Chris Gethard’s new film opens with the 40-year-old performing at 9am to a pancake-guzzling audience in Buffalo, New York. Truly, the life of a touring standup is not all glamour. That’s partly the point that Half My Life is making: it finds the New Jersey man revisiting a handful of his favourite venues, ruminating on life as a mid-career comedian, and pining for his wife and baby son back home. Between the scenes of this diary-cum-documentary, footage is spliced from the shows on the tour.
It’s a diverting behind-the-scenes document of the peripatetic comic’s life – if not a particularly surprising one. We see Gethard and support act Carmen Christopher gridlocked on the interstate under lowering clouds, electric-scootering around Asbury Park, New Jersey, in the hours before showtime – then post-gig, posing for photos by the merch stall. None of it looks like the big time; Gethard jokes that he couldn’t fill an arena if he tried. But then, he began life as a tyro punk comic, and if Half My Life conjures with Gethard’s career disillusion, it also advertises his fidelity to those roots.
In the UK, he’s known for 2016’s Career Suicide, a standup show that detailed his history of anxiety and depression. Those tendencies lurk in the margins of Half My Life, as Gethard wonders aloud whether he still loves comedy, and urges himself to feel the good times as keenly as the bad. But clearly he’s in a happier place now: a new father, learning to embrace maturity, and delivering upbeat standup to the burghers of Philadelphia, Baltimore and beyond.
We see isolated routines in Half My Life rather than Gethard’s whole show – endearing sections on childbirth, his history of juvenile delinquency, and on an alligator theme-park in Disneyworld’s shadow. None of it cuts deep, and you could argue that in trying to be two things – both documentary and standup special – the film isn’t wholly satisfying as either. But it remains a vivid and arresting snapshot, of a comic transitioning from the adrenaline rush of his first 20 years to the steadier satisfactions (and frustrations) of the years to come.
Chris Gethard: Half My Life is available on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.
