By Kate Rennebohm

In his essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin argued that mechanized war, industrialization, and urbanization were reorganizing human existence on a mass scale and were, in turn, making “experience” increasingly incommunicable. The storyteller, one who has historically made experience understandable—grounding all things (narrative, morality, practical know-how, history, tradition, and politics) in a telling of specific experiences—was thus necessarily disappearing from (Western) life. For Benjamin, where what will come to replace experience—information—disavows context to claim to be “understandable in itself” (all the better for its commodification), storytelling lives in specificity, avoiding the (informational) pull towards explanation. Storytellers report their own experiences or others’; they bring tales from faraway travels or they pass on local tales and traditions, all in the service of communicating experience. And as storytelling fades, Benjamin writes, so too does the possibility of being made a communal listener—of becoming one who can take in others’ experiences and have them become their own.

Enter Joe Pera, the comedian, actor, director, writer, and producer whose self-financed, self-produced, and self-released comedy special, Joe Pera: Slow & Steady, dropped on his YouTube channel in early October. Pera is primarily known for performing an exaggerated version of himself—a soft-spoken Midwesterner (his comedy is peppered with the word “Sorry”) who delivers lines at a snail’s pace while sporting a bald spot and thick glasses, a protruding neck, and sweaters with Dockers. The singularity of Pera’s creative approach lends continued credence to Benjamin’s alarm call over the death of the storyteller, yet Pera’s output also offers some hope that the contemporary moment’s chaotic brew of social-technical-political conditions might be making possible the role’s re-emergence.

On the technical side, the possibilities of short, small-budget internet productions targeted to highly specific audiences have certainly been integral to Pera’s success. Having started performing stand-up in college, Pera later co-founded with fellow comedian Connor O’Malley the production company Chestnut Walnut Unlimited, which would support the production of various shorts, made with a roster of comedian friends of whom many would be key contributors to his later work. The real upswing of Pera’s career, however, followed his collaboration with the Adult Swim network, which began with the short 2016 special Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep (directed by Pera and Kieran O’Hare) that aired under the network’s Infomercials programming and involved a (literally, not figuratively) animated Pera sitting by a fire, musing on subjects designed to make the viewer fall unconscious. A second Adult Swim special that same year, Joe Pera Helps You Find the Perfect Christmas Tree, connected Pera with Marty Schousboe, who, as house director, would play a key role in developing the capacious aesthetic (alternatively droll and plainly beautiful) of Joe Pera Talks with You, the regular series that the network greenlit soon after. 

Remarkably idiosyncratic, Joe Pera Talks with You ran for three seasons between 2018 and 2021. In its expansive 11-minute episodes, the show follows “Joe Pera’s” life as a middle-school choir teacher in Marquette, a smallish city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Demonstrating what Benjamin calls the storyteller’s “orientation toward practical interests,” the show employs a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood–style framing device in which Pera, speaking directly to the audience, opens each episode with a plan to talk about something particular—breakfast foods, fall drives, the Midwestern need to own a second fridge, good fashion, and fireworks—which then quickly falls into the background as the daily events of Pera’s life take over. 

The first season introduces Joe’s older best friend, Gene (played by Late Night with Seth Meyers camera operator Gene Kelly), and charts Joe’s developing relationship with Sarah Conner (comedian Jo Firestone), a new music teacher at his school. (Joe at one point excitedly describes Sarah to his beloved grandmother as “If an old woman were young, in the best possible way!”) The second season tracks the disintegrating marriage of his neighbours, the Melskys (Connor O’Malley plays the father, Mike, with the comedian’s signature Trumpian man-child emotional explosions making a perfect foil for Pera’s calm demeanour), while Pera mourns the loss of a family member. The third and final season finds Joe pondering the future as the mental health of Sarah, an anxious survivalist with a stocked panic-room basement, worsens.

That Sarah is hyper-attuned to the possibilities of societal collapse is only one of the more obvious ways Joe Pera Talks with You distinguishes itself from the recent trend of liberal head-in-the-sand “nice-core” sitcoms that have been so successfully marketing themselves as sidestepping political divisions. Certainly, the show offers up qualities like patience, humour, curiosity, and acceptance as helpful responses to the challenges of contemporary life, but it has no interest in avoiding or denying those challenges: Joe Pera Talks with You, like Pera’s solo comedy, fuels itself on the incongruities that follow from constant confrontations between a kind, optimistic outlook and the harsher aspects of the world. In an episode centred entirely on Joe’s weekly grocery shopping trip, Joe excitedly crosses paths with “Fred the sample guy” (Fred Firestone), a middle-aged man whose sky-high enthusiasm for his job giving away free food samples and absolute joy at seeing Joe is put into relief a few minutes later when Joe reveals, via to-camera address, Fred’s status as a previously incarcerated person. Optimism and enthusiasm are lovely, but not an escape or panacea.

Joe Pera Talks with You even builds such dissonance into one of its main narrative arcs, as Sarah constantly reminds Joe (and the viewer) of the endlessly proliferating threats to humanity’s continued existence on the planet. Midway through the first season, Joe links Sarah’s worldview to a particular experience: as a child, he tells the viewer, Sarah witnessed her brother being trampled to death in a Black Friday stampede. Neither Joe nor the show insist on the need to address or expel these realities, but rather speculate on how we might maintain our sanity in the face of them. When trying to come to terms with Sarah’s worldview, for example, a distracted Joe asks a series of middle-schoolers what they think about the future. Their answers, alternatively worried and assured, are striking, but no more so than the ease with which Joe Pera Talks with You incorporates these moments of documentary (the children, like many others in the show, are non-actors) into its fictional narrative—a shift that denies any kind of simple break between the reality of the show and the reality of its viewers’ lives. 

