Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Langston Kerman: Bad Poetry’ On Netflix, A Stand-Up Special Marking John Mulaney’s Directorial Debut

The Green Mill cocktail lounge in Chicago has a long and storied history as a cinematic backdrop, including films such as High Fidelity, The Lake House, and Michael Mann’s debut feature, 1981’s Thief. Now it’s also the scene for John Mulaney‘s directorial debut, showcasing the stand-up comedy of Langston Kerman.

LANGSTON KERMAN: BAD POETRY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You may recognize Kerman from his roles on HBO’s Insecure or Prime Video’s The Boys (he played Eagle The Archer), and he’ll feature in a recurring role on the new FX series, English Teacher.

But he shown his comedy stripes even brighter in collaboration with other comedians, as a co-creator and co-star of the Peacock sitcom Bust Down alongside Chris Redd and Sam Jay; as head writer and EP of HBO’s Pause With Sam Jay; and as a writer and actor on Mulaney’s recent live talk show experiment, John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA.

For his debut Netflix special, Kerman draws upon his earlier career experiences as a teacher dealing with mean teenagers, managing his mother-in-law’s dating apps, and wondering what the best time of his life really was. And as the title suggests, there will be poetry. Perhaps bad.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?:  Although Kerman has a couple of bits in this hour that share some comedic DNA with both Mulaney and Jay, he more often than not displays his own uniquely playful sensibility that defies such easy comparisons.

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Memorable Jokes: As memorable as the diss from his former students may be, particularly since it inspired the title of his special, Kerman’s routine most likely to stick with you is a recurring bit in which he demonstrates to what lengths he has gone in impersonating his mother-in-law while managing her dating app profile. “I’m pretending to be a 65-year-old woman,” he confesses, “and I’ll be honest, I’m having the time of my goddamn life.” It’s not just the flirtatious messaging that appeals to him, but the ability for his mother-in-law’s potential male suitors to leave voicemails for her, which he springs on the audience at random intervals during his performance.

And his own mom’s romantic history may be even more epic, as Kerman relates that one of her four marriages so far included a dalliance with a disgraced NBA mascot. How could a pro sports mascot become disgraced, you might ask? He’ll tell ya!

Kerman also gets some mileage out of the perceived fear that as one half of a fully bi-racial couple, he and his wife could spawn “a little surprise white baby!” 

And while Kerman’s love of McDonald’s might’ve held potential for a corporate collab, his fantasy of running away with the McDonald’s employee who gave him 12 McNuggets when he only ordered a 10-piece should give him pause.

Our Take: But part of the fun in watching Kerman perform is how and when he in fact chooses to pause isn’t where most comedians might. Rather, he’ll lean into a weird premise, or pivot back to an earlier bit when you least expect it.

I mentioned earlier how a couple of jokes in Kerman’s 50-minute set demonstrate how he might sit in the middle of a Venn diagram between John Mulaney and Sam Jay. Certainly his joke about getting roasted by his high-school English students, dashing his poetry dreams, recalls or echoes Mulaney’s own feelings getting put in his place by teens. But there’s another turn of phrase earlier in the set, where Kerman describes his helplessness about becoming a parent to feeling “like a bird trapped at the airport,” which might call to mind Mulaney’s brilliant metaphor a couple of specials back in which he compared Trump to “a horse, loose in a hospital.”

And just for comedy trivia, it turns out to be a fun fact, indeed, to learn that Kerman’s bit about getting high on mushrooms and witnessing hijinks in the park with friends not only involves Sam Jay as one of said friends, but crosses over in the same joke universe with one of Jay’s own jokes in her stand-up special about doing shrooms with friends in the park.

Now if it ever turned out that those jokes existed in the same real-life experience as witnessing Forest Whitaker in an IHOP, then perhaps Kerman really would have a case to make about what might’ve been the best thing to ever happen to him. His own child notwithstanding.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Kerman may joke that he can stretch the limits of an audience’s patience just to serve up a solid pun, admitting, “that’s critique I’ve heard, too long” to go for a pun. But his brand of humor may also just be the comedic spark you needed in your life, saving you from having to put a metal can in the microwave and becoming Orville Deadenbacher.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.