Review: Andy Kindler: Hence the Humor

Firm­ly tongue in cheek. That’s how I would encap­su­late Kindler’s debut album (record­ed 28 years into his career in 2019). The first track is a rant about the cable con­nect­ing to his micro­phone and chid­ing A Spe­cial Thing Records (“AST” in his bit) for some mishap that must have hap­pened before the record but­ton was hit on the final record­ing. There’s a lat­er rant about pop­ping Ps, smooth­ing the tran­si­tions between jokes, and emp­ty seats in the audi­ence. No one should be able to pull this off, but Kindler cer­tain­ly can.

Hence the Humor was record­ed pri­or to the COVID pan­dem­ic, but Kindler decid­ed to release it a few months into the pan­dem­ic just to get it out there. I’m hap­py to report that this album is time­less. Lis­ten­ing to it today it has the same impact as it would have had if it had been released when it was record­ed in 2019 before the world as we know it turned on its head. I can’t spoil too much about this album because it must be heard with a fresh per­spec­tive.

For this album review, I lis­tened at least half-a-dozen times, but this one is going into the ​“favorites” rota­tion. If you’ve seen Kindler per­form, you know that he’s not a sto­ry teller, he’s going from one top­ic to anoth­er in rapid fire suc­ces­sion. The track lists are mean­ing­less. There is no nat­ur­al break between the tracks. I had to look down repeat­ed­ly to see where I was in the track list just to see if there was a con­nec­tion between what he was talk­ing about and the track title.

He’s in on that joke by the way. Sev­er­al track titles toy with this idea. From ​“Ges­tur­ing Wild­ly”, ​“A Lull”, ​“And Then the Oth­er Thing”, and ​“Bring it Way Down Now”, the titles all con­vey the idea that there is some nat­ur­al flow of a stan­dard com­e­dy album. For Kindler, how­ev­er, there sim­ply isn’t. ​“Any­body can do jokes”, Kindler says about 10 min­utes into the album when he ​“real­izes” that the rant lead­ing up to that moment has­n’t formed a con­ven­tion­al com­e­dy album.

One of my favorite lines in the album is ​“I have trou­ble uni­task­ing”. It’s so sim­ple and it cap­tures who he is as a per­former and a per­son appar­ent­ly. But it helped me dis­cov­er that Kindler is a word­play com­ic. There are a few lit­tle gems like this sprin­kled through­out this album. Because of Kindler’s fast-paced pre­sen­ta­tion style, it’s hard to miss these word­play jokes with just a sin­gle lis­ten, which is why you real­ly have to lis­ten to this album mul­ti­ple times. Don’t think of it as a chore (though chances are, Kindler would say it is and sug­gest you lis­ten to some­one else’s album), think of it as a min­ing expe­di­tion.

​“They call me fiz­zles” he claims ear­ly on in the album. No, Andy, I think they call you fan­tas­tic.

Hence the Humor was released on May 8, 2020. This album is avail­able on stream­ing plat­forms and can be pur­chas­es at astrecords​.com