How should we celebrate great comedians? Netflix’s latest exercise in live comedy is called The Hall: a new pantheon for legendary comics, launched onstage at the recent Netflix is a Joke festival in LA. That show now drops on TV, and finds four present-day comedians eulogising a quartet of dead geniuses: the first entries into this new hall of fame, into which acts will henceforth be inducted annually. It’s a worthwhile endeavour, at least if the aim, as creator/director Marty Callner has said, is acquainting today’s audiences with yesterday’s greats. Whether the tone is quite right (is it comedy? Is it ancestor worship?), I’m not sure.
For the most part, we don’t really get comedy from the four comedian-hosts. Jon Stewart is first on, sermonising about George Carlin – about his legendary “seven words you can’t say on TV” routine, about his quest to be “actualised as an artist”, about how “as a culture, we [still] miss his voice”. Later, Chelsea Handler hymns Joan Rivers, pausing after every statement she makes about Rivers’ pioneering genius so the audience can dutifully applaud.
