David Cross might have an impressive resume as an actor, in addition to his own projects as a writer and director. But he tells her Consequence, stand-up will always play a role in his career, for “the simple fact that I love doing it. I will always want to do it, I imagine.”
Your new special, The worst dad in the world., debuts on YouTube this week, after making its initial premiere on comedy streaming service Veeps last November. making the The worst dad in the world. The tour was “a blast,” Cross says, something he appreciated even more because he couldn't tour with his previous special. I am from the future, due to the pandemic. “I will always be disappointed that we couldn't take that goal on the road, but it was fun to do it. And I'm really happy to be able to tour again, because there was a period of time where I didn't know if that would ever be a possibility. So there was more joy than I normally would have, and I have a lot. “I really enjoy doing it.”
Like the vast majority of stand-up specials, The worst dad in the world. It was edited together from two different performances, recorded on the same night in Chicago, Illinois. Unlike most stand-up specials, where the editing ideally creates the illusion that it's just a performance, there are multiple points where that artifice is abandoned, with clear edits between performances, which Cross says that it was not “a calculated approach.”
“That just appeals to me,” he continues. “I don't like anything too clever.”
This is highlighted most prominently midway through the special, when Cross invites audience members to come up on stage to perform a scene written with him, and the editing flows between the two different versions of the bit. “If nothing else, it shows you that I did this every night, at every show. So I like that. And it allowed me, once established, to take the most interesting shots of each person. So you're still doing the script as is. But I also definitely wanted to include the whole thing where the guy didn't understand how to read that line. I thought that was funny. So it really is the best of both worlds.”
Bringing an audience member onstage in this way, Cross says, is “a fun, superficial kind of theatrical element,” but, as he adds, “you never know how it's going to turn out. I had to stop some people and ask them to leave, because they were too drunk, obnoxious, or trying to throw a punch. That happened when she was in Glasgow: the lady decided that she had her own jokes of hers and I said to her: 'You have to go, because I've already done the work, thank you very much.' And some people were too nervous, even though they volunteered to go up. So it's an element that's not just a guy doing a monologue on stage. It has a very lively feeling and every show is different.”
When asked to rate the two audience members who appear in the special, Cross says, “I thought the lady did a pretty good job. She would give it a 7.7. I think the gentleman was a little less in tune with that and she would give him a 5.8”.
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