CD Review:
Patrice O’Neal: Unreleased
4 1/2 stars (out of 5)
What is so evisceratingly funny about Patrice O’Neal’s work, exemplified in the poignant title of his final taped special, Elephant in the Room, is his brazen romps into the audience’s personal lives. He pries at the doors usually untouched, driving us anxiously into the topics that are protected, impolite to broach upon, hidden in obviousness. This legendary knack for taking a conversation in the most enjoyable, unruly direction is a foundation O’Neal seemed to have loved to build his sets on.
So many jokes in Unreleased are audience driven that it seems his prewritten bits were brought up by the audience themselves, almost as if their entire personhood was contrived for the set and he is simply explicating what is inherently funny, when in fact he is creating the power dynamics and the conflict.
In a 2004 interview with Stage Time, O’Neal said he does his writing on stage. Unreleased is largely an improvisational foray into the lives of the audience members, but he also suavely unleashes some priceless prepared bits at opportune moments.
The items pulled from memory flow flawlessly. Does he really have a premade bit about a British man and an American girlfriend, waiting dormant and poised like a Venus Fly trap for his prey to eventually walk into a room? O’Neal was like a tailor; he always had something to fit whoever walked in, or he’d make something their size.
Emerging from his crowd suggested marriage material was an unstoppable metaphor facetiously comparing a child of his girlfriend’s previous marriage to a pair of boots. The strings tying the two together, confidently, did not occur to O’Neal in the middle of the taping, exemplifying timeless tact, his ability to infuse killer bits with the action that takes place in front of the stage.
This is the third of posthumous releases of O’Neal’s work following Mr. P and Better Than You. Unreleased is now available on CD.
