Dan Mintz, Reanimated
Comedians can be control freaks. However freewheeling a standup set may seem, it’s usually the product of obsessive trial runs and rewrites. But every comic walks onstage along a precipice of potential disaster. Unless, that is, the set is fully animated, in which case every blink and cough can be endlessly tweaked. Dan Mintz’s new YouTube special, “Well Rounded Entertainer,” is this kind of routine: it is a cartoon.
In the special, a two-dimensional Mintz delivers a fusillade of non-sequitur one-liners—Borscht Belt-y, but peppered with severed-dick jokes—in a nasal deadpan that is recognizable as the nasal deadpan of Tina Belcher, the angsty teen “Bob’s Burgers” cartoon character that Mintz has voiced in more than three hundred episodes. It is uncanny to hear an animated forty-five-year-old man say “A pack-a-day habit is bad for a smoker, but it’s really bad for a guy who molests Cub Scouts” in Tina’s voice—like seeing Bart Simpson suddenly quoting Scripture.
One recent evening, performing on “The Tonight Show,” the human Mintz had no cartoon avatar to hide behind. He rattled off some of his more network-friendly fodder: “I grew up dirt-poor,” he began. The audience let out a sympathetic “Aww!” He continued: “We were money-rich, but we had very little dirt.”
After the taping, Mintz made his way through the bowels of 30 Rock and perused the menu at a rinkside Italian restaurant. “I always have to Google every kind of pasta,” he said. Was a gnocco, he mused, “just a baked potato?” He talked about how John Mulaney, who executive-produced the new special, also officiated at his 2011 wedding. Mintz said that he was nervous before the ceremony—he had to follow Mulaney, after all, and his vows contained a bit. “It started with ‘I really wanted these vows to be good. I spent so much time on them, I haven’t even had a moment to watch the news,’ ” Mintz recalled. “Then it was, like, ‘Your flaws are as hard to find as Osama bin Laden,’ ” who’d just been killed. “It was a big swing,” he said. “What if I’d bombed?”
Mintz ordered rigatoni carbonara and described a heckler from early in his career. “It was just a woman saying, ‘You’re not funny and you’re a bad comedian!’ That’s the kind of heckling that happens on TV all the time, but not in real life.”
“Well Rounded Entertainer” is not the first-ever cartoon comedy special—Tig Notaro put one out in 2021. But, where Notaro used the format to dramatize long anecdotes, Mintz’s special is mainly just him, in a red T-shirt and glasses, talking into a mike. “Eventually, people convinced me that there should be a reason for the animation,” he said. So he added cameos by “Tom Hanks,” the world’s oldest tree, and a gospel choir.
In an early cut, Mintz didn’t like the shape of his head. “It’s kind of big,” he said, ruefully. “I can’t go to a hat store—I have to go to Big Hats for Big Heads.” He continued, “The tricky part was that, if someone’s trying to draw a picture of you, the funniest version is kind of insulting. But if you take the edit too far it’s like airbrushing a head shot.”
The animated set is based on a live show Mintz did at Dynasty Typewriter, in Los Angeles. The audience was packed with parents from his kids’ school (he has an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old), who turned out not to be the biggest laughers. “But I didn’t want to see people laughing hard,” Mintz insisted. “If you see it, people will be, like, ‘You drew that! You drew them to laugh at you!’ ”
He thought back on his own teen years, in Anchorage, Alaska: “I was kind of similar to Tina, I guess, except maybe without her confidence.” He adopted his monotonic demeanor in the seventh grade, when, he said, “I just felt, like, ‘I can’t betray any kind of emotion.’ ” In high school, “I realized that, if I said something sexually inappropriate in my voice, it would get a laugh.” (From the special: “I think anything’s O.K. if there are two consenting adults—except a threesome.” A classic Tina-ism: “I’m nuts for butts.”)
For his closer on Fallon, he opted for the opening joke from the special: “When you’re little and you hear a noise in the middle of the night, you’re, like, ‘Please be the water heater, not a monster.’ But when you grow up you’re, like, ‘Please be a monster, not my water heater.’ ” Mintz had been nervous about how it would play, he explained, because, “in Manhattan, people aren’t homeowners.” He prayed that there’d be people from Jersey in the house. The joke killed. ♦