Allen Anders - Live at the Comedy Castle (circa 1987)
2019 · 7m
Directed by Laura Moss
Genres: dark comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A stand-up hack named Allen Anders opens with generic snooze-button material and progressively crumbles into existential horror on stage, while the studio audience keeps laughing. Shot to look like a VHS-degraded 1987 comedy special, the film is a darkly hilarious portrait of a man unraveling in real time.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A comedy special where the jokes are the cover story for a nervous breakdown — and the audience never notices. This is the kind of formal trick that makes me actually lean forward.
Laura Moss directing Tony Grayson's nervous-breakdown-or-best-set-ever stand-up fever dream is exactly the dark-experimental register I trust her in — the period-piece comedy-as-horror premise is genuinely original.
Period-authentic 1980s stand-up special with deliberate VHS glitching — so the breakdown happens inside the cheesiest possible container while the studio audience keeps laughing. Tony Grayson holding a real Andy-Kaufman-tier register inside that format is a craft tightrope.