Justin Heckert: Kyle Kinane is everywhere like farty Jesus. He is in the shower with a six-pack of beer. He is drunk at a Wendy’s drive-through ordering chicken nuggets out of the sliding door of a taxi van. He is the guy at Red Lobster getting into a fistfight with the night manager over whether the moon landing was faked. He is accidentally childproofing himself out of a microwave while trying to nuke Totino’s Pizza Rolls. Then he is berating the microwave, shouting at the microwave to unlock, finally unplugging the microwave and eating the pizza rolls raw, while in his underwear. The next day he is crapping his only pair of pants.
In his first hour-long Comedy Central special Whiskey Icarus, Kinane is talking about the state of his life, and he admits that he realized what the definition of lonely is the time he forgot he was in the process of jerking off in a hotel room in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the nuisance of finishing like taking a broom and shooing raccoons off his porch: “Hyah … get outta here … hyah, hyah.”
He is the guy on Drunk History who knocks back an entire bottle of tequila and pukes into a trash bag. He is on Conan in a wool hat pulled over his eyes, sighing: “You ever see an abandoned TV dinner in the beer aisle? Yeah, that’s me. I did that. That’s my street art.” He is the title character in a reality-show pilot about the experiences of his life called Kyle Kinane’s Going Nowhere, in which he is smoking weed and hunting Bigfoot in a Back to the Future vest and watching a lizard wearing plastic dragon wings shit on the robe of a wizard. He is paunchy, prickly, grumbly; when his beard is at its woolliest, it presents him as a little knight in a visor of hair. He has a tattoo on his arm of a skull eating a slice of pizza.
Onstage, somewhere out there, pretty much every night of the week, in big, famous places with theater seating and tiny, leaky places with buzzing lights and fake brick as a backdrop, with a beer in his hand and the stage lights on his face, Kinane is confessing to an audience, telling stories that go on and on without obvious punch lines and build to often startling introspection; he’s in front of middle-aged Midwesterners and in front of college students and in front of other comedians, in front of hipsters who follow him on Twitter and grow similar beards and with whom he gets into occasional fights; with empty beer bottles next to him and empty pint glasses on a stool beside him, the hairs of his beard brushing the microphone, he is harrumphing about failure and the stasis of unrealized dreams.
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