The first thing you notice about Sam Morril is his voice - that thick New York drawl - that's so effortlessly paired with a lackadaisical delivery that you're drawn into a comedic stupor.
Which all sounds like a negative thing, but it’s not. The oft-unspoken comedic rule is that stand-ups have to make you laugh every nine seconds or so to keep an audience interested and engaged. Any longer, and it builds up a tension that can overwhelm and ultimately destroy a set.
What’s more, when a comic enters the stage, the first and foremost task is quelling an audience’s anxiety – their fear that you’re going to bomb. That’s why open micers face such a harder task than established comedians, the bigger the reputation, the less audience anxiety, and the easier it is to push those boundaries and ultimately win them over. When an audience is truly in a comedian’s palm, that’s when the real boundary-pushing material can work, and when the magic happens.
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Morril is somewhat unique in that his voice utterly calms such anxiety from essentially the moment he opens his mouth. It’s a wonderful attribute for a comedian, perhaps even surpassing the generally held idea that an inherently funny accent – Carl Barron’s Aussie twang, for instance – is one of the greatest attributes a comedian can possess.
Morril grew up in New York City, the son of Ashkenazi Jewish parents. His mother, Marilyn Greenberg, is a painter and his stepfather is publishing industry attorney Mark Charles Morril1. He attended the Browning School in Manhattan and later attended Tulane University in New Orleans. He was named one of Comedy Central’s “Comics to Watch” in 2011 and has worked with comedians including Dave Attell, Marc Maron, Conan O’Brien, and Amy Schumer1. Morril’s style is confessional, glamorous, and gently grotesque. He is known for his sharp wit, clever wordplay, and ability to tackle sensitive topics with ease.
His voice also nicely compliments his style. He’s a clever comic, who relies often on wordplay and broadly relatable themes (the majority of his set was devoted to those timeless tropes of sex and relationships) because they so easily belie the gently grotesque and laser-beam-dodging controversialities that he uses to surprise and delight his audiences. There’s a subtlety to his performances and he never relies on faux-anger, that build up of emotion, that can generate excitement in an audience.
It’s an impressive choice on his part, as it’s very difficult for comic’s to play it as cool as he does (with relatively little self-deprecation we might add) for quite a long set and really satisfy an audience in the way he does. To keep momentum, he runs quite quickly from punchline to punchline, almost never basking in an audience’s laughter. He also relies slightly more on shock value than some of his contemporaries, there are quite a few lines that purely work because of basic misdirection, rather than the originality of the concept.
He’s fairly unique within the current generation of American comedians. We’ve seen Shane Gillis and Mark Normand sell out Melbourne theatres in the preceding months and he’s a far cooler on-stage character who has succeeded far less due to an overt shtick and far more due to the cleverness of his wordplay. Very easy to respect, and very much worthy of recommendation.
Tickets here.
