If dark and uncomfortable humor is your thing, you’ll love Sean.
On November 7, 2014, comedian Sean O’Connor, who has been featured on Comedy Central’s “The Half Hour,” came to New York to perform for the New York Comedy Festival at the infamous Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea. The night started off strong with comedian Jack Knight taking the stage and opening with how his day has been watching Aaron Carter rehearse for his show. What made this opening hilarious was that Knight was on point when he described his experience watching Aaron rehearse with the 20 other people who were still fans of his. His description was completely on point. He also talked about how much of a struggle is being a Kanye West fan because everyone hates Kanye because he thinks “too highly of himself.” But, as Knight describes it, we will all be sorry when the rapture comes and Kanye is saved because he is God’s son. Knight talked about a lot of topics such as how strong white guilt truly is and how he is anti-gentrification, as he puts it, because as the crime rate goes up in his neighborhood, his rent goes down. If it were up to him, the government should bring back drugs, gangs, and guns so he could live for free. Knight was hilarious and had the crowd laughing throughout his entire set.
After Knight left the stage, the headliner of the night, Sean O’Connor took the stage, and right off the bat we could tell that his energy was anything but high. However, even though it seemed like he just woke up from a nap, his low level of energy really worked for him, especially with his type of stand-up material. Sean’s way of performing is to tell very dark stories about his life and try to see how much of a terrible person each audience member is. The theme of his routine was what he called “trolling.” He started off talking about how he loves Halloween because it’s one of the best times of the year to be as annoying as humanly possible. He goes on to tell us how he loves to guess people’s costumes wrong and how by doing that, it typically result in him getting punched in the face. Although it may not seem so bad, Sean has a way of taking the most insignificant moments of his life and telling them in the most humorous way possible. After that joke, he decided to continue with the theme of trolling where he treated the audience to his own little “30 for 30” video describing what trolling is. To everyone’s enjoyment, his video just contained a countless amount of penises and other homoerotic pornographic images, and that was probably the best way to describe trolling to anyone. Sean was unpredictable with his stories and the way he went rom a lighthearted beginning to a very dark and uncomfortable ending where audiences didn’t know whether to groan or laugh. That sort of reaction is probably one of the best reactions a comedian can get and Sean thrived off of the audiences’ discomfort. With his dark humor he made the audience sad then confused then happy and then sad again, which in itself is such a hard thing to accomplish. The night was filled with laughs though and Sean absolutely killed it. It is no surprise why some consider him the future of comedy.
–Vinesh Vora (@vineshv1206)
