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Directed by award-winning comedian/actress Ali Wong, Frankie Quiñones hits the stage in Portland, Ore., for his second stand-up special, and first for Hulu, to reflect on how he overcame isolation and addiction in the first year of the pandemic, but what’s really crazy is what he unearthed about himself in the process.
FRANKIE QUINONES: DAMN THAT’S CRAZY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Quiñones was one of the stars of the critically-acclaimed but horribly underappreciated Hulu comedy series, This Fool.
He previously released a sketch-based comedy special, Superhomies, on HBO Max in 2021, and also was a member of The Dress Up Gang, a webseries/comedy collective who had a deal with TBS. You may recognize him as Miguel, appearing on three episodes of FX’s What We Do In The Shadows. He also showed up earlier this year in an episode of St. Denis Medical.
But his most popular character is and has been Creeper, a CholoFit instructor, where he has attracted millions of views across multiple YouTube videos since 2017. Quiñones jokes about the how and why of Creeper and his other characters in what turns out to be a very personal and revealing special.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Since Wong directed him here, it’s interesting to note the narrative arc he plays with in joking about his past dating experiences, which was the hallmark of Wong’s most recent Netflix special. Whereas Wong approached her sexual history from a position of fame and fortune, Quiñones places himself as the butt of the joke in his sexual encounters.
Photo: HuluMemorable Jokes: Quiñones sets us up for a possible recurring bit by beatboxing right from the start, asking at one point: “What if that’s all I did?”
He does get into actual material besides imagining how inappropriate beatboxing would be for other occupations, though, with perhaps the most timely observation coming when he thanks his audience at the taping in Portland, Ore. by saying, “People are so nice here.” You know. The Portland that the Trump Administration and his loyalists would want you to believe is wartorn. Actually, not so much.
And Quiñones has seen his fair share of “tough-ass guys” sitting up front at his shows before, jokingly demonstrating how their faces and body language betray the actual fun they had enjoying his comedy.
As mentioned above, he takes us through some of his more memorable relationships, from the white woman he dated for four years after meeting her at an open mic where she performed hippie poetry, to the zookeeper who quizzed him on animal sounds during sex, and the woman who wanted to stop at 7-Eleven on the way back to his place and coerced him into eating a Buffalo wing, Lady and the Tramp style.
“You don’t need to fully understand something to have sex with it,” he jokes, before proving that in no uncertain terms when describing the lengths he went to for companionship while isolated during the pandemic lockdown.
Our Take: Quiñones is very visual and audibly descriptive in his storytelling.
It’s easy to imagine him in his dating misadventures, his very graphic lockdown misadventure, or even in his more innocent childhood.
He reveals he started doing characters such as “Creeper” as a means of escaping his simple, impoverished childhood, and that he always wanted to be reverential to the Cholo lifestyle because his dad and relatives embodied that already. “I was always around the positive side of the culture,” he says.
Well, not always, as it turns out that during his rehab from drugs and alcohol in Utah, he lets slip that something truly traumatic happened to him when he was still just a child.
But now, two decades after he started comedy professionally, and a decade after he was still broke at 35, when his grandmother would joke that he must be gay for not having kids yet, he’s doing well enough not just to have all sorts of relatives coming out of the woodwork, but also to be at peace with himself. And that means he can look back at where he was, and how far he has come, and laugh at himself without being This Fool.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Quiñones joked that in his culture, being 35 and single was a privilege: “I didn’t get nobody pregnant so I was able to pursue my dreams and be a starving artist.” It’s almost as freeing for us as he must be for him to see him living out his dreams now. His happiness and contentment reaches us through the screen.
How To Watch Frankie Quinones: Damn That’s Crazy
If you’re new to Hulu, you can get started with a 30-day free trial on the streamer’s basic (with ads) plan. After the trial period, you’ll pay $9.99/month. If you want to upgrade to Hulu ad-free, it costs $18.99/month.
If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the Disney+ Bundles, all of which include Hulu. These bundles start at $10.99/month for ad-supported Disney+ and Hulu and goes up to $29.99/month for Disney+, Hulu, and Max, all ad-free.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
English (US)