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America sees two Chris D’Elias.
On TV, one Chris D’Elia outshines his co-stars in sitcoms such as NBC’s Whitney and Undateable. Onstage as a stand-up, another D’Elia exists in a world where he can remain immature, less in on the joke of his lifestyle than his sitcom characters seem to be. In his second Netflix special, Chris D’Elia: Man On Fire wants us to know he’s changed over the past decade. But has he grown up?
D’Elia broke through the comedy ranks at the beginning of the decade as a next-generation Dane Cook, complete with the physicality onstage, a charm that won over young male and female audiences alike, and a no-drugs-no-alcohol never ever policy offstage.
If you need an updated stand-up reference in 2017, consider D’Elia the male counterpart to Iliza Shlesinger. Hugely popular and successful among club and theater audiences across North America, beloved by the comedians who work with them, yet not so much by the rest of their peers — who believe they may harm as much as help the cause of their gender and comedy stereotypes. D’Elia emerged as Justin Bieber’s favorite stand-up comedian, back when Beliebers couldn’t believe how delinquent their pop idol had become. On Undateable, though, D’Elia not only had the opportunity to play up the pick-up artist bro-dude type, but also play it for laughs at his own expense. Bieber has since started taken himself seriously. And for his part, on Man On Fire, D’Elia expresses a self-awareness of how he looked at 36.
On the one hand, D’Elia acknowledges that he finally looks his age, even if he resembles “a tired eagle.” On second thought, he also almost doesn’t recognize himself, adding: “I literally saw me, and I thought, fuck that guy, he looks creepy. That’s what I thought. I was like, I don’t like his whole story. F— him. And then I realized it was me. I feel like I look like a guy that would like, f— your girl and then be like, ‘That’s the game!'”
D’Elia seemed very happy to play that part, or at least pretend to, in his 20s. But now (he turned 37 in March after taping), he’s at that point in most comedians’ lives wherein they have begun to learn the harder lessons of adulthood. D’Elia got divorced seven years ago, and he has boiled down modern love to two words: “I guess.” Compromising and learning to take the worse with the better is better adopted by men in their 30s, he argues, making the point with a personal example of how he knew he wasn’t meant to remain married. The bit culminates in his tag that “mistakes are scarier than monsters.”
He jokes that too many of us grow up mistakenly thinking that we’re all special, that we all could watch Denzel Washington in 2004’s Man on Fire and believe we could be him, too. “You think you’re the man on fire?!” D’Elia wonders. “We’re all extras in someone else’s movie.”
He insists that’s true even for him, in that moment, filming his Netflix special.
And yet.
For as much as D’Elia wants to convey sincere life lessons that sound like a TED talk, he’s just as liable to launch into a premise or punchline that sounds more like he’s still 37 going on 17. He chooses a Muppet-sounding voice for the man in his relationship examples, including the guy who’s the “flute bitch” in your man army. He believes his friend buying him pants that fit as a birthday present represents “the gayest gift” he could receive, and he freely elaborates that he means exactly what he says by evoking homosexuality. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to!” he even insists not once, but twice, after suggesting any guy in the audience could have sex with another guy. And to men who brag about working out, he wishes they’d instead “eat dicks.”
If this is all meant to reveal D’Elia’s true self to us, then his self must still be rather conflicted.
Over and over again, he provides examples of how he no longer will pretend to be somebody he’s not. But for every revelation such as his reason for not having children — “I don’t want to be better. I want to be me.” — he’ll pretend to sound and act “gangsta” and describe it as “how real I was trying to keep it” so as not to allow a 4-year-old girl to soften his manhood.
He’s still the dude who became a man-boy in Hollywood as the son of a veteran TV producer (Bill D’Elia) who directed his first stand-up special for Comedy Central, White Male Black Comic, as well as this hour-plus for Netflix.
He says he doesn’t want to pretend, but when sitcoms and movies pay him to act, he’s great at it. If only his stand-up reached similar heights.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
