesn’t happen. Not that he puts his girlfriend on a high horse; in fact, he does joke about her wearing glasses, having a peanut allergy, and her cats, but it’s never funny, and you can clearly see that the man is not trying to put his partner in a bad light. This, of course, brings us to the best joke—at least the one I found the funniest. When Daniels and Kelsey had a conversation about having kids, Daniels refused to have any more. His reason was that he already had two of them: a twenty-four-year-old son and a twenty-year-old daughter. But that’s not where the joke lies. Daniel’s son is about to get married. The comedian is a bit concerned, given he’s only twenty-four and the bride-to-be is a year younger than him. So he floats the difficult question to his son: is he too young to be engaged? The son responds with another question: is dad Daniels too old to have a girlfriend? Clearly, Daniel is not afraid of making fun of himself.
