Rank Your Records: Kyle Kinane Ranks His Four Comedy Albums

In Rank Your Records, we talk to members of bands who have amassed substantial discographies over the years and ask them to rate their releases in order of personal preference.

Kyle Kinane doesn't enjoy talking about himself. Case in point, as soon as he finished ranking his four stand-up specials—three for Comedy Central, along with his debut album on ASpecialThing Records—he says that he needs to "go wash the self-indulgence off." For a comedian like Kinane, who has the ability to turn a joke about selling gourmet cake decorations over the phone into an allegory for post-college malaise, it's clear that his comedy avoids solipsism and self-indulgence. If you visit his website, this is abundantly clear as the three-word mantra "shooting for third" rests above a photo of himself doing stand-up, and well above the links to his tour dates and merch.

But it's this eschewing of the spotlight that has given Kinane such a devoted fan base. His material sees him making himself the butt of the joke instead of into some wise-cracking folk hero, and it's his embrace of the off-kilter—going on tours with punk bands like The Falcon—that shows he's not in it for the glitz and glamor. Last month, Kinane's most recent special, Loose in Chicago, was released on vinyl and, to mark the occasion, we had him rank his four hour-long specials to see how they stack up in the present day.

Kyle Kinane: I think I might just be trying to be contrarian, I know the "Pancakes in a Bag" story on that one went viral, and that's the one I hear from people about the most. I think that joke has become the "Free Bird" of my comedy.

That was my first hour special, and I'm actually very proud of it and the way it went, they kept in some of the stuff where I went off on the audience in San Francisco because I mispronounced pho, and they corrected me, like I wouldn't have a backup plan, like it's not part of a joke. I like that that made it in there. But yeah, I think it's a little more that I'm tired of hearing about that one, so I put it last.

Noisey: For as good a reception as it got, did you start to feel pigeonholed by it, like you were Radiohead and everyone wanted to hear "Creep"?
Yeah, you kind of want to be like, "Did you listen to the other stuff? I'm real proud of the other stuff." It's so weird to have to do this, because I don't dislike any of them, but I just have to put it in an order. I think I just put it last because it's the one that kind of put me on the map with, maybe not the hardcore comedy fans, but with bit of a broader audience. But yeah, when people are like, "Pancakes in a Bag," what they're really saying is, "Nothing you've done since then has been as good." It just kind of hurts my heart a little bit.

Going into your first hour-long special for Comedy Central, how did you approach it being so new to that side of things?
Well, this was the first and maybe the last; I didn't know. I only had one record out before that, a Comedy Central half-hour, and a couple other spots here and there. I think what worked about the first album, Death of the Party, was there was that it was not totally polished, and it was not this slick comedy album where they're gonna put makeup on me.

I got there and the set design that they had, they had these screens up and would project images on it, and the images they projected on it were to make it look like a dive bar or something. And I was like, "This is cheesy as fuck." So they changed it last minute. I liked the rawness of Death of the Party, just get in there and set up the mic and there we go, that's the recording. I kind of wanted the TV stuff to be like that, too. You want it to look good, and we did it at the historic Fillmore Auditorium, and the only way you could tell it was the Fillmore was if you looked at the chandeliers. Then it's like, why does it matter that you taped it at this place? Why did you tape it at this place if nobody can tell where it is? That's why when I got to choose for Loose in Chicago, I was like, "I want to do it at The Metro and you're not touching shit. I want it to look like The Metro. If we're gonna tape at The Metro, it's gonna look like The Metro. You can mess with the lighting, but it's gonna be this."

Going into a big production like that, how hard was it to not have it be presented in a way that felt inauthentic?
With Whiskey Icarus, they were taping other people's in there also, so it was kind of like the half-hour where they just had that location. I forget who else, but that's why they just had the generic screen that they could project stuff on it.

I don't have gimmicks. That's what I find distracting about a lot of comedy specials now, is people try to reinvent the special, they're putting another layer of comedy on top of the stand-up special. That's distracting from the jokes. I want it to be like, "Here's what it's like to come to a live show." That's it. No fancy bullshit behind me, nothing else. That's why all the albums all look the way they do. I have one friend who does them, I appreciate his aesthetic. I don't tell him anything about them, I just go, "I got a new stand-up special coming out. So whatever you got…" Like, when the cover of a comedy album also looks funny—it doesn't all have to be wacky. Let the jokes do their job.

You did this one at The Metro in Chicago, and I was actually at one of the shows…
Were you at the first taping or the second taping?

