Photo by Ryan Provstgaard
At the end of his incredibly funny new stand-up special, Shocks & Struts, filmed at Wiseguys in Salt Lake City, Kyle Kinane explains how a misadventure with his new van during a trip to Joshua Tree National Park – among other things – changed his outlook on life and made him reevaluate his cynical, judgmental ways.
“I don’t know anything about you. You don’t know anything about me. Let’s just get on in this world and be okay with each other,” he said closing out his set to uproarious applause.
We had a chance to chat with Kinane about buying a van, performing during a pandemic as well as the people, places, pets and philosophies that helped shape Shocks & Struts.
“I want to watch somebody learn from the world and turn that into what they’re doing in stand-up. I don’t want to see a comedian who thinks they’re right all the time, that’s not attractive to me. Let’s see a comedian who knows they’re wrong and still struggles with trying to do the right thing,” he said by phone earlier this month. “Personally, that’s more interesting to me than someone who’s like, ‘Let me tell you how the world works.’ Please tell me. You make a living telling jokes, having free drinks and not having a day job, but you tell people that sit in rush hour traffic everyday for three hours how the world really works. I don’t know how your world works. I don’t know you. I know how my world works and I’ll tell you about that world.”
As shown throughout the special, Kinane’s world is full of opportunities to learn and grow, but – more importantly – to find the funny in encounters big and small.
“It’s gotta be funny first. Even if you’re making a point about something, the joke’s got to be the most important part of what you’re saying, not the pontifications,” he said.
One of the funniest segments of Shocks & Struts is a bit about the debauchery involved with taking any cruise, let alone a heavy metal cruise during the waning months of a pandemic. Though Kinane is more of a punk than a metalhead, he explained that he took the gig to perform – among the likes of Lamb of God – specifically because it wasn’t in his comfort zone.
“I appreciate them having me. Anything that seems like it might scare me a little bit, I have to do it,” he said joking about how waking up to the music of Mudvayne on the ship’s speakers wasn’t exactly his idea of a relaxing trip at sea, but it was heartwarming to see people connecting after lockdowns ended. “It was a music festival at sea. Especially because of the pandemic, you saw people where this was their trip. You saw people from all over the world that had come to go on this cruise. So people were seeing their friends for the first time after the world kind of shut down and everybody was in good spirits. It wasn’t all necessarily my type of music, but I’d cruise around, take in a little bit of this band, a little bit of that band and a lot of times look out at the sea.”
Not a fan of Zoom comedy shows – as hilariously detailed in Shocks & Struts – Kinane found inspiration in bands and the DIY scene to keep performing as the pandemic lockdowns loosened-up by finding nontraditional venues to host a set.
“If I’ve got to load up in a van and roll into a parking lot, or pull into your driveway and you can invite your friends over – I’ll just do a show that way. For seven weeks over the summer [of 2021] I was kind of bouncing around. I would use social media to be like, ‘I’ll be in Albuquerque tomorrow night if anybody wants to put a show together in anyway possible.’ I’m not looking for money. I just want to keep doing comedy in whatever way possible. Just to keep moving. I’m like a shark, I’ll die if I stop moving,” Kinane explained.
Photo by Ryan Provstgaard
Before traveling the world as a comedian, Kinane grew up in Addison, IL. He’s “DuPage [County] through and through.” As a teenager, he fell in love with punk music and would spend every weekend seeing all-ages shows across the Chicagoland area. He paid homage to one of his favorite places for live music, Metro – the Wrigleyville spot where he taped his 2016 special Loose in Chicago – by wearing a vintage venue t-shirt in Shocks & Struts.
“It feels like every great rock band has been through the Metro. I figured I’d give a nod to Joe Shanahan (Metro’s owner/founder) and the last special I did by wearing that Metro shirt. Plus, it’s a cool shirt,” he said noting that Smoking Popes, Bollweevils, Alkaline Trio, and Apocalypse Hoboken are a few of the bands he’d seen at the iconic club back in the day.
Chicago is where Kinane got his start as a comedian alongside people like Kumail Nanjiani. To direct Shocks & Struts, he recruited Nanjiani’s former Meltdown co-host Jonah Ray Rodrigues who was recently behind the camera for Kurt Braunohler’s latest special, Perfectly Stupid.
“It was a really great match because he came up to Portland and saw me run a few different shows before taping it. He came from the world of stand-up and we know each other, so he had a lot of really valuable insight,” Kinane explained.
Shortly after Shocks & Struts debuted, Kinane shared the sad news that he had to say goodbye to his cat Lil D. The loss left him gutted, but he is appreciative of all the love and support he’s felt from fans who followed along with his pet’s adventures on Instagram and OnlyFans.
“We moved to this house three years ago during the pandemic and this cat was just kind of a neighborhood stray that was living in the yard. We just took it in and – you know it’s the pandemic – everyone got to get weird. We started taking pictures of it to celebrate this little animal and then for a minute there we thought it was really funny and my girlfriend created an OnlyFans for it. Anyone who paid for it, we just donated that to ASPCA,” he said with a laugh. “It became too complicated to navigate that because clearly that site’s used for other things. Rightfully so, they should make it more difficult, so we made an Instagram account for it.”
Kinane added, “At 19 years old, I think we gave it a pretty good sunset. It’s been rough but you love something that much, it’s gonna hurt when it goes. That’s inevitable.”
“Hug your pets,” he said in closing.
Kinane has a knack for taking what life throws at him, learning from it, and creating hilarious art. Whether he is talking ghosts, ghouls, and the unexplained with his pal Dave Stone on their podcast, The Boogie Monster or challenging himself to find the good in everything on No Accounting for Taste, a podcast with Shane Torres, Kinane is always pushing himself into new territory.
“It’s so easy to be negative and cynical – especially with comedy – it’s so much harder to be funny while praising something. It’s easy to chop something down, but it’s so much harder to try and find the positive,” he said of the mission of No Accounting for Taste explaining that he and Torres didn’t want to simply create another podcast “with dudes laughing into each other’s open mouths.”
“That’s the one thing we were sure of, there’s not enough of these out there,” he added sarcastically. “There’s not enough of this ‘bros performing some sort of Human Centipede laughing into each other’s orify.’ So let’s add another one to the mix, but let’s do it from a place where instead of mocking or being cynical, we force ourselves to be celebratory about things. We do an okay job. There’s some subjects we couldn’t get around on. We try our best which makes it fun. It’s sometimes very difficult to act like there’s anything redeeming about the Dave Matthews Band, but we try. We really, really try.”
Shocks and Struts is available for free on YouTube and for a $10 rental via 800 Pound Gorilla which includes an extended digital audio version with bonus material that will be delivered in April/May 2023.
“The extended audio, I am excited about. It’s what you see on the special, just more of it,” he said explaining that the label wanted the show to be cut down to an hour and he may even release EP versions of extended bits. “I tell stories that have these longer jokes so I might put something up that’s 12-minutes. ‘You like that 4-minute joke from the special? Here’s the 12-minute version of it that I wanted to present.’”
Click here to pick-up a copy of Shocks and Struts and check out the free version on YouTube. Tour dates and more can be found online at Kylekinane.com.