Kyle Kinane - Shocks & Struts

Kyle Kinane is a wildman poet. He has been laughing at anti-vaxxers for some time… To their baseless claim that vaccines cause autism, he responds, “Fucking good… We probably need more autistic kids. They’re the ones that keep beating robots at chess.” It’s this type of serious thinking about our collective future that makes his new stand-up special Shocks & Struts perfect for our current moment.

To him, dinosaurs were “God’s little tricksters”; a laparoscopic appendectomy is a “lappy appy”; and a foreskin is “the devil’s calamari.” Using his unique parlance, the beloved comedian transforms our dull world into an emporium of the weird and wonderful.

Kyle recently bought a van – a car that fits his look of someone “who should be at home plotting to kidnap a Democratic governor” – and hit the road to “Jehovah’s Witness [his] bits around the country.” This special showcases another night of hilarity from his travels and a return to a live-action stand-up special, his first since 2018’s Netflix The Standups.

With his gruff voice, gentle heart, and ill-fated confidence around hotel buffets, Kyle delivers an hour of keen commentary and messy adventure. He wonders at how his pillows turned that color (?!), he explains the way to make everyone in a cruise ship hot tub immediately uncomfortable, and he marvels at pilots who aren’t intimidated by the hundreds of buttons in airplane cockpits, all of which should simply be labeled “Don’t Die!” Kyle Kinane is himself a skilled pilot of comedy. In fact, he’s like a comedy blue angel: darting and diving, taking big risks and pulling off tricks, giving us something to watch that thrills us and moves us too.