The first, where the person kept screaming about Portillo's.
That piece of shit. Like, why do you think all these cameras are here? You know what, man? You got too fucking drunk. I'm trying to do a nice thing and you got too fucking drunk. If it was a regular show, I'd have been like, "You're getting the fuck out of here now." But I was trying to be cool. But I could tell even after that, I don't know if we used anything from the first show. I think it was all the second show. Because after that, all I could imagine was their skull exploding. All I could think of was blood coming out of their eyes. I wanted them dead. I wanted their throat cut in front of me. Because it's a nerve-racking thing to do. Even getting it to go well is a nerve-racking process. This dumb asshole—I'm still mad about it now.

I mean, yeah. You had to keep redoing that whole set-up over and over and over.
They just kept throwing it in there. And there's something distracting about seeing people I know in the audience. And also, that material, it was weird, I guess for commercial reasons that should be number one, because the vinyl just came out, and I'm really happy because the material on that album definitely went in a different direction. Half of it was about gout and was this story, but I was taking on certain viewpoints. I'm really proud of the gun stuff on there. It wasn't the funniest, but I'm proud of the stance on it.

I have a big problem with comedy right now being bad comedy but people love it just because it supports their ideas. There's so much applause-based comedy. It's all, "Gay people should get married and weed should be legal and Trump's bad." No shit. Why is this a unique viewpoint? The jokes suck. I want to agree with it, but the comedy pisses me off. It's not one-sided, it's not black and white arguments.

I'm proud of the material on it, but I was so sick of it. I was ready to record it the October before then, but the date just kept getting pushed back. I kept touring on that material to keep sharp on it, but I overcooked it and got sick of it toward the end. I had a run leading up to that point where I just wasn't having fun doing comedy, and it seemed like more drunks were coming out. I don't want to do any more, "Boy, I got so drunk" stories. When those are the people coming out to the shows, it's a lot less thoughtful.

How does it feel having to go out and try to expand what you're doing when you're doing it for people who maybe aren't growing with you?
There's the Doug Stanhope bit about walking down the street and seeing people walking so he crosses the street to avoid them, and then realizes they're people going to his show. I wanna be able to hang out with everybody that's there. If I met them, I'd wanna be like, "This is a person I like. I get this person." But when all my stories are like, "I got drunk and did this," then their stories are, "I got too drunk at the Kyle Kinane show and fucked it up." I know I'm partly to blame, in that I'm trying to get people who don't normally come to a comedy show, but that means they might not know how to behave at a comedy show.

More and more, I don't hang out after the shows; I can't drink all the drinks, I get a little agoraphobic after the shows sometimes, because it is a lot of drunk people trying to clamor at you. I'm glad you liked the show, and I'm grateful you came, but if I'm not mentally exhausted after I did the show then I didn't do a good show. I hope it doesn't come off as arrogant or anything, I just have nothing else to talk about after.

By the time you get to recording a special, are you ready to just purge that material and move on to something new?
If you do a joke long enough, outside of one-liners, bits can always evolve and change. You mess around with it a certain night and you're like, "Oh, I'm gonna add that to it." And you mess around with it a little bit more and that's why people are like, "It's storytelling!" No, it was a four-minute joke that I dicked around with for 15 minutes. If I dick around with it for longer, that's gonna be 20 minutes. If I dick around with it for longer, it's gonna be the whole show.

The problem with recording a special is that I can't keep adding stuff. I have to get stuff locked down. And that's when I start getting bored, because I can't really deviate too much. I have to figure out the order and I don't want to make any last-minute changes. There's a joke on Loose in Chicago where I open by making a joke about the Juggalo in the "I <3 Squirters" t-shirt, and that happened like a month-and-a-half before, but I was having fun saying it and just to do something different because I'd been telling these jokes for too long. It wasn't even called Loose in Chicago until I recorded it. I recorded it and was like, "I think I was a little loose on this one" so I called it Loose in Chicago, which is more about the material not being totally tight than being some sort of wild man in the streets. It just wasn't the tightest special in the world.

Loose in Chicago is the first one to deviate in the track titling. Until then, everything had been you lifting song titles from albums like KISS' Destroyer or N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton and this one is just a list of ingredients. Was this a way of making it so people couldn't skip around when listening to the albums?
Forcing people to listen to the whole thing wasn't the intention. As much as I said I don't like it during the actual special, there are other jokes happening that distract from the stand-up, I think elsewhere in it, the cover doesn't have to be spot-on comedy, like, "Oh, look at me! I'm holding a dildo and making a goofy face!" You can still be a little bit of prankster. My whole thing is, I know I haven't made it because I haven't been sued by KISS or Cheap Trick yet.

If you're gonna, I'm sure Gene Simmons would have pulled the trigger pretty quick.
I figure that would have come up right away. I haven't been sued by him or gotten a cease-and-desist, so I know I haven't made it yet.

It's funny, because the first album was Cheap Trick, Whiskey Icarus was KISS. I didn't even edit it. I was like, "Here's 13 tracks. Split it up wherever it's gonna work." That's why one thing would be 12 minutes, another thing would be two minutes, just do it, I don't care. When I did the second Comedy Central special, I Liked His Old Stuff Better, and I was gonna use the N.W.A one, a lawyer was like, "You can't do this." I was like, "That's funny, because I did it on the last one." Clearly somebody hadn't been paying attention. And they were like, "Uhh, we're gonna have to pull this off the shelves!" What shelves? They were getting mad at me that I did it, but your lawyers fucked up. That's why I Liked His Old Stuff Better had to be, "This Track Is Not Called…" because the lawyers got scared.

This was your second go-round doing an hour-long special for Comedy Central. What did you want to do different from Whiskey Icarus?
Well, a lot of it was aesthetics. I got to pick the venue, so I chose the 40 Watt. But they still dicked around with the stage-setting there. It's like, if that's the set, why are you trying to make people believe it's somewhere else?

I was able to tour with some of that material to Australia and it was really well-received there. It was maybe a little more universal. It was just one of those, "I'm ready to record another special, I have the material." And Comedy Central was like, "Okay, great! We'll do it." It was Comedy Central just saying, "Yeah, we'll have Kyle do a special." And not because they were going to be taping several specials at this place, they were kind of like, "We trust you. You've proven yourself." It kind of felt like, okay, it's not taking a chance anymore.

That special was recorded at just the right time where I was still excited to do it on stage, I wasn't sick of that material. I think I started putting more bits in where I act a little bit, where I play some characters in the bits.

When you're going into a new special, how important is it to feel like the material is offering something new for you, artistically?
Well, I think you can always tell when a comic is past their interest level with what they're doing. A really good comic, you'll never know how many times they've told that joke. But I also don't have that level of salesmanship; I'm not that good of an actor. You know how every comedian is like, "So this happened the other day," none of that's true. That's all lies for a set-up. So I'll be like, "Two weeks ago this happened." Then next week I'll be like, "Three weeks ago this happened." Then it's like, "Oh, six months ago this happened." It's not a fresh bit. The timeframe doesn't matter anymore, and you've been telling this too long, so I'll reverse engineer it.

That cop story, I was like, "Oh, I remember this funny story. What's the context for it?" I had to make up a context about your first adult party that you go to. If you just did a bit where you're like, "Man, I was at this party and the cops showed up and this guy died," you gotta put some context around it.

That's maybe not the most funny thing right on its face. With that in mind, people love to position comedy as being completely autobiographical, so how comfortable are you with taking liberties for the sake of the joke?
It's all exaggerated to an extent. Every comedian is going to exaggerate an event. For me, it just sounds better when you nail down some details. There are factual comics who are like, "I was walking down the street and saw this." Well, what street were you walking down? All of a sudden, if I put that in there, that I'm walking down Selma and there's a Jack in the Box right up the street, and a guy got stabbed there, I'm like, "Well, that's the second worst thing that will happen to you at Jack in the Box." So you put that in front of it, now you're joke just got 30 seconds longer. And if you keep doing that, you get a quote unquote "story."

I like that I just named it that, too. Because, again, when Whiskey Icarus kind of blew up bigger than I expected, and I was happy about it, if you read any A.V. Club comments section or any YouTube comment, it's all gonna be like, "Man, this isn't as good as his last one." So I was like, "I'll just call the whole record that and you can kiss my ass."

Just beat them to the punch with it.
"Oh, what were you gonna say about it? You were gonna say the title of the record about it? Okay good, now I got you already."

This was your first comedy album. How long had you had been sitting on that material?
Some of that stuff, a couple of those things were the first jokes I ever told. You have your whole career to record your first thing so you can choose from your entire backlog. But that was 2009, and in 2007 I had bombed at the Aspen Comedy Festival, and that's when I kind of found my voice after that festival. It was kind of like, "Oh, it doesn't matter anymore."

