Will Arnett’s midlife-crisis comic portrait asks, simply enough: Can pain be alchemized into punch lines? Is This Thing On? answers with a wavering shrug. The film blinks at the electricity of stand-up culture and looks away, here rendering a soft, self-serious breakup dramedy whose jokes hobble along and insights arrive half-baked.
The Premise and the Problem With Stand-Up as Salve
Arnett portrays Alex Novak, a buttoned-up New Yorker whose friendly divorce from his wife Tess (Laura Dern) leads him to the world of open-mic nights. He’s not trying to build a career; he wants catharsis. Cooper, who wrote the script with Arnett and Mark Chappell, presents stand-up-as-salve (not craft), and that’s the first of his film’s mistakes. When your protagonist treats the stage like a confessional booth, we want to hear revelation or razor wit. This script rarely delivers either.
There have been plenty of movies that deeply mined the torment and ego in comedy when they itched to impart that texture — consider Punchline’s bruising ambition, Funny People’s industry melancholy or the meticulous rise at play in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Is This Thing On? skims the surface. Alex riffs on dad-bod clichés and marital discomfort, getting prickly whenever the room cools. The scenes hit with the queasy energy of an open-mic spiral, but without that spiral’s edge or danger, which helps drive it forward at all.
Performances That Deserve Better Than This Material
Dern provides Tess with grace notes — patience curdling into exasperation, warmth cooling into wary distance — but the script too frequently relegates her to the bench. The film zeros in on wanting to examine a marriage from both sides, but defaults to Alex’s interiority. But when Tess finally does have the floor, those moments sing, promising a more expansive two-hander that never arrives.
Cooper appears as “Balls,” a talentless thespian whose pratfalls and irrepressible optimism seem to constitute the Ken Loach-ian pulse of the movie. He’s about the only character here who really seems to dig show business for its own sake. Some supporting turns pop — Christine Ebersole as Alex’s needling mother, plus actual comics like Chloe Radcliffe, Jordan Jensen, and Reggie Conquest to give the club scenes a lived-in cadence. There’s a chuckle in there even from former quarterback Peyton Manning, who makes a celeb cameo. The cast continues wringing laughter where the script strains to provoke it.
Why the Stand-Up Misses the Mark on Craft and Process
Onstage, specificity is everything — tight premises, ruthless edits, tags that move forward rather than stall. The film occasionally nods to the grind of rewriting and bombing, but it doesn’t often dramatize how material morphs. Without that iterative engine, Alex’s sets feel static, more framed by sentiment than structure. The result is a paradox: a movie about comedy that doesn’t seem willing to tolerate the actually messy, awkward process of testing and honing jokes in real time.
Matthew Libatique’s close-in cinematography positions us inches from Alex’s face, inviting empathy, but also unwittingly highlighting the flabby patches of the act. When a performer is “on,” those suffocating close-ups can be riveting; when the material sags, they’re punishing. It’s a contrast that lays bare the film’s tonal split — sincere American family therapy session versus queasy quasi-comedy — and fails to bridge the two.
The Broader Comedy Context and Today’s Stand-Up Boom
Stand-up is enjoying a boom that has gone on for years. Major touring comics are packing arenas, and festivals like Just For Laughs and the New York Comedy Festival feature scores of emerging voices annually. Pollstar has been tracking record grosses for comedy tours in recent years, and streaming platforms keep releasing new specials. In that cluttered ecosystem, audiences appreciate the craftsmanship behind a tight five-minute set. (The fact that this is a real-world bar further exacerbates the issue here: The movie wants us to believe this club is a safe sanctuary, not a meritocracy judged by frequency of laughs or originality of premise.)
It is a truth universally acknowledged by industry veterans that comics spend months sanding down one little bit, workshopping small-room-sized beats before going all in on larger stages. Interviews on NPR and panels at the Comedy Cellar have occasionally driven home the same point: vulnerability doesn’t make for structure. Is This Thing On? gets the vulnerability, but it underestimates how much framework verve lends to that vulnerability.
Judgment On The Arnett And Cooper Team-Up
There’s another, better movie hidden inside this one — about friendship in the trenches of show business, a portrait of hobbyist artistry that still uses macaroni and glitter anyway, divorce without melodrama. The cast vaporizes that movie at the periphery, with Dern grounded by the pathos and Cooper’s clownish sidecar supplying chaos. But the central stand-up gimmick never gels — the jokes are almost never good enough to warrant such heavy framing.
As a contemplation of closings, Is This Thing On? is tender, if timid. As a comedy about comedy, it’s a miss; when at last the light flashes from the back of the room, you’re relieved for all concerned — but you wish that set had dared to kill rather than merely confess.
