This material we saw live is the same material in Neal Brennan’s new special, Blocks, released today on Netflix. I saw this material live at the Den Theater in Chicago in July.

What Unacceptable Is:

Because of the serious and emotional weighty nature of Three Mics and because Unacceptable premiered on broadway and seemed more like a one man show (it was marketed like theatre, advertised as 75 minutes long with no intermission, it had a director, it had a fancy blue stylized poster with his face broken up into four pieces, and Brennan’s instagram was full of celebrities attending the show during its six week Broadway run), I was expecting more of a Birbigliaesque show with one main through-line, operating as more of a serious examination of a single topic punctuated by jokes.

Instead what I got was the finest hour of traditional standup comedy that I have seen in a long time.

Brennan’s entrance to the stage perfectly encapsulated what Unacceptable is about. Chicago headliner and beloved local comedian, Chris Higgins, opened the show for Brennan and the transition from him leaving the stage to Brennan coming on stage was the most awkward transition I’ve seen at a comedy show in a long time. Higgins just kind of left, the announcer introduced Brennan (why not have Higgins do it as is par for the course in comedy shows?), and Brennan came on a few seconds too late and didn’t acknowledge or thank Higgins.

I am sure it wasn’t a conscious diss. It was yet another example of what Brennan described in one of his excellent jokes of the evening: Social interactions for him are like looking at the trash bin with separate holes for trash, recycling, and composting. He looks at each hole and makes his best guess but walks away thinking “I am pretty sure I didn’t do the right thing.”

That’s what Unacceptable is about. Brennan doesn’t think he fits with normal society. Drugs don’t really work on him, he doesn’t drink, his dog isn’t his best friend, and he is unmarried at 48 with no kids.

But more than acting as a deeply meaningful emotional anchor like the old man and the pool in Birbiglia’s new special or depression in Brennan’s own Three Mics, the Unacceptable idea is just a trojan horse to his hour of lethally written jokes. And Brennan treats it as such. His only reference to “Unacceptable” is at the beginning of the show when he dismissively says the show is called that because he doesn’t fit in and thinks his behavior is often thought of as unacceptable. It was as though someone forced him to title the show something* and he went along with it and just wanted to get it out of the way at the start of the show so he could do what he really wanted to do.

And boy does he do it. I don’t mean to be trite and banal but Unacceptable is hilarious.

It’s not hilarious because of trickery. Brennan doesn’t get by on charisma and energy. He doesn’t get by on detailed, long-form stories. He doesn’t get by on talking about how he knows a bunch of celebrities, although there is a great joke about Mulaney and he closes with a joke that Chris Rock made about him at a big Netflix party. He doesn’t get by on woke clapter. He is the living embodiment of the height of what standup comedy can achieve; expertly written lethal jokes.

Jokes in Unacceptable:

So let’s jump in and discuss some of these real jokes.

•Brennan started with material that couldn’t have been part of the original Unacceptable material from the Broadway show, based on when the events he discussed took place. He gave his take on the Will Smith Chris Rock slap. A lot has been said but his take focusing on how Will Smith graciously took all kinds of criticism about Jada’s infidelity, including publicly from 50 Cent on instagram, was an original angle. I think after this is when the Unacceptable material really started.

•Brennan opens the Unacceptable material by talking about how he is a liberal, obviously. He is a skinny white dude. He talks about how hard it is to get accepted by liberals. Republicans accept anyone who wants to join them. But with liberals, everyone is trying to out liberal each other.

In this section, Unacceptable is hilarious in an enduring, memorable way. Indeed, it contains bits that absolutely could be Chappelle show sketches, most notably How Liberal Are You?, the game show that puts liberals in impossible positions. If anyone doubts that Brennan meaningfully contributed to the Chappelle Show, this section of Unacceptable puts those doubts to rest.

•One of the biggest laughs Brennan got during this show involved a joke about liberals carefully playing jenga so as not to offend regarding transgender issues. This joke requires him to bump into a stool and after doing it night after night for weeks, he injured his shin during his Broadway run and had to change the choreography.

•It shouldn’t be a surprise that Unacceptable contains a whole section on race. Brennan is best known for co-creating the Chappelle show, his first podcast with Moshe Kasher and his latest podcast, How Neal Feel, frequently interrogated racial issues, and he has talked about race his entire career (his criminally under-appreciated first special was titled “Women and Black Dudes“.)

•And even though material about the relationship between black people and police has been done time and time again by countless comedians, Brennan’s jokes are still wonderfully original. His reference to the song I Shot the Sheriff was my biggest laugh of the night. And another joke that he makes in this section contained possibly the biggest audience laugh off the night. Hint: it involves a record label and Brennan asserting that the joke would kill at a clan rally, another reason Brennan is unacceptable; he makes jokes about race that mean one thing but could be interpreted in nefarious ways.

•Brennan also talks about getting a dog and how he is either the only one who doesn’t understand the proper relationship between humans and dogs or the only one who does. I can’t imagine anything more Neal Brennan-like than not seeing your dog as your best friend.

