‘Search Party’ Comedian Finds His Voice

I
t’s a sunny afternoon at the end of August in a crowded Echo Park cafe, and John Early is telling me, unprompted, about his pulled groin. 

I have to admire this spontaneous confession from the mischievous blond actor and comedian, given our lack of privacy. This is of a piece with Early’s standup act, which can feel like gossip about information that’s supposed to be confidential, or that we’d rather not acknowledge. Take his warning that if you let your boyfriend go to therapy, “they are 100 percent ripping you to shreds with the help of a licensed professional, hunty.” Or his observation that anal sex can feel so good he sometimes wonders “if the original purpose of the anus was to be a sex organ, and that the shitting — sorry — is just some weird error that we have yet to phase out.” 

Early, 36, explains that his injury was itself quite public: the night before, he was opening for singer and actress Lola Kirke at a show at famed West Hollywood club the Troubadour and trying to perform a kind of striptease. “Have you ever seen the clip of Janet Jackson in concert, where she strapped some guy in what looks like a like sex-torture device?” Early asks. “He’s like, freaking out, she dances close up on him, it’s so wild.” He wanted to do something similar, though without choreography or much of a plan he wound up tying a male audience member to a chair, with a keyboardist playing accompaniment. The volunteer, Early notes, “was literally too hot,” and quite tall. Nonetheless, while making his seductive moves, he decided to throw a leg over the man’s shoulder. Big mistake. “Oh no,” he thought instantly. As the song went off the rails, Early, hurt but trying to save the bit from bombing, went all out for a climax — pretending to faint from lust for his captive. “I fall on my knees,” he says. “No one laughs.”

“So I have a pulled groin, bruised knees, and nothing to show for it,” Early concludes. But is he still going to attempt the routine on his upcoming comedy tour, which kicks off Sept. 9 in San Diego and will take him all over the country? “Yeah, I’m going to figure it out,” he says. It’ll just mean coming up with an actual dance. And, of course, studying Janet Jackson some more.

You could say that divahood is woven into Early’s presence on stage and screen alike. He’s played a son to 30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney and Taylor Swift in the funeral sequence of the music video for “Anti-Hero,” voiced a self-important brunch blogger on Bob’s Burgers, and featured in a sketch on I Think You Should Leave as a man who throws a fit when he loses a game of “credit card roulette” to determine who will pick up a restaurant tab. His own comedy — when not flying solo, he frequently collaborates with friend Kate Berlant — takes a savage line on millennials’ noxious apps, delusions of significance, and mutually destructive buzzwords. Those themes fed into his breakout role on the dark satire Search Party, which ran from 2016 to 2022: his Elliott Goss is a narcissistic gay man scheming his way to fame at any cost, whether by faking cancer or cynically reinventing himself as a right-wing pundit.  

His latest work, the debut album Now More Than Ever, cements Early’s command as the center of attention, adding bonus covers of Aaliyah and Madonna to his HBO special of the same title. The original show, released last summer during the writers’ strike, is a glam rock spectacle, pinballing between pop songs performed with his live band the Lemon Squares, jokes about our collective posturing around the definition of “pre-war” apartments and cliché dating advice, and a recurring gag designed to embarrass his parents in the audience. The special includes a reflective monologue over melancholy piano that opens with an invitation to admit the unacceptable: “Do you guys ever feel like we didn’t learn anything real in school?” The set culminates in a gotta-hear-it-to-believe-it cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” that pushed Early’s disco falsetto through the ceiling. (Hitting the high notes had long been a party trick of his.) The new tracks were also recorded with the Lemon Squares, who will join him for select tour dates, as well as Early’s dad and his dad’s best friend in his hometown of Nashville, who have played trumpet together since they were teens.

Those musical influences are on Early’s mind while vinyl-diving at a nearby store, Sick City Records. A true aficionado of the deep cuts, his introduction of a Britney Spears cover on Now More Than Ever involved forcing the crowd to spend a full minute guessing the third single from her third album before he finally got the correct answer and launched into “Overprotected,” which never made it above number 86 on the Billboard Hot 100. 

Sure enough, Early gravitates to a dance/funk section and starts digging out niche live albums by Sylvester, another disco favorite, and it’s not long before he moves onto the comedy rack, where he finds two vintage recordings by Joan Rivers. He buys them both. “It would be too presumptuous to call her influence in any way, but I am inspired spiritually by her,” Early says. Then he notices a shelf of VHS tapes: “My eye goes right to Muriel’s Wedding.” The 1994 comedy stars Toni Collette, an actress he so admires that he maintained a website about her during adolescence. “I named my dog Muriel,” he adds. (Early eventually got to meet Collette on the A24 podcast and present a birthday collage he made her as a tween; he has also shared amusing screenshots from the website.) Elsewhere, we come across Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department — Early’s memorable appearance in her “Anti-Hero” video (as one of the singer’s spoiled, squabbling heirs) prompted shocked messages from acquaintances dating back to elementary school. Since then, he says, her team has sent him a “huge shipment” for every new Swift release: the vinyl, plus a sweater and other goodies.

Early only bought a record player somewhat recently, as the Lemon Squares were preparing the extra songs for Now More Than Ever. His collection began in earnest with eight LPs by soul legend Isaac Hayes, which he specifically wanted to hear on vinyl. “Something else was clearly going on in my life,” he says of the obsession with the singer. Hayes became the “main source” of the sound that he and the band wanted to achieve. It might seem strange that the echoes of such a tender voice could fill the nooks and crannies of Early’s arch standup. Yet the Seventies throwbacks provide a way to complicate all that intra-generational loathing. The most surprising cover from the album is an affecting take on Neil Young’s elegiac “After the Gold Rush,” with its cryptic vision of a bombed-out world.

“Here’s the moment where you’re allowed to be kind of swept away, and to feel something at all,” Early says of the choice. “To me, it’s this little gem of sincerity right up against this caustic, depraved thing that I’m talking about.” Indeed, the reversal is so disarming because it follows a hilariously scorching riff on how performative success on social media masks the helplessness of adults currently barreling toward middle age — an indictment of all that is insincere about soon-to-be fortysomethings. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says at one point. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know” — here he puts on a gratingly smug voice — “how to be a badass.” After all that comes the unexpected, romantic release.

Early’s reputation as a ruthless critic of his own age cohort has been “something of a prison of my own making,” he says, with such commentary now expected of him. But, in his mid-thirties, he’s ready to move on to the next phase of his career, and that’s part of why he segued from his trademark jabs at “disruptors and creatives” into the Neil Young tune — it was a farewell of sorts to material mocking everyone who came of age with the internet. The tour promises to reveal the next iteration of Early’s comic persona, and there’s an exciting new project on the horizon that, for the time being, has to remain under wraps.

Wherever the next years take him, Early comes armed with magnificent musical range, and a back catalog that’s hard to beat. Just don’t invite him to karaoke — contrary to all indications, he’s “really not” a fan, and doesn’t even have a go-to number. “The key is always wrong!” he declares. A diva deserves better.