On the most recent edition of Saturday Night Live, Kyle Mooney brought back one of the strangest, most off-putting characters in his repertoire: Bruce Chandling, a hack stand-up comic whose utter lack of talent is rivaled only by his desperate need for the audience’s approval. Sad sack Chandling has no real “material” to speak of, just some trite, half-formed observations and lots of nervous energy. In an otherwise lackluster episode of SNL, Mooney’s tense, painfully protracted appearance at the Weekend Update desk counted as something of a highlight. But, bizarre as he is, Bruce Chandling is not altogether new. In a new piece for Slate, writer Matthew Dessem points out that the character is merely the latest deliberately awful comedian whose persona is a satirical critique of comedy itself. It’s a lineage that spans decades.
No discussion of anti-comedy would be complete without mentioning Andy Kaufman, who did incredibly inept impressions as Foreign Man and openly berated audiences as lounge lizard Tony Clifton. That set the precedent for Greg Turkington, who created the character of Neil Hamburger, billed as “America’s Funnyman,” armed with an endless supply of phlegm and tasteless one-liners about celebrities. On Mr. Show, Tom Kenny portrayed Hawaiian shirt-clad laughmeister Kedzie Matthews, who seemingly learned all the worst lessons from Robin Williams, Gallagher, and Carrot Top. England’s answer to the anti-comedy phenomenon is Ted Chippington, whose clumsy, monotonous jokes all begin the same way: “Walking down this road the other day…” The article also includes a discussion of Norm MacDonald, who has occasionally been lumped in with the anti-comedians but utterly rejects the label. “Anti-comics, when you come right down to it, are critics,” he says, “which may be why they find favor among, guess who, critics.”