Comedian Kyle Kinane plays dumb
The comic aka "Uncle BBQ" brings his intricate everyman stories to the Variety Playhouse
As much as he downplays it, Kinane is on another level. There’s not a joke anyone could quote that you would guess what written by anyone else. That is, if you had the stamina to retell one. Kinane is a punk rock, blue-collar raconteur peddling his “dumb dumb stories” around the country. Despite his self-claimed descriptors, Kinane is as smart as any comic working today. His stories indeed start out self-deprecating in nature, analyzing a mundane folly in his life such as burning his laundry and accidentally throwing away change, but those are just the roots of his jokes. These roots grow and branch out into this wild tree that blooms hysterical epiphanies on life. Kinane’s everyman parables are almost always positive, a stark contrast to the often cynical tone of other comedians.
Watching Kinane do his thing is like biking off-trail, following the lead of a more experienced rider. You start somewhere familiar, then just go with the flow to places you’d never expect to end up. Ever casual in demeanor and often with a beer in hand, Kinane’s stories are meticulously crafted like this. Whether he’s ruminating on the time he watched a man eat pancakes on a plane in his first Comedy Central special Whiskey Icarus, or the time he fell while drinking the shower in his follow up, I Liked His Old Stuff Better, he packs every anecdote with so many jokes that the story can run 15 minutes long.
A good comic knows when to stop a joke. Typically, brevity is your friend. However, Kinane writes what could be a gorgeous 30-second stand-alone joke then just keeps adding tag upon tag until it becomes a killer 45-second, one-minute, or two-minute bit. He will tie these wayward observations into his larger chunks, taking off on a tangent caused by some minor detail in his story, then somehow bring it all back around to his original thought without ever waning in quality.
Comedy Central’s golden boy wrestled up another hour of his insane campfire stories for a third special, Loose in Chicago, which debuted on the network last week. He continues to spread his beer-soaked gospel across the nation with a stop at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse.