perhaps best known to most people as the strange and extremely inappropriate Hazel on 30 Rock, took on San Francisco's Fillmore for a one-hour Comedy Central special -- her first and, she says, her last.
PHOTOS: Behind the Scenes of '30 Rock'Schaal, who has also been a Daily Show correspondent and currently plays the part of Louise on Bob's Burgers, spent a lot of time Tweeting before the special aired to discourage people from viewing it, calling it "a nightmare," and telling her friend Kurt Braunohler for Vulture, "it definitely didn't go the way I wanted it to go. Because it went badly. I just can't even believe they're going to air it."
But for the first 30 minutes, Schaal flies high, hitting the mark on everything, engaging her audience and successfully incorporating props (like a particularly amorous pot and spoon) as well as a well executed mime routine as a magician's assistant. She ranted about taints "nestled like an island between two black holes" -- a favored subject -- but did so with an energy and pizzazz that lifted it from being simply vulgar to being genuinely funny. I couldn't imagine, at that point, what could go so wrong for her to insist so vehemently that people not watch. Was it all a joke?
That's the same question I asked myself just a little later, when after a lazy eye joke fell completely flat, Schaal totally lost it. She said the joke had been her grandmother's and seemed genuinely upset at the poor response. Unable to get past the moment, she corpsed repeatedly on the pronunciation of the word "airplane," saying it over and over again to a chuckling audience who, like me at that point, thought it was part of the joke. It wasn't. Right?
And here the horror of secondhand embarrassment, usually felt far more keenly at an amateur stand-up performance than a sleek one-hour production on a comedy network, really set in. Schaal completely unraveled, and things only got worse as the audience went silent and sat in shock as she raced off the stage. Though she returned later to a willing, though skeptical crowd, she spoke seriously about how her surrealism is not "in" right now, while autobiographical stuff like Louie C.K. does is. A few half-hearted jokes got a decent response from the muted crowd, but when she was completely shown up by a sassy young girl who came on stage to do a sudden fast-paced and hilarious monologue (which I presume was part of the act, but then again …), the show was definitely over.
Schaal then tried to regain the earlier fervor of her performance and the crowd's former energy with a rant about a horse, which fell totally flat. At this point, after she leaves the stage again, there is a short video that runs (presumably created after the special aired) to try and make light of her meltdown, but it just adds to the carnage. When she returns again she tells the audience, "so, this comedy special didn't work. This probably is not going to air at all. Please don't upload this or tell anyone about it," before performing an infamous sketch with Braunohler that, if Comedy Central's editing is to be believed, made the crowd actually leave before the performance was over. Schaal closes the show with another video sketch lamenting about her dead career.
No comments:
Post a Comment