That Smiley Fella, Hit by a Bus
Illustration by Blake Loosli
By Ted Bushman
It’s with a flair of noblesse oblige that Ryan Hamilton, opening for Jerry Seinfeld at the Beacon Theatre on January 21st, informs his audience that he was hit by a bus. “It’s okay,” he says, “you can laugh. Getting hit by a car is a tragedy. Getting hit by a bus is pretty funny.”
The audience hesitates. They already like Ryan, the grinning Idaho boy that he is. It’s hard not to like him. “I look like where I’m from,” he explains. “People wouldn’t guess it, but when I tell them, they go ‘that makes sense.’ There’s something potato-y about that guy.” Should they laugh at his injury?
But Hamilton commits, and it doesn’t take long to get the audience laughing. This is, after all, an expert at work.
Ryan Hamilton, 47, has snuck his way into the pantheon of great comedians over the last decade, purely on the strength of his stand-up. Without a sitcom or a movie to his name, he’s landed himself a Netflix special, 2017’s Happy Face, opens with frequency for Jerry Seinfeld like this weekend, and even wrote jokes for last year’s Oscars. Hamilton is in the big leagues, and he looks like he belongs.
How does he bridge the gap between his rural upbringing and the city-slickers he often plays for? He adapts. He might have a striking, one-of-a-kind face that he himself lampoons, but he can play the chameleon with his audiences. A member of The Season’s editorial board recently saw him perform in Idaho, where he extended his set by 45 minutes, fondly explaining “you’re my people” and filled the rest of his time with potato jokes. In New York he tells it like it is. His Netflix special featured an extended critique of New York’s brazen arrogance — at this set he only tells a few New York jokes, comparing a return to New York to a leap into a game of Double Dutch.
The Double Dutch hops serve as one of the few points of physical comedy in his set tonight. If Hamilton is the personification of a cartoon, he is usually an Al Hirschfield — a swirl of strangely curved limbs and exaggerated features, rarely remaining still. He pantomimes. In his Netflix special, he plummeted gracelessly through the air while skydiving, swam through a sea of ones and zeros, and cast out undesirables as a feudal lord using Tinder. Tonight, he is more sedate — not stiff, by any means, and hardly reduced in enthusiasm, but it’s one of the few ways in which his injuries and continuing recovery make themselves known.
That is, besides the text itself. Hamilton’s set, which runs a little over a half hour, is a master’s thesis on that most important of subjects: being hit by a bus. He starts with an idiomatic deconstruction that would make Cyrano de Bergerac proud — debunking “I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus,” wondering at “throw someone under the bus.” He describes the bus, its passengers, and his experiences in the hospital, juicing from every segment of story some morsel of commentary or self-deprecation.
It’s worth noting that hit-by-a-bus humor has its limitations. The set, while surprisingly diverse for its narrow thesis, doesn’t yet sparkle like previous material. As the set progresses, the depth of Hamilton’s injuries are revealed — ten broken ribs, a punctured lung — and the audience realizes with a vocal response how serious it all was. “That reveal always gets a gasp, that’s true,” he says nonchalantly. “I gasped too. I was gasping for six months.” To comedians who comforted him that he would get tons of material from the injury, Hamilton, ever the realist, replies: “Not worth it.”
After Hamilton’s set, the main guest arrives — Jerry Seinfeld himself. His set, a recurring residency at the theater, unburdened by traumatic injury, is easy and conversational as ever. One sees immediately why Hamilton is (like the title character of a Broadway show nearby), the legend’s right-hand man: their styles match near-perfectly, without feeling like an impression. The major difference between them is in some shades of subtext: Jerry recognizes his faults but has no shame, offering morsels of silly insight with all the complexity of your funny neighbor at a barbecue. Ryan, on the other hand, plays himself as a wreck of hidden despair and self-loathing masquerading under a cool suit, whose observations occasionally come