David Cross gets too much crap. All that grief he got for appearing in two Alvin and the Chipmunks movies? Hell, having The Squeakquel on the same IMDB page as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind means getting paid and having one of the weirdest résumés since Raul Julia. It also means that for all his reputation as an edgy, confrontational crank, he's still got enough versatility to switch to lighthearted family fare and back. And if you go back to his previous two CDs, Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! and It's Not Funny, you might be able to catch the absurd undercurrent that allows him to run that kid-friendly/shock comedy range. Those were polarizing sets, ones where detractors claimed he came across like a pompous, arrogant know-it-all. But that onstage persona worked because he made it clear that beneath all the seething irritation with other people's stupidity was an anxious sense that he had no idea what to do except freak the fuck out. There was fear and anger in his material, but it was the same kind of fear and anger felt by every thoughtful type who's ever felt outnumbered by hostile morons.
All that said, there's something inexplicably missing from Bigger and Blackerer, his latest comedy record*.* It's definitely not the confrontational stuff-- he touches on rape, racism, necrophilia involving famous Holocaust victims, anti-Semitism, drugs, pedophilia, and the ridiculousness of organized religion. It's not the left-leaning political material-- of course Cross has something to say about scares over Obama's "death panels." And it's not the self-aware showmanship; the CD opens with an intentionally ludicrous Tom Jones-style number about all the edgy, anger-provoking (yet cosmonaut-free) material yet to come in the set, while the DVD cut of the set kicks off with a foul-mouthed grade school kid in glasses and a bald cap impersonating Cross for a few minutes before pulling an Axl Rose ("Are you recording this? No way, I specifically said no recording of any kind!") and stomping off the stage.
But in contrast to It's Not Funny, his last comedy album released a full six years ago, Bigger is missing the sense of the gleefully ridiculous that colors Cross' best material. At his peak, he could be calm and bitter and manic and naïf-like all during the same train of thought, and in the process he could pull out words and phrases and associations nobody else could think of while dismantling things you thought you already knew. Here, instead of magnifying the lameness of dumb consumer products or religious mythology with increasingly elaborate non-sequiturs or references to sad-but-true cultural detritus, he tries to carry things by restating obvious, familiar arguments-- Mormonism's as much of a fraud as Scientology; Tea Party protesters are ignorant-- and rambling through labored, joke-deficient setups as though these observations were automatically funny on face value. And while the edgy stuff does a great job of pushing buttons-- like where he discusses his plan to buy a commemorative MLK vanity license plate reading "NGR LVR", or taunts Orthodox Jews for dressing ridiculous-- it's not in the context of mocking the hypocrisy of institutionalized discrimination that made this kind of material work for him before. Cross has never come across as this needlessly crass.
Maybe the most telling stretch of Bigger and Blackerer is the 14-and-a-half-minute portion of drug talk early in the set, where he transitions from goofing on "Intervention" to discussing his own experiences with getting fucked up. It's material Cross has dealt with spectacularly in the past-- few moments of wasted, existential panic in comedy can match the "answer your telephone" bit in Fucking Baby-- but aside from a pretty funny routine about what it's like to try and hide how high you are in a convenience store (which, like many of the bits, benefits greatly from watching Cross act it out on the DVD), it's a bit too personal and unpleasant to laugh at. When more than one audience member shouts "woo" at Cross' admittance of being fucked up on drugs and alcohol for the last 10 years, Cross' retort-- "unless you're a dealer, it's not gonna turn out good"-- only underpins how uncomfortable the whole thing is. And that's before he admits that those years of abuse led him to the point where he'd wind up shitting his pants in public.
Cross is a talented performer, a gifted writer, and arguably the reason so many people have wound up getting into the alt-comedy scene in the first place. And there's still flashes of Cross' brilliance at points: There's a great bit on the DVD where he yells at his hearing-impaired interpreter for telling different jokes than him-- and anti-Semitic ones at that-- which David then transitions immediately into a bit comparing the guilt-trip name of an eco-friendly product ("If You Care") to a passive-aggressive rabbi. And the last joke in the set, where he talks about how he overcame more than 30 years of chronic depression-- "the entire time, I had a rock in my shoe"-- is a perfectly understated bit on how hard it really is to overcome mental blocks. So it feels kind of gratuitous to single Bigger and Blackerer out as a misstep, especially at a point in his career where the backlash has long since threatened to overwhelm the goodwill. But by shifting his tone from thoughtful, us-vs.-them irreverence into misanthropic venting, Cross has lost a lot of what made his standup appealing in the first place. His career isn't a writeoff, but I've got a bad feeling about that velvet-painting album cover-- you don't often see one depicting the skinny Elvis.
