Everyone has something that would make them snap. Losing a job perhaps. The death of a loved one. For Conner O’Malley’s character in one of the funniest sketches on the series “I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson,” it’s a bumper sticker that reads, “Honk if you’re horny.”
He is, so he does. Then in a virtuosic display of mania, he groans, jumps out of his car, randomly spins in a circle and acts aggrieved beyond reason. Why, he needs to know from the owner of the sticker, is there no relief? Bending over in full-body agony, O’Malley assumes that the sign was posted by someone who “helps guys so horny that their stomach hurts.” Then he leaps in the air pointing at himself, howling unnecessarily but also poignantly: “’Cause that’s what I am!”
This is deeply stupid, of course. But also, it’s somehow intensely funny in a way that no one could write. O’Malley, a loose-limbed performer with a wide grin, specializes in brittle men. Not since Sam Kinison has a comedian done more with a scream. Hollow and desperate, self-evidently silly, his yell announces the idiocy of the id. But unlike most comic roars, it inspires some compassion.
O’Malley is a cult hero in the comedy world, in part due to his gift for becoming unglued. Playing Chris Elliott-like lunatics, he raged at Seth Meyers on “Late Night,” he was a young version of Louis C.K. on “Louie” and he riffed off Aidy Bryant, now his wife, on “Broad City.” He wrote for “How To With John Wilson” and provided loud contrast to the serenely sensible star of “Joe Pera Talks With You.”
An O’Malley cameo is a seal of approval to comedy nerds. But for the full experience, follow him on YouTube, where he keeps up a furiously productive artistic pace, creating an entire oeuvre of spoofs of conspiratorial, overly online, primally yelping men: utopian tech bros, finance gurus, conspiracy nuts, dudes just hanging out.
He first broke through in the early 2010s on the now-defunct platform Vine, where his goofy quick-hit videos featured him wandering up to strangers in suits or inside sports cars and, using a mumbling Adam Sandler-like voice, praising them as pimps or players, and saying things like “Money is a game and you’re the winner.” Since then, he has created a clown car full of bizarre and demented characters like a conspiracist arguing that Shrek is real, a guy hosting a talk show from a river and, during the lockdown, a moody loner prowling the empty streets of Times Square in leather pants while intoning in voice-over: “For those who want respect, they must give respect.” On the comedy site Splitsider, Megh Wright called him “the new king of weird” in 2016.
O’Malley remains obscure because he has never had his own breakout vehicle on a major platform. And yet, over the past year, his work shifted, not just becoming more ambitious, with multiple productions, all self-released, but also darker and dreamier, with more elaborately imagined narratives.
In a feature he co-wrote, directed and starred in (“Rap World”), and, on YouTube, two short films (“The Mask” and “Coreys”) and a sort-of special (“Stand Up Solutions”), he drills down on the artistic dreams of his quintessential desperate characters. These are comedies about men with big, futile ambitions doomed to be unfulfilled.
The most fully realized is “The Mask,” a minor tragedy with a sweeping arc shrunk to just under 25 minutes. It’s about the radicalization of a kid named Tyler Joseph who loves short-form improv perhaps a little too much. Perpetually online, Tyler constantly makes videos of himself as the Jim Carrey character in the movie “The Mask.” These images, delivered with a commitment that is unsettling, are juxtaposed against Tyler’s sweetly mundane ordinary life, hanging with his grandmother, doing snow angels in the leaves. Following his dream to Los Angeles, he ends up a modern-day Rupert Pupkin, conspiracy-addled, broken by showbiz.
It would be easy to sneer at a young man falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole far enough to be ranting about the Chinese controlling Joe Biden. But there’s empathy here that has shown up repeatedly in O’Malley’s work this year. It might even hold back some of the comedy, but adds to the richness of the characters.
“Coreys” is an 11-minute study of a frustrated dad stuck in a Target who notices on his social media scroll a guy who looks just like him living a much more fun life — partying, driving fast cars, having a threesome. This short hits on many standard O’Malley themes: doubling, stymied male ego, body horror, the way life online breaks you. But it spins into the bizarre in a way that’s beyond laughs.
Part of a long tradition of alternative comedy, O’Malley also consistently mocks the corniness of mainstream comedy, the banality and appeal. In one video, he plays a guy who does a late-1980s Dennis Miller impression for tourists in Times Square. It’s gently making fun of the comic, but you can also detect affection in its details.
My favorite example of his complex relationship with traditional comedy might be a short video in which he tries to reboot “Jaywalking,” a running bit from Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” that involved getting laughs when people on the street incorrectly answer trivia questions. O’Malley flops because pedestrians get all the answers right. But what begins as a solid sketch idea twists into a fever dream with a demonic version of Leno chastising him for his disrespect and punishing him by giving him a broad chin and sending him to the Improv comedy club to tell jokes about Viagra and O.J. Simpson.
His characters tend to wind up humiliated, broke, cuckolded, beaten up, even killed. Disaster befalls Richard Eagleton, the disturbingly peppy tech utopian he plays in “Stand Up Solutions,” which preaches the virtues of artificial intelligence to potential investors. O’Malley tends to play either hucksters or those gullible enough to believe them, and his hour as Eagleton marks him as both. He promises A.I. will fix politics, comedy and even labor, saying in a moment of overexuberance: “We are hacking slavery!”
Realizing how that sounds, he assures the crowd that “regular slavery is still bad” before adding a ridiculous scream: “I hate the heck out of that crap!”
Eagleton is the kind of guy who probably listens to a lot of Jordan Peterson. At one point, he says he goes outside and yells 100 times a day. “We as men are meant to be screaming for seven hours a day,” he says with grievance in his voice. “Society took that away from us.”
This line satirizes a certain branch of the manosphere. But it also gets to the heart of the comedy of this distinctively independent artist, one who captures something essential about life in the internet age. It makes you want to scream.
Read More: Conner O’Malley’s Intensely Funny, Deeply Stupid Manosphere