•Another huge laugh for me involved Brennan’s treatment of the issue of gun violence and his advice for what we should do for emotionally troubled men (“it’s always men!”) who ask to buy a gun. I especially liked this material because it wasn’t liberal hackery. He opens it by saying that republicans always say it’s not guns; it’s mental health and liberals always say it has nothing do with mental heath; it’s guns. “No, it’s both,” Brennan said, and, of course, he is right but hearing a liberal quote the statistic that 2/3 of gun deaths are from suicide is a rare thing indeed and it gave Brennan credibility that made his punch line all the funnier. It’s far easier to present an extremely partisan view of one side of the issue and go to extremes to get laughs. It’s another thing to present an honest, nuanced view of the issue.

•Alcohol wouldn’t get approved by the FDA today.

•Another main area where Brennan is unacceptable is that he is unmarried at 48 and has no kids. He has had plenty of long relationships but none have worked out. He breaks down the difficulty of finding a good relationship using statistics, and figured out that the odds of you ending up happily involved with the person you are currently on a date with are 6%. It’s a hilariously specific analysis of the topic that paints a wonderful picture of what Brennan’s attitude is on dates. Can you imagine showing up to a first date with the attitude that there was a 6% chance you’d be happily with this person forever? His joke about how dating a model is like driving a dunebuggy was one of the best one-liners of the show.

Live Audience Reception:

It feels obvious to me that once this special is filmed and goes up on Netflix that it will be a hit because of how hard it landed with the audiences it could most easily offend. While Brennan was talking about kicking fetuses down State Street, I saw a very pregnant woman in the front row losing herself in laughter. I saw uptight looking women on dates laughing at the 6% material. I saw guys who look like they have a safe full of guns laughing at the gun material.

At other times, you could see it hit with exactly the people you’d expect. Brennan did very little crowd work but from the one tiny bit he did do, we figured out that there was a 36 year old single guy in the front row. As Brennan talked about how most marriages are miserable and most husbands seems like hostages, this guy had to restrain himself from standing up with his fist in the air.

Brennan ended the show by stating that the Unacceptable portion of the night was over and would be on Netflix and he was going to do some new material that wasn’t part of the Unacceptable show. And this material is great too. His Tiger Woods joke, in particular, is absolutely fantastic and totally quotable.

Brennan & Chappelle Coda:

Have you ever had a friend you could always just trust to be 100% honest with you? The friend you ask if you really want to know if a dress makes you look fat? Protecting your feelings is a never priority with this friend. They just always give it to you straight. Neal Brennan is this friend. He comes across as cold but really he’s just your honest, blunt friend. When all your other friends are getting drunk at the party, he’s the sober one who will tell you at brunch the next morning that you made an ass of yourself and need to cut back.

I think Neal Brennan was born this way and this is his deeply engrained personality but I think living in the specter of Chappelle and the resentment that must create has heightened this trait.

Calling Chappelle popular is silly. He is a force of his own. Everyone who sees him is thrilled to see him. Audiences will burst into tears if he makes a surprise appearance. He transcends famous. Who on earth is cooler than Chappelle? He stays up late drinking and talking and going to cool small spots, he is famously aware of in every city. Even his latest Netflix special, if you can call it that, where he doesn’t even do standup but gives a speech accepting an award from his high school is enjoyable to watch just because being in his presence is so damn pleasant.

Then, in comes Neal Brennan. His contribution to the Chappelle show is largely unappreciated. No matter how successful he is on Netflix, he is rarely mentioned without Chappelle also coming up. (On a recent Rogan podcast, Brennan went out of his way to make sure the audience knew that Rogan, not Brennan, was the one who brought up Chappelle.) When invited to Chappelle’s cool small spots in the city, Brennan probably says “no thanks” and goes home sober after a vegan dinner to get to bed early. He is a self-described “bed boy,” who secretly loved being shut in during the pandemic lock downs. Being in Brennan’s presence isn’t that pleasant. I shared a brief elevator ride with him at the Montreal festival in 2015 and he was exactly how he describes himself in Three Mics.

But he is a straight up murderer. He isn’t on Netflix accepting awards, smiling and laughing. When you see him live, he isn’t going to ask what you do for a living and make jokes about your banker job. He is too busy giving you the most laughs per minute of any comedian working today. He prepares. He writes. And he kills. If my family was taken hostage and the hostage-taker told me I had to laugh as much and as hard as possible in an hour long period to see my family again, I am going Brennan every time.

Neal Brennan’s joke writing has been better than Chappelle’s for years and probably always was. If we could know who wrote which Chappelle sketches, I think we would see this very plainly.

Going back to the material at hand, I wonder how much this iteration of Unacceptable differed from the New York show. It’s hard for me to see how this show I saw could have required a director as Unacceptable had in New York. It was just Neal doing standup. Why did he need a director? Why did this standup show get six weeks on Broadway when virtually no other standup show other than Birbiglia’s New One operates that way? Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. The material is absolutely top notch and the joke writer is lethal.

If you can see Neal Brennan do comedy ever anywhere on anything, run and don’t walk. There’s no stronger joke writer.

*I wrote this months ago and just found out Brennan re-titled his special “Blocks” for Netflix so it looks like he agrees with me.