I recently got to see one of my favorite comedians, Chris Fleming, at The Theater of Living Arts in Philadelphia. My girlfriend and I are huge fans of him and his quirky, esoteric online comedy videos. I’ve been a fan for such a long time, and the last time I got to see him live was in 2018, so I was eager to see his new stand-up set.

We arrived at the venue on a Friday night and found that our seats were in the second row, which was a very nice surprise for me. I don’t think we had bothered to look when we bought the tickets, we just took whatever came up.

The show was phenomenal, maybe my favorite Chris Fleming comedy set (and I’ve seen his Showpig special on YouTube, his Hell special on Peacock, and another live set). The entire crowd was laughing the whole night. My cheeks genuinely hurt at the end of it.

Fleming mixes in original songs with his stand-up, with full-blown performances in front of a projector with visual aids; one was about the perverse comfort of the reclining seats in movie theaters. He also had jokes about the lack of control police officers have over their police dogs in airports, the quiet strength and dignity of middle school tuba players, and how Barry Keoghan has thrown off the consensus on what makes a hot man.

He did some crowd work, encouraging a girl right in front of us to give an impromptu a capella performance of Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”, which she was unprepared for but willing to do, laughing so hard she could hardly sing the song. My favorite joke was a story he told about overdrawing his bank account when buying fancy hats from a specialty store on a vacation with his friends; the punchline to this had the entire audience screaming.

Fleming’s comedy is unlike anything else you can see at a stand-up show, his perspective totally unique and yet completely resonant with our current cultural landscape (at least if you run in the circles I run in). If you’ve never heard of him, find Chris Fleming on Instagram or YouTube and fall in love with his comedy the way I have.

— Hannah Gruen, advertising & events coordinator