In Stevie Martin: clout, at the Monkey Barrel, Martin plays a successful “online comedian” - which she calls herself before retching.
The gags are almost relentless
She goes on to lament how the social media content she creates is now dictated by “the algorithms” and so she has returned to the ‘realness’ of live stand-up...which she explores
through sharing her own TikTok videos, Tweets and memes.
Much like a reel or TikTok, there is little momentum leading up to a joke but the gags are almost
relentless. A lot of the jokes rely on the visual aids on the onstage screens, which if you
blink, you miss, as Martin moves onto the next projection. The “in memorial” slide of “jokes
cut from the show” is funny on irony alone. “It’s so hard to make anything new now when
everything’s on the internet, which kind of takes the pressure off,” Martin posits. “So why
try?”
There’s no denying that Martin has most of the audience in stitches, undoubtedly helped by
the fact that the room is mostly full of her fellow, equally-as-online millennials. It is quite meta
to complain about what social media has done to comedy while heavily relying on it for a
comedy show, though it’s unclear if this is intentional. It would be interesting to see if Martin
could hold a room and our attention spans sans tech.