This fluidity of movement between different image and meaning regimes is perhaps the most distinctive formal feature of the show, and one that is often missed in the frequent descriptions of it as a slow-paced and realistic (if comedically heightened) take on small-town life. Joe Pera Talks with You frequently swerves outside of its diegetic reality into spaces that combine Joe’s imaginings with the visual vocabulary of corporate stock images and advertising, the tropes of nature footage and slow TV, the sonic ambience of ASMR videos and affect-management podcasts, and the lo-fi didacticism or process footage of YouTube videos to provocative and frequently hilarious effect. For instance, in the first-season episode “Joe Pera Lights Up the Night With You,” Joe sets off New Year’s Eve fireworks to entertain the Melskys’ five-year-old daughter (a shivering Pera outside, before lighting the fuse: “Three, two, one—hey, it’s 9 p.m.!”) before Joe and Kelsey Melsky’s awed, upturned faces give way to a montage of fireworks and faces staring into lit skies. In a voiceover that, like so much of the show, manages to be simultaneously endearing and farcical, Pera narrates his theory that viewing fireworks leads to “thinking about ex-girlfriends”—which he then does, before meandering into an imagined Midwestern garage hangout with his crush Sarah. 

In another first-season episode, “Joe Pera Talks You Back to Sleep,” rapping rain on Joe’s window leads the episode into another of these reveries. As Joe wonders what other sounds are relaxing, viewers are presented with advertising-esque shots of liquids being poured into glasses while a Hawaiian riff plays in the background and Pera makes comments like, “Watching liquids flow from a large container to a small container is a delight.” Then we have a brief interview with a man who pours professionally for such images, which then leads to a montage of said pourer doing his favourite activity: playing dominoes. It’s as if the 21st century’s rapid collapse of meaning and legibility into mediated isolation and psychosis were being surveyed and narrated by your grandfather. 

Certainly, “grandfatherly” is an adjective that follows Pera around, as much for his physical presence and a writing style that uses minimal verbiage to maximum effect (he cites musician Bill Callahan as an important influence) as for his penchant for discussing arcane historical and contemporary details. One early episode of Joe Pera Talks with You has Joe attempting to woo Sarah by writing a musical for his middle-schoolers recounting “the Rat Wars of Alberta (1950s–Present Day),” while a second-season episode pairs a current-day evening power outage with the story of Joe as a returning Civil War soldier who struggles to determine what he can offer to Sarah, the local lighthouse operator, as he pursues a job as her assistant (such positions, he tells us, sliding between times and spaces in a characteristic fashion, were among the first federal jobs held by women in the US). 

If episodes such as these speak to Pera’s interest in passing along local and distant histories and traditions, Joe Pera Talks with You’s gorgeous musical score plays a crucial role in this as well. Composed by Ryan Dann (who similarly accompanies Pera on stage in Joe Pera: Slow & Steady), the show’s music takes its cues from early American hymns and Shaker music; “stuff that feels timeless and solid,” in Pera’s words. True to form, though, the show consistently punctures any overly romantic views of the past: the last scene of the lighthouse episode, “Joe Pera Guides You Through the Dark,” finds Civil War–era Joe sitting by a fire with Sarah, and ends with the punchline reveal that she’s going to be subjecting him to a prophylactic leeching session for at least another hour. 

That the show manages to maintain this sense of offering a historical vantage on hyper-contemporary matters—it seems written by minds completely conversant in post-media-convergence life and completely alien to it at the same time—is its defining quality. Joe Pera Talks with You is often described as lacking in cynicism, which is true, but this characterization fails to capture the show’s wry attitude: its signaling of the historical, and thus ephemeral and potentially absurd, nature of contemporary American visual, moral, and social culture. The show celebrates the ordinary, but only by maintaining the underlying faith that this too will change. 

This quality is perhaps more obvious after watching Joe Pera: Slow & Steady, which strips away from Pera’s joke-writing the rich comedic vein of visual counterpoint found in the show’s free-associating montages, while making his impulses towards storytelling all the more evident. Filmed at the Opera House in Williamsburg last spring, and designed around material Pera built up while touring after the cancellation of Talks with You, the pitch-perfect special (directed by Schousboe) sees Pera leaning into his absurdist tangents and using his persona to vocalize and estrange contemporary idioms of sexuality and dating. One section has Pera thinking deeply about a date’s comments on space law (apparently a real thing), and concludes with him asking, “Why am I even trying to find connection? I should be trying to fuck.…I want, I want, I want to own that ass.” 

While Pera’s joke-writing in Joe Pera: Slow & Steady is as sharp as ever, and his ability to relate to the crowd the way a second-grade teacher relates to his students is deeply charming, the most memorable section of the special is its conclusion. Here, directly invoking storytelling, Pera sits in a cozy chair next to a lamp, reading from a large book as he unfurls a tale about a hot summer night in New York in which he struggles to sleep next to his partner Yoobi, who is “basically a benevolent version of the Babadook.” The story, which ends with a lovely paean to ice and companionship, traverses the realms of fabrication, fantasy, and the utterly mundane, posing the question (so consistent in Pera’s oeuvre) of where the personal or autobiographical begins and where it ends. That question is less important for any answer that could be forthcoming than for what it says about the achievement of storytelling: the possibility of making experience—real or unreal, direct or mediated, joyful or devastating, yours or others’—communicable, and of making listening imaginable.

Kate Rennebohm