David Cross: The Pride is Back (1999)

Starring: David Cross
Grade: C+

I understand that David Cross is a legend in comedy, and The Pride is Back has some good laughs. However, you may be expecting something better if you’re a superfan of the man, though it’s not bad when you consider the length.

Summary

To open everything, we see Cross on a date, lying about himself to impress the woman he’s with. They’re interrupted by a fan who wants him to perform stand-up for her boyfriend who’s at a club across the street, celebrating his birthday. Cross agrees and we see him walk with the fan from the restaurant, as he asks her questions along the way, all the way to the stage of the club he’s performing at in one take.

To start off the actual set, he does this vaguely Italian singalong thing, and it doesn’t warrant nearly as much time as he clearly felt it needed. The payoff was pretty funny though. Then again, I laugh anytime someone calls someone else a fucking moron. Following this, Cross weaves through a multitude of topics like airport art, magic, porn magazines, how companies try to gear their advertisements towards younger crowds (the egg thing was pretty funny), and a sandwich he got on the plane with a bible verse on it. If you think he’s done lampooning Christianity, he’s not. It’s a topic he jumps back to quite often. He talks about in-flight magazines, this whole program encouraging people to give up their free flyer miles to sick children, a woman who claimed to see the Virgin Mary every so often and him going to see the woman in action, and subsequently, a story about how he got raped by the ghost of the Virgin Mary. In addition, he rightfully predicts how people were going to be wrong about the world ending once the year 2000 hits (This special did happen in 1999 after all) and how funny it will be to hear the back pedaling of preachers who tried to scare people. Next, he goes after the crucifixion and how Jesus probably accepted his fate because of how awful life was back then, the idea of turning water into wine and its negatives, weed and the subculture that comes from it, and how much he hates the ridiculousness of High Times Magazine.

Cross then brings up two money-making ideas he has.

1. A company that delivers pizza via limo
2. Eating and describing pork to kosher people

After this, he considers raising his future kids to be Amish but not become Amish himself, and he talks about a handbook he found on ridiculous date suggestions. This handbook thing, which was a real book, was easily one of the funniest bits of the show. For instance, one date idea was to talk about the time they saw a UFO and if they don’t have a story like this, make one up. This is genuinely stupid, and David Cross handles it accordingly. This leads into another suggestion about using a kazoo to jam along to MTV and he lambasts this idea as well, rightfully so. Next, he jumps to doing an impression of a crack baby and Stephen Hawking with a prostitute, assisted suicide and the people against it (I’d argue that his spin on it was funny no matter what side of the argument you land on), fetal tissue testing, and the world’s obsession with protecting dead bodies. This is where he admits he doesn’t care what happens to his body after he dies, arguing they should hand his body over to a bunch of necrophiliacs.

That’s classic David Cross right there.

Cross goes on about his problems with people not being organ donors and those crazy old people that die and leave all their money to their pets. Admittedly, that shit is ridiculous. He touches on violence in the media (“Did Hitler play video games?”), a CES (Consumer Electronic Show) convention and how the second (and more populated) floor was all about porn. This snowballs into pornstars and how they want to be successful actors, thinking it’s a steppingstone, and how big of assholes real actors can be. To end this breezy 55-minute special, he goes all-in on attacking James Lipton in a very funny rant.

My Thoughts:

For just under an hour, The Pride is Back isn’t too bad. David Cross gets by on putting his real opinions into controversial topics and the satire can be pretty funny. At times, he does miss the mark though. Sometimes he hits with biting satire and then jumps to something “shocking” in his set to get a rise out of everyone, but the crowd seemed to be well aware of his brand of humor, and it felt forced. Additionally, it did feel like he went on with the Christianity rant a bit too much because there was only a small chuckle-worthy portion. The porn stuff was really funny though. In fact, the last part of the special was really good following the bang-up first part. When he started talking about the pornstar selling pictures of her asshole and how he immediately thought of the process she probably went through in picking the right picture, I couldn’t help but laugh. This of course leads us to the best joke out of the special. He talks about someone at the CES convention promoting, “Fuck My Dirty Shit Hole: The Movie”, with Cross quipping, “I’m sure you’re having the same reaction I did, you know, which is like…how did they ever turn that book into a movie?”.

The ending to the special really brought everything home. You can see the low-key anger in Cross as he talks about how easy acting is but how big of assholes actors can be and be paid handsomely for it. He spins this directly into a full take down of James Lipton and the pretentiousness of Inside the Actors Studio, and I loved every second of it. He had me rolling when he talked about how him and Bob Odenkirk had to present a “Best Cable Host” award to him at some awards show and after talking about what award it was, he says, “Big fucking deal” and jumps back into his story. It’s supposed to be a throwaway line, but I cackled on that one. He harbored some serious hate for the dude, but he turned it into some great comedy.

You can tell David Cross is an intelligent guy that knows about the serious topics he brings up because his ranting has a bite to it. It’s not just observational humor, he seems to be making a solid point with everything he brings up. Some of it works, and some of it doesn’t. The only thing that really doesn’t work seems to be the early part of the special where he’s just goofing around and touching the topics lightly to say something off-color. None of the material in the first half was really that funny. It was amusing at times, but I wouldn’t go any further than that. The actually funny stuff comes with the second half.

David Cross is a funny guy and during some stretches of The Pride is Back we do see it. I can’t say it was as good as I thought it was going to be but for the length, Cross doesn’t do a half-bad job. Plus, the last fifteen to twenty minutes save the day. All in all, it’s not even close to his best work, but it does the job for a short viewing.