I have never wanted to know less about the personal life or background of a performer than I have with Conner O’Malley. And yet there are a few things I do know: He is a comedian, in his late 30s, and was raised on the North Side and trained at Annoyance Theatre, where he met his wife, “Saturday Night Live” alum Aidy Bryant. I know he once worked for 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and that he wrote for “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” That said, for best results, to fall down the comedy rabbit hole being dug by O’Malley — a portal almost entirely found on YouTube — try and learn nothing else about this guy.
He is one of the most original voices in contemporary comedy, and if you’ve never even heard the name, that’s perfect. You’re in the sweet spot. O’Malley brings to mind Steve Martin in the late 1970s, or even Andy Kaufman, comedy that sings when the wall between the person on stage and who that person actually is remains opaque.
Comedy that overwhelms through a performer’s sheer commitment to a role.
A few weeks ago O’Malley released an hour-long special on YouTube titled “Stand Up Solutions,” (content warning) and it’s fast becoming one of those things forwarded to you online out of wonder at how unhinged O’Malley comes across. It’s also remarkable, because unlike Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman, who celebrated absurdity for its own sake, O’Malley’s brand of performance art is more pointedly speaking truth to power. Specifically, he’s skewering capitalism and its promises. There is a dark ugliness lying beneath it all.
Like many of his videos, “Stand Up Solutions” came out of the blue, with O’Malley buried inside a character short-circuiting. He rarely plays Conner O’Malley, but embodiments of delusion. He always looks 90 seconds from a breakdown, even as his uneasy, toothy sunniness sweats to pretend that this dude? This dude is KILLING … IT!
He screams a lot.
He’s obnoxious, but wants to be friends — needs to be friends. There is a quick moment in “Stand Up Solutions” where he seems to break character and explain most of his stage routine: “Imagine Joe Rogan without the money,” he whispers, holding hands with an audience member for an uncomfortably long time. The premise of “Stand Up Solutions” is that this isn’t a comedy show but a product demonstration for his angel investors. O’Malley identifies himself as Richard Eagleton, graduate of engineering and Dr. Pepper sciences (“there are 23 flavors that we know of”) from the University of Wisconsin. He wears khakis and a Stand Up Solutions-branded hat and polo. He explains: From his hometown of Des Plaines, he’s developed an AI stand-up comic that is run on 5G and harvested datasets compromised of “one-third of everything on FunnyorDie.com and every episode of ‘Real Time with Bill Maher.’” The AI comedian is named KENN, Kinetic Emotional Neural Network. Like much of what he says, Richard delivers this in a way that suggests he doesn’t understand tech but it sounds awesome.
The future, in general, sounds awesome to Richard.
“The AI space is on fire!” he screams. There will be so much free labor! “We’ve hacked slavery!” he announces, then quickly explains this won’t be “like the bad kind of slavery.”
“Are we experiencing social cohesion?” he asks.
It is a TEDTalk in hell, scary because what O’Malley is saying is not far from the technology and marketing playbooks that Richard worships. If Steve Martin’s stand-up act was centered around a hacky comic who believed he was the smoothest, O’Malley is cheerleading for a future everyone knows will not benefit him. But he can’t focus. He marvels at how Google can adjust the national borders of maps depending on who is viewing (which is not a joke): “A group of 30 people in the Silicon Valley went ahead and made a geopolitical decision that affects over 2 billion people with no political oversight!” And you know what else is so super cool? His 2015 and 2018 Toyota Rav4s!
Because Richard has a hard time staying on track, his “presentation” is digressive: O’Malley goes into the history of Des Plaines, a traffic incident on Golf Road brought on by USB ports, Croatia’s best vaping artists, becoming a member of the Illinois Naval Reserve (“the world’s only freshwater navy”) and becoming the Punisher. He believes Ray Kroc had the original McDonald brothers “unpersoned” and dumped at sea.
But the core of O’Malley’s comedy is always a very blue-collar Midwestern resentment, and at times embarrassment, a feeling of being left behind by gentrification. Ostentatious wealth is his target, but he rarely plays successful people. His characters are the people who want to believe the promises of billionaires, the people who pour their abandonment and instability into businesses that never have their backs.
If his face looks familiar, it’s because O’Malley’s had roles in Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave” and Adult Swim; his is a cult following found inside larger cult followings. For a couple of decades, he’s been shooting short videos (with the help of collaborators) around Chicago and New York City that raise self-delusion to an art, with a hint of Borat. The fruit is sometimes low-hanging. He’s stood in Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie outlet mall and vowed to protect shoppers from ISIS. His Wrigleyville Cubs Playboys shorts throw the neighborhood’s caustic bro-culture into pretty obvious mud. But Mark Seevers, his Donald Trump superfan who runs an Infowars-like website named TruthHunters.com out of his basement apartment in Rosemont, is so delightfully convincing he barely gets a second look when O’Malley attends Trump’s inauguration. Another video, satirizing an incredibly unaffordable new neighborhood in New York City, offers “Amazon Alpha”: For $400,000 a year, you get double voting power in elections.
O’Malley’s videos began more than a decade ago with very brief Vine shorts in which he played a wealth-obsessed bicyclist who would race up anyone on a street in New York or Chicago who looked rich or drove a cool car and shout compliments at them. If you watched the videos as they arrived, O’Malley went from screaming “You’re a job creator!” at rich people to screaming “I submit my will to you!” Some people look unironically pleased. Some roll up windows. By the end of the Vines, he’s jabbering at the old Taco Bell sign in Wrigleyville that wearing a Cubs hat “keeps you from demons and the army from coming to kill your wife!” There’s a great 17-minute compilation on YouTube (titled “The Transformation”) that strings them into one anarchic dream.
“Stand Up Solutions” is the closest Conner O’Malley’s comedy has come to the mainstream, and it’s breath-stealing wacko, one of the funniest things I’ve seen this year. But as soon as it ended — no joke — YouTube gave me an ad for a new AI writing service. It promised to save hours, even years, time I could put into a more fulfilling life.
Just me, my new Toyota Rav4 and the open road.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
