Discussing "Slow and Steady" with Joe Pera

I loved the beginning and middle of Joe Pera’s new standup special, Slow and Steady, but I especially loved the end, a quasi-guided meditation of the sort he’s recently perfected in his podcast, Drifting Off, though I suppose you could use the term to describe most of his oeuvre. There’s music and ambience from composer Ryan Dann, jokes, crowd work, a simple narrative premise that balloons into a meandering journey across history and the globe, and of course Pera’s voice guiding us through it all, soft and slow. At the end of the sequence, the story’s protagonist (an unspecified second-person “you” that stands in for Pera himself) complains to his partner that he’s too hot to sleep, and they bring him an ice cube. The bit echoes an earlier joke, in which a younger Pera prepares a tray of ice for his roommates; now, though, the ice whisks him and us off to dreamland: 

"Here," Yoobi says, and puts it in your hand. "Hold it. Can you feel the coldness in your hand? Going up your arm?”

And you can't help but laugh, because you remember that Yoobi learned English by watching Do the Right Thing.

"Move it to your other hand," Yoobi says. "Can you feel the chill go up the left side of your body as well? Now put it on your forehead.”

You do, and the cold radiates through your head and then the rest of your body as well. As it melts, your worry does too. 

"It's magic," you say. 

"No," says Yoobi, "It's ice.”

“Thanks, Yoobi. I'm glad to be in a relationship with you.”

You hold sweaty hands and fall asleep like you are dead. The hum of your air conditioner blends with all the air conditioners on your block, and those join with the hum of the air conditioners in your neighborhood, which join the chorus of all the air conditioners in New York City. And if you didn't fall asleep in the crowd, I wish you goodnight.

I love the move from the intimate to the grand here, the scope expanding from the lone couple to the entire sleeping city, like Gabriel gazing out his window at the end of Joyce’s The Dead. If you’ve watched the hour, though, you know that’s not quite even the end of the bit. As the credits roll, we see Pera’s audience filter out into the lobby, where a giant ice cube awaits them: the imagined made real. It’s a clear delight for the people encountering it (except one who’s too buried in his phone to notice), but the size and surprise of the thing also makes it a pleasure to watch onscreen. This, to me, is the perfect example of what's so special about Pera's work, the way he and his collaborators approach comedy as more than a matter of writing and saying funny things. They treat it as a search for beauty and truth, which they look for—and consistently find—in strange and unexpected places, which often turn out to be mundane and familiar ones too. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the good stuff.

Okay, enough preamble. I interviewed Pera over email about Slow and Steady and his work generally, and that interview is below, lightly edited for clarity. Please enjoy.