He has a hit Netflix animated series in Big Mouth and also turned his schtick with John Mulaney into a hit Broadway run and Netflix special, Oh Hello On Broadway, but what is Nick Kroll’s stand-up like? You might be able to guess, but even if you’re a comedy nerd who remembers Kroll’s early performances pre-Kroll Show, you still might wonder what he’s like now that he’s all grown up with a wife and son.
NICK KROLL: LITTLE BIG BOY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Kroll’s first special, Thank You Very Cool, could be viewed as sort of a back-door pilot for what became Kroll Show on Comedy Central.
A decade later, the comedian and actor who started popping up onscreen in shows such as Best Week Ever and The League is operating on another level, not quite a fantasy league of his own, but you get where this wordplay is going since having a successful show and settling down with marriage and fatherhood means his best weeks ever have kept on coming. This special, filmed in Washington, D.C., where he went to college at Georgetown and first met and befriended Mulaney, focuses on his journey to personal success, rebounding from heartbreaks and digestive mishaps to find love and perhaps also his own manhood in the process.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Not a special, but Kroll’s animated show Big Mouth, which also mines the comedian’s real-life adolescence for jokes about puberty and bodily fluids. And his use of an inner monologue doesn’t sound quite like Jim Gaffigan’s, although his functions in a similar manner.
Memorable Jokes: In fact, Kroll’s inner critic sounds just like Jason Statham, insulting him and keeping his ego in check. Not that Kroll needed help with the self-loathing, based on his graphic recollections on diarrhea and heartbreak.
He also goes into detail about how he successfully quit smoking through hypnosis, and then later went to a second hypnotist for help with a seemingly less serious addiction. When he senses the audience might not believe him, he calls their bluff in a big way.
And if you watch the credits, you’ll also find video evidence backing up another story of Kroll’s about when he went on a trip with his future wife to Italy, rented a car, and realized she was the one love for him. The video clip might not reveal the most embarrassing parts of that story, but it still might make you cry laughing.
Speaking of which, Kroll cops to crying at too many things, and cites as an example what he imagines as an uplifting Lowe’s commercial…which might actually be an actual memory he had of a very real TV ad for the home improvement big-box store chain. This ad aired way back when Kroll was but a wee Caveman. Does it make you tear up?
Our Take: Kroll’s definitely neither the first nor the last stand-up comedian to regale us with stories about their need and failure to make it to the toilet on time, diarrhea or no. But these are the kinds of jokes which have made Big Mouth a hit with viewers, and there’s a reason audiences continue to eat this up, so to speak.
And if all you know of Kroll’s recent work is his mix of drama and comedy in movies such as Loving or Don’t Worry Darling, or his voice-over work, or his hosting of the Independent Spirit Awards, then perhaps you’d need an improper introduction into his more juvenile humor, the kind of thinking that ends a story about his childhood karate days with “I came in a white belt, and left a brown belt.” Or a story straight out of Big Mouth where Kroll gets pantsed at his first co-ed party in the seventh grade, which Kroll claims as his origin story for becoming a comedian.
For all of that, though, there’s also a more sensitive side to Kroll that he wants us to see. The guy who argues why we’re all mean to our mothers for good reason, and yet should cut them some slack and call them up more often.
Perhaps it just took this little big boy becoming father to a little boy of his own to realize that for himself.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t worry darlings. Even if Kroll doesn’t spill the tea on what happened on set here, he’s still more than willing to open his big mouth with embarrassing details from his own life. As he says: “Guys, we are all just doing our best.” His best is better than OK.
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.