The Degraded Ars Comedica of Johnny Azari’s Stand-Up

Fuccboi 4: The Status-Quo” sees America’s most famous brown comic father of an expensive white baby bringing his feelings to comedy, knowing they’re useless and doomed to be broken.

Preacher Boy
5 min readOct 12, 2019

Johnny Azari’s performance across these 70 minutes of stand-up comedy marks him as a modern-day truth-teller, a wry observationist of the degraded and redeemed, and a whip-smart polemicist unafraid to slaughter everyone’s darlings. As this up-from-the-swamps post-beatnik hobo delta road dog takes us along the debauched roads of an America that is both beautiful and broken, he leaves no turn unstoned. If you’re tired of champagne socialism, Azari offers more than enough whiskey anarchy to go around. Check your John Mayer records at the door, and get ready for a cold shot of Johnny Azari.

The comic as agent provocateur is a role many aspiring laugh legends have played to the hilt over the decades. The best of them combined wit and wisdom in ways that opened our minds even as they tore laughter from our throats. But if shock and awe is a time-honored comedic tradition, it must be said that the style has become commodified, and accordingly, safe.

Today, few comics are qualified to deliver genuine shocks to the funny bone — experience is a necessary precursor to authenticity, and that means coming from OUTSIDE.

Few are as outside as Azari.

There’s truly nothing like him. He looks like someone draped a designer suit around a filthy fuzzy-topped pencil that’s been used to grout the tub in a cold-water walkup. His voice is a sort of next-octave-down laconic Bukowski drawl mixed with a soapbox preacher’s declarative urgency. He has neither the train-force improvisational mania of a Robin Williams, nor the cocaine-filled socio-political shoulder chip of a George Carlin, and neither the horrible screaminess of a Sam Kinison nor the quiet lethality of a Lenny Bruce. And yet, he’s somehow the child of them all. As to his material, he’s a living recipe for degradation soup.

As to other kindred spirits actively working rooms today, the temptation to bundle Azari with the likes of Dave Attel’s nicotine stripper-pole wisdom is strong, though his wry acceptance of his own shortcomings would make him equally good company with the Tom Segura’s of the world. That said, if body fluid poetry was a billing binding agent, he’d be a natural to share a stage with Ali Wong. Make absurdity the prerequisite for a double-bill, however, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better match than Rory Scovel. Truth be told though, the comic that actually first came to find as a comparison was Bill Burr. Early Bill Burr. The Bill Burr who so meticulously, angrily, hilariously described a woman eating an Egg McMuffin and then wiping her face with the bag. Azari has a similar way of seeing the end of the world in the everyday greasiness of ordinary citizens.

Kind of like the way Superman had an alternate universe doppelganger, Azari is also not unlike a kind of other-world version of Dice Clay — macho posture, ashtray mouth, don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, and a greasy swagger that you can literally almost hear as he moves across a stage, and yet, noticeably NOT Dice Clay. The difference is that: a) Azari is real, and b) Azari has a heart a mile wide.

Yes, it’s true. Contrary to everything you might think after the relentless roll call of junkies, jack-offs, hookers, junkies, jizzes, ball sacks, titties, fistings, felchings, fornicatings, rapes, incests, crimes, demeanors, STDs, road trips, and regrets is finally over, you’ll realize you’re under the spell of a man who loves the world.

He also loves his wife, and, as he reminds us several times during the show, his $40,000 white baby.

There’s a lot of that “did he just say that?” in this show. Leave it to Azari to refer to an Elko madam as a “song Tom Waits didn’t want to finish.”

Azari likes to talk about his own life in his comedy, and we’re the better for it, as he’s certainly lived an interesting one. He’s been on tour as an aberrant mutant delta blues innovator for the better part of a decade, and the debauches that have transpired in the back of his van will one day be a novel to rival Irvine Welch’s “Filth” for the sheer virtuosity of his nastiness. That said, while his shift to stand-up has taken him from one kind of authenticity (read: not famousness) to another, it’s been combined with marriage, fatherhood, and sobriety, and as his head has cleared, his eyes have opened. A burgeoning social consciousness has awakened within the Azari breast (where his heart beats strong below a white “Fuck Your Government” tattoo), and as his views have sharpened, his wisdom has deepened.

Let me preface the next point by saying that Azari’s comedy bears NO RESEMBLANCE WHATSOEVER to that of Eddie Murphy’s. And yet, the structure of his show reminds one of nothing else so much as Murphy’s “Raw” — the final third of which is essentially one long pile-up of misery that simply doesn’t stop until you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw up. Normally, crowd silence during a comedy show is a bad thing, but Azari’s storytelling is so compellingly real, so masterfully bizarre, so delightful dirty, and so emotionally rewarding, that his audiences barely breathe when he gets on a roll, as he does often during this show.

Azari also likes to talk about comedy during his comedy. “That’s a perfect joke, and fuck you for having feelings,” he says. He often reflects back on what he’s just said, shares a story about where he last told a particular joke, brags about why a particular line is so good, and deadpans when something is clearly too shocking. Somehow, his reflections always manage to be both insightful and cringe-inducing, as when he follows that quote above by stating that “bringing your feelings to a comedy show is like bringing a single condom to a gangbang — It’s useless and it’s gonna get broke.” This ongoing Ars Comedica is one of the most charming aspects of the whole show — it’s clear that Azari loves comedy itself. Comedy loves him, too, as do his audiences. While he’s not yet quite out of the Motel 6 circuit, it won’t surprise anyone who’s seen him if this album sees him hitting the next career level in a big way. And for the record, his feelings are precisely what he DOES bring to the show.

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Fuccboi 4 The Status-Quo” is available October 22.

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Preacher Boy

Singer, songwriter, poet. Vintage guitars, vintage typewriters, new Moleskines.