Chase Montana: From Funny to Fatherhood (A New Yorkers Story)
Written and directed by Jason Flood. Performed by Andrew Yanker.
Presented by Wholesome Productions.
Presented by the New York City Fringe Festival
April 5 at 5:20 PM, April 8 at 9:50 PM, April 11 at 5:20 PM, April 17 at 6:30 PM, April 18 at 8:40 PM, 2026.
Hard comedy, sometimes called anti-comedy, has rules, even when its whole project is breaking them. Andy Kaufman made audiences uncomfortable by exposing the social contract of entertainment: the assumption that a performer owes the audience pleasure and that the audience owes the performer goodwill. In “The Eric Andre Show,” Eric Andre refuses the conventions of celebrity interview culture, the decorum that protects power from examination, with an furious nihilism that makes no viewer comfortable regardless of where they sit. Roberta Gregory’s Bitchy Bitch, the Fantagraphics indie comic series from the 90s, turned feminist rage into comedy so uncomfortable it induced castration anxiety and earned every second of it. Happy Tree Friends, the early 2000s Flash animation series, wrapped extreme cartoon violence in the exact visual language of children’s programming: adorable woodland creatures, bright color palettes, cheerful production design, and graphic dismemberment. The target was the form. In each case, the cringe is a method. It points at something real about how power operates. The discomfort has a target. And the target is never the powerless.
Chase Montana: From Funny to Fatherhood (A New Yorker’s Story), written and directed by Jason Flood and performed by Andrew Yanker, wants to be in that tradition. A cameraman and a photographer were present at the performance, likely documenting the character for a sizzle reel and industry pitch packet. It wasn’t incorporated into the show, but a camera in the room is a camera in the room. The energy of a performance being recorded for a pitch sits differently than the energy of a show willing to risk itself in front of a live audience alone. Yanker’s commitment to the character is real, and the physical comedy of a man entirely convinced of his own magnificence has a genuine comic engine. The problem is what the show decides to aim that engine at.
Montana’s voice is a valley boy California affect, the Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure register that has been mainstream shorthand for a certain brand of white male slacker cool since 1989 and equal parts lampooned and paid homage to ever since. As a comic target it has its own logic: a man this committed to being effortlessly cool in an accent this associated with studied cluelessness is at least aimed in the right direction. The show’s use of Blaccent is another matter entirely. Flood provides backstage voiceovers for all subsidiary characters throughout, and every one of them uses it. Whether that reflects a limitation of range or a deliberate choice is unclear. The harm it does is not. The public controversy over Awkwafina’s use of a Blaccent in her early career feels tame and respectful by comparison.
Those subsidiary characters are represented by blow-up dolls: white-flesh-colored plastic stand-ins for everyone in Montana’s world. These stand-ins are one anatomical detail short of being sex dolls, and the evocation is plainly intentional. The show treats this as set design rather than content. It is content. Flood voices them from offstage, all in Blaccent. What the show constructs is a universe where the only presence of Blackness is a disembodied affect projected onto white plastic. That is not a comic target. That is the problem.
The show’s most interesting formal gesture is the Jay Leno comparison, framed with actual footage from a Leno stand-up set outside “The Tonight Show.” Montana is positioned as the anti-Leno: authentically cool where Leno was institutionally square, real where Leno was processed. Montana makes this case for a painful, interminable thirty seconds, perhaps longer. Then it runs into the fact that the show hasn’t established Montana’s coolness as anything other than his own belief in it, which Leno also had. The construction of Montana is closer to Leno than both the creators and their titular character would care to admit.
Two people make this show: Yanker on stage, Flood providing all other voices from offstage. When Yanker commits to Montana without the prop comedy, the character has genuine comic texture. These are the show’s strongest passages: a man who believes, totally and without reservation, in his own magnificence, performed by someone who has thought carefully about what that belief looks like from the inside. Flood’s voiceovers are, in fact, of a piece with Yanker’s performance. Both serve the show’s consistent worldview: Montana as a man surrounded by Blackness not of his own making, who endures it, and whom the show would have us believe eventually triumphs over it. What sinks the show isn’t a mismatch between the two performers. It’s what they’re both performing.
Montana’s son opens the show by asking how he got so cool. This is the show’s structuring choice, and it has consequences throughout. We are told from the first line that Montana is the hero of his own story, that the question is rhetorical, that the answer is self-evident. Hard comedy requires the possibility that the subject doesn’t emerge intact. Naming the hero before the story starts forecloses that. The rest of the show is a man being exactly who we were told he was: relentlessly confident in his heroism.
What’s here isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s a failure of aim, and a confusion about who the targets are. The show seems to believe it’s aimed at power: the women Montana objectifies, the Blackness Flood borrows for every subsidiary character, treated as if they represented power rather than its absence. That confusion could be the basis of something interesting if it belonged to Chase alone. A man so invested in his own mythology that he can’t see where power actually sits would be a legitimate subject for hard comedy. The character already has a grandiosity the show could interrogate. But the confusion isn’t framed as the character’s blindness. It belongs to the creators, and the framework it maps onto has a name: straight white male grievance. In the real world, men like Montana can’t find love, can’t get recognition, can’t be seen for whom they believe themselves to be, or at least, believe what the world has promised them they are entitled to. The women he objectifies and, at least auditorily, the Blackness he supposedly encounters read as obstacles rather than as presences with their own claim on the room. In that framework, the powerless become the problem. Kaufman, Andre, Gregory, Baron Cohen, and the Happy Tree Friends team all know which way power runs. Chase Montana has it backwards. Inexplicably, the show and its creators do not appear to know it. Or if they do, that says volumes about the creators and their worldview, none of it funny in the slightest.
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Review by Ariel Estrada.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on April 15, 2026. All rights reserved.
