Diehard comedy fans and mainstream entertainment consumers alike have seen plenty of David Cross in recent years.
In IFC’s out-there comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. Reunited with collaborators from cult-fave HBO sketch series Mr. Show with Bob and David for Netflix’s spiritually kindred new W/Bob and David. In small roles in big shows like Modern Family, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Community. In the Alvin & The Chipmunks movies.
And, of course, as Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development.
David Cross: Making America Great Again!!Fri., April 15, Ferguson Hall at Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Tampa. 8 p.m. Non-traditional tickets still available at press time,call 813-229-7827. strazcenter.org.
One place we haven’t seen Cross in a while, however, is on tour, delivering the alternately absurd and cuttingly provocative stand-up that made him one of the late ’90s/early aughts alternative comedy scene’s most visible and polarizing figures. Those familiar with the more politically charged bits from timely, visceral live albums like Shut Up You Fucking Baby! and It’s Not Funny might’ve been tempted to think there wasn’t enough wrong with Obama’s Generation of Hope to inspire the ire of a comic who once suggested George W. Bush might go down in history as America’s worst president ever. But the truth is much simpler — Cross has had his plate full handling the jobs mentioned above, and many more besides.
“I didn’t stop doing stand-up once a black Democrat got
into office.”
“I have not heard that perception, but if that is the perception that’s false,” said Cross during a phone conversation with CL. “First of all, I’m not a political comic, I never was … but I also have been doing stand-up, and plenty of it, during the Obama administration, I just haven’t gone on tour, because I’ve been busy, you know?
“I didn’t stop doing stand-up once a black Democrat got into office. That’s crazy.”
Over the six years since his last full-fledged comedy tour, Cross has done countless sets at festivals and benefits, friends’ shows, “drop-ins” at clubs and events and more. These shows are easy to fit in between his acting and writing jobs — gigs that demand the sort of time and attention that don’t allow him to split his focus with another equally big project. Those stand-up sets have provided him with the material he needed, though, when it did come time to make room in his schedule for his current “Making America Great Again!!” tour, hitting Ferguson Hall at Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts
this Friday.
“It’s made up of all the material that I’ve culled for the last couple of years of doing sets, because I’m always doing sets,” he said. “So I have plenty of material, but going on tour is a whole different approach to it. You’re taking all the material and putting it together to create an hour-plus of what that show is … I don’t ever stop doing stand-up, but I can’t be doing things like going out on tour and [simultaneously] writing a new series, those are things I can’t do.”
Cross said he’s had no interest in reshaping his occasionally button-pushy material (remember the bit about getting a job eating pork and describing it to kosher Jews?) in order to make it more palatable to new folks in the crowd who may only know him from Arrested Development or other of his more accessible TV and movie credits (“I don’t know what good it would do anyway”). But he did allow that he has made some conscious changes in the name of delivering a more satisfying performance, more closely editing what many fans, reviewers and he himself have described as a meandering style to produce a somewhat punchier delivery.
David Cross: Making America Great Again!!
Fri., April 15, Ferguson Hall at Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Tampa. 8 p.m. Non-traditional tickets still available at press time, call 813-229-7827. strazcenter.org.
“Yeah, it’s tighter, it’s definitely tighter,” he said. “But I do improvise and riff a lot. It just has a tighter feeling to the whole thing. Which isn’t to say that it’s super-tight. I tend to go off the path quite a bit, but at least I know where I’m going back to.”
Other than that, Friday night’s show should deliver the wealth of topics, anecdotes and laughs that longtime followers of Cross’s stand-up have come to expect, and something those newly introduced to his career will be talking about for some time to come. What the crowd shouldn’t expect, despite the name of the show and/or whatever some might have heard about his more outrageous material, is an hour-plus rant on the subject of a certain orange-haired presidential candidate, or the state of American politics in general.
“I wouldn’t want to see that, I have no desire,” said Cross. “I personally wouldn’t go see an evening of political comedy, or Jewish comedy, or feminist comedy, or an evening of gay comedy. That’s boring to me.”
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2016.