"In no other show this year will you see an elderly character wearing a wig of pubic hair at her crotch while playing air guitar or a younger one spider-walking topless while growling demonically."

From the NYT article, "Make Way for the Carnal Clowns of Stand-Up/Three rising comics share an aesthetic that marries crass physical humor with disarmingly sexual themes. They’re unsettling and hilarious."

Good use of the verb "marries."

The first 2 "clowns" discussed in the article are female, so I was cynically thinking gender was a big part of why the NYT was giving such an enthusiastic write-up. But the third "clown" — discussed very briefly — is male.

Cynical Me rears her ugly head to say they only threw him in so it would look as though the new trend was crass physical humor with harshly sexual themes and not specifically women getting into the old male terrain of physical humor and sexual themes.

Cynical Me points out that that there are only 3 sentences about the male, and the third one is, "He is a familiar type: The comic with infinite confidence and no skill." Old, not new. Does he really belong in this article?

The article ends:

As artists searching for originality often are, they borrow from a variety of sources.... And perhaps what makes them seem so thrillingly unpredictable is that they don’t seem to be reacting against a tradition as struggling to forge their own.

But the guy — whose comic persona is a bad standup comedian — doesn't sound "thrillingly unpredictable." That is "reacting against a tradition." And we were just told "He is a familiar type."