Tim Harding experiences Alan Resnick and Anna Seregina

Reviewer Tim Harding gives his verdict on two visiting avant-garde American comics in the latest edition of his fortnightly comedy diary.

Over the last few years, Hackney venue the Moth Club has built a great record as a stepping stone for cult American acts as they look to break into the UK’s consciousness. Among others, they hosted the first British solo shows of Conner O’Malley, Catherine Cohen, Simple Town and Rachel Kaly. If you’re familiar with any of those names, you’ll recognise them as being on the cooler end of American imports.

The latest in this strand are Alan Resnick and Anna Seregina, who alternated four nights for a brief residency at the Moth Club last week. Seregina is mostly unknown over here, but Resnick has a bit of cache as an avant-garde comedy filmmaker who’s put out some of Adult Swim’s weirder material. You might have come across Unedited Footage of a Bear or This House Has People In It.

Firstly, Seregina’s show, titled A Tour Of Anna after its conceit, which is that Seregina plays a ‘docent’ – an academic expert on Anna Seregina who has met you here at the Museum of Anna Seregina to take you on an hour-long tour of the subject’s life and work. 

Arch and dryly surreal, she encases her autobiographical elements in a thick layer of distancing techniques that allow her to talk without too much vulnerability about her central subject: the painful identity split that occurred when she left Russia as a little girl and attempted to assimilate into American life for the first time. 

The idea of the identity split is conveyed quite well by the end, but in terms of comedy, some of these distancing techniques work better than others. At one point she has a conversation with a holographic version of the woman she would have been had she never left Russia. The hologram keeps getting interrupted by cryptic Russian adverts for hammers, which is a very weird and funny bit, beautifully executed. 

Elsewhere, a routine in which the docent undergoes a simulated date at a restaurant (with AI being involved in some obscure way) is operating under one too many layers of artificiality to take root. A video of herself singing while dressed up as a nose is played largely to silence. Maybe if the costume was more recognisable as a nose? The whole show is a parade of these bits, some brilliant, others frustrating or just misconceived. She’s always interesting, but only reliably funny when she’s speaking off the cuff.

In a way, it’s charming to see such a ramshackle, scattergun approach from an American act, most of whom are slick to start with and then positively robotic by the time they make it over to the UK. It’s the kind of show you’d expect from a member of the Weirdos collective, not so much from one of LA’s cutting edge comedy underground.

Resnick, the following evening, prompts similarly mixed feelings with his show One Funny Hour. A very unusual show, this. The first half of the show is simply a slide-assisted lecture on how generative AI works: what it can be used for, how it’s getting smarter, and a relatively deep dive into the principles on which it functions. 

To be honest, it’s fascinating. For something that takes up so much of the current discourse, AI is very poorly understood (at least by me) and Resnick makes a genuinely informative guide, even though he leaves us almost entirely without jokes for around 30 minutes of this comedy show. 

You may find that waiting for the other shoe to drop takes up a decent proportion of your concentration, but the subject matter and the accessibility with which he explained it had me rapt.

After an extended break to fix a tech issue (or was it part of the show? You just never know with this guy), the Joke finally arrives in grand style, whereupon Resnick spends the entire back half of the show hitting the same beat over and over again, with minute variations. 

Now it’s a pretty good joke, at least to start with, but the extreme repetition is not going to be for everyone. The more demonstrative laughers at this gig, well I wonder if they might have been kidding themselves a little... Even good jokes lose their punch a little when told a thousand times in a row.

Without spoiling anything, Resnick’s joke is to show us AI-generated images that are all variations on a theme – hundreds upon hundreds of them until you’re completely saturated. My experience of it was the same as my experience with all AI art: an initial sense of wonder that almost immediately gives way to disappointment and a vague depression as you see the program iterate charmlessly on itself without intent or feeling. 

It’s been said that AI inadvertently proves the existence of the human soul by showing us what art looks without one. The same eventually applies to this hour, as you realise that the funniest thing about this experience is Resnick’s idea for the show rather than the show itself. As in his video work, its conceptual framework leads it by the nose. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I did a whole stand-up show that was just [INSERT BIT HERE].’

The moment-by-moment details of that show are just blank spaces to be filled in, and this time he’s used AI to do that work for him. Once the joke’s hit, a feeling of profound emptiness makes itself known. I found it fascinating, I laughed an awful lot from about minutes 30 to 35, and I ended up hating it more than almost any show I’ve seen this year, all of which I feel somehow grateful for.

Published: 27 Sep 2024