New York has lost a lot of its luster of late, but one area in which it will retain its dominance is as a breeding ground for underground comedy. What you see in a closet-sized space in New York will often end up as a cultural phenomenon five years later, and while Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu of The Cody Rivers Show technically hail from Seattle, they subscribe to the New York/Chicago style of comedy, which is grounded in theater, as opposed to the Los Angeles style based on semi-spiteful mockery of the arrogance and contradictions of the entertainment industry.
If right now the Frat Pack of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen are the dominant force in comedy, in five years I guarantee you will be seeing more acts like Cody Rivers. You can argue that their style of cerebral, inverted observational comedy has already broken through, with TV shows like Important Things with Demetri Martin and Robot Chicken, but as bro-comedy icon Peter Griffin said on Family Guy, “You’re not really a success until you’re on a respectable network like NBC, ABC or CBS.” As it stands, the next wave of comedy is shaping up to be one of the most cerebral we’ve ever seen, and even within the theater realm. Cody Rivers's new revue, Meanwhile, Everywhere, may be the most joyous, hilarious, effervescent brand of cerebral comedy I’ve ever seen, and the only act of its kind that didn’t make me depressed (comedy nerd that I am) without hiding the utter chaos behind its humorous exterior.
Granted, the crowd at UNDER St. Marks was exactly the kind catered to by the Cody Rivers Show's style of comedy. Yet I am still hesitant to call any comedy act too cerebral until I am proven wrong. The fact of the matter is, the era when most comedians started performing at 16 or 17 and had to be funny to stay alive is further and further in the past. For more and more people, joining the working grind is a reality, and going without food for days for an artistic dream is even less practical than it once was; more and more comedy troupes are populated by lawyers and accountants, and even those who live in relative Bohemia are educated at places like Yale, Columbia, and Harvard.
A similar change is occurring to comedy’s audience. Those in their 20s have an unprecedented level of college education, and can pick up on little highbrow touches more than ever, even if they didn’t make much of an effort to learn in college. Thus, when Cody Rivers does a routine on speaking in opposites, mixes real-life storytelling with an absurd mock-ballet, or flips through a talk show on Greenland Independence, Robot Chicken style, by using the “magic of theater,” what was oblique even in the Steve Martin era is becoming increasingly mainstream. Needless to say, if the under-30 vote can put Obama in the White House, I think it can dictate comedic taste.
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