Nice! But as Nick Kroll details in Little Big Boy, his new comedy special on Netflix, there’s a second way to get comedy superpowers: Extreme and utter humiliation. Here’s how it went down.
Netflix
Cycle back in time to Kroll’s seventh-grade year. The setting? Jenny’s house, the site of his friend group’s first-ever boy/girl party. Nick was dressed for love: Purple button-down shirt and GapKids khakis with the elastic waist (“for the kids who were like ‘I need to go poopy now!’”)
Kroll selected his outfit so carefully because of one girl in particular: Lizzy, the object of a crush that had lasted the entirety of Nick’s childhood. His seduction plan was engineered well in advance. He approached her while she was watching TV, casually leaned against the wall, and hit her with his practiced opening line:
“So did you hear Mrs. Goldman’s daughter might have cancer?:”
As Kroll describes, he was straight-up “spitting hot game.” But just as Lizzy turned to look at Nick, disaster struck. Jenny (you remember Jenny, she’s the girl throwing the party) sneaks up on Kroll and pantses him.
“Those GapKids khakis with the elastic waist come right on down. And then below that, I’m wearing silk boxer shorts like a businessman on vacation in Hong Kong. Those slide right on down.”
It didn’t help that Lizzy was still sitting down. She turned to Nick and “is now eye to eye with my bald little cashew.” She’s understandably horrified, perhaps as much as Jenny, the girl who had no idea what havoc she had unleashed into an unsuspecting junior-high world.
As for Kroll? It was a moment that would reverberate through the rest of his life.
“I am now a comedian.”
See some of the bit here.
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Top image: Netflix