Some may argue that comedy doesn't belong at music festivals. The comedians often struggle outside their comfort zone of a nightclub or auditorium, and are relegated to being an overlooked sideshow. Pitchfork's series of comedians had their moments, but did very little to dispel that notion.
The evening started on Stage B with SNL writer and Chicago native Hannibal Buress, who provided a relatively entertaining set mixing various racial jokes with more topical humor, and one particularly funny bit about racism and apple juice. Buress managed to snag a few laughs here and there, but overall the crowd seemed unfamiliar with his work, and may have been saving their laughs for the more famous comedians soon to follow.
After what may have been the worst mid-act comedian of all time (some balding sad-sack magician whose only joke involved shitting in his magic hat), ""Daily Show"" correspondent Wyatt Cenac took the stage. His material was spotty, garnering occasional laughs at the end of a particularly clever rant, but generally fell flat. The twentysomething crowd was unimpressed by a bit about YouTube comments, and couldn't relate to most of Cenac's jokes on race. Undeterred, Cenac went after PETA, an unwise move when considering the hipster crowd chock full of vegans. Cenac also stopped on occasion when the nearby music from Robyn became too loud, and his methods of coping amounted to mumbling along to the song while asking dubious audience members to sing along, or simply lowering his head until he regained composure.
After another god-awful interlude that stretched the very definition of comedy, Michael Showalter took the stage, providing the most compelling and divisive set of the night. Showalter's material felt strained, and the audience didn't respond well to his decision to bring a laptop on stage and play random songs. Showalter was also incredibly distracted by the background music, confessing that he was borderline autistic, making it near-impossible for him to complete his set. Every joke featured an aggravated pause, and before long Showalter hit rock bottom, attacking heckling audience members who called out requests for Showalter to rehash his most popular bits from ""The State."" Showalter openly confessed to flopping, and sat in stony silence as the audience laughed uncomfortably.
But it was during these lulls, these absolute low points, that Showalter's flop became a truly brilliant bit of anti-comedy, and the fact that 75 percent of the audience wasn't in on it made it all the more hilarious for the remaining few. Considering that Showalter played random hip-hop samples on his laptop, pretended to read his jokes from a small notepad, attempted to keep prolonged conversations going with audience members, and delivered lines like ""what's with the World Cup? I could score more goals than those guys!"", it seems likely that Showalter had planned his meltdown from the beginning. Whatever the case, his schadenfreude was easily the highlight of Pitchfork's comedy lineup.
Unfortunately all of our writers (and 98 percent of the festivalgoers) missed Eugene Mirman's set to catch the end of Broken Social Scene or secure a spot for Modest Mouse, but it seems unlikely even Mirman's reliably quirky comedy could be more memorable than the Showalter meltdown.
—Kevin Slane