I wasn't trying to record an album. And, at the time, what was on that label [ASpecialThing] was like when you look at Kill Rock Stars or Dischord Records. You look at the label and you're like, "These are the people I want to be like." It was a curated list of comics on that label. So when they asked me to be on it, I said yes. Then I realized I didn't know how to record an album. I wasn't headlining. I wasn't on the road. I was only doing spots in town, and you can get ten minutes here and there, so I only had ten-minute pieces of material. I had no idea how they fit together. That album was, and you can tell, is a chunk, then I stop and take a drink of water, then there's another ten-minute chunk of comedy that works together, then another ten-minute chunk that works together. It really shouldn't have worked out. It was lo-fi and kind of sloppy, and it was taped together in the editing, but I thought it was awesome that they asked me to do a record. I wasn't planning on it, and it was only one recording. That's it. It's real punk rock shit. And I quit my day job two weeks before I recorded it in the summer of 2009.

Were you prepared to give comedy a full-time go regardless of what happened with the record?
Yeah. It was real indicative of what was going on in my life at that point. I was getting road-work here and there. At that time, I was also opening for Patton Oswalt a little bit, and things were going well there. I had a manager and an agent that was booking me things, and I was like, "Okay, you need to book me for whatever. Because as soon as I quit my day job, I'm gonna be scared shitless and I need to work." I quit two weeks before that album came out and they were like, "You're gonna start working the road and hitting these clubs." I didn't know what I was doing. I was booked at real goofy comedy clubs and it wasn't going well, but it was a real big period of change. It's a little time capsule, because I'm still talking about day jobs on that album. Because that was written when I had day jobs. I don't want to see a comic be like, "Oh man, working in an office sucks." You've been on the road 12 years.

When did it start seeming like people were finding the record and connecting with what you were doing?
I went on a tour in 2010, I did a month where I had this box of CDs and a shitty little Ford Ranger with a cap on the back, and I went out for a month and would sleep in the back of the truck if I had to, I'd sell the CDs out of the back of the truck after shows. It was everything I thought being in a band would be like without all the bullshit of load-in and load-out and stuff. I had some of the best times of my life on that tour, and I had something physical to sell. It was like, "I am a comedian." I didn't have to go to work in the morning. And yeah, people were buying 'em. I just couldn't believe how much people were scooping 'em up after shows. So yeah, that album, though I did like that the material was a little more raw, I've been able to be a comedian without a day job for eight years now. So I can't really complain about anything in life. The problem with happy comedians is that they're not really funny.

Did you think having that perspective, of working a day job and really trying to make this other thing happen, resonated with people more?
I think it was that I was 33, so the same age as a lot of people who went to college because they thought they were supposed to, even though maybe what their heart was interested in—their passion—was not something that necessarily required college. They went for art, or for this and that, and then were left with a mountain of student loans. And they weren't gonna be a doctor, so how were they gonna pay it back? I think those jokes got to a lot of people. I know I mocked graphic designers. That was a thing that everybody became. "I can't be an artist, I guess I'll be a graphic designer." Even the musicians. "Ahh, I'm a graphic designer." That was the fallback. Nobody was doing the thing they wanted, everybody was doing the fourth thing because that's what they had to do. So I had jokes about that, jokes about pissing your efforts away at an art school, and that resonated with people.

What did you take from this one to help inform the TV specials that came in the wake of it?
At some point, you get a little sick of whoring out your personal experiences for comedy. I also don't live the life that I lived before, of getting drunk and getting into situations so I could report back, being this alcoholic journalist where I'm the investigator and the subject of every story. Now it's like, what about writing bits about something you're not personally connected to? What about just being a comedian as opposed to being the drunk guy that does dumb shit and then shares it with people? Let's just write bits. Let's write long bits, that are maybe impersonal, but then see if you're still funny.

Comics get used to people knowing who they are so they can kind of rely on their reputation to get them through, and then the writing suffers. It's like, I don't want to walk into a club and be like, "Oh, I got drunk and fell asleep on the pizza guy." No, that's easy, and it's an easy way out for comedy. That's why I like Loose in Chicago, and I especially like the putting ketchup on a hot dog line just to get a "boo" out of people. Because fuck you and your stupid fuckin' rules, you hypocrites. That's the bratty kid in me that kind of wants to irritate the audience a little bit. I want to challenge them. Like, why are you laughing at me?

David Anthony is on Twitter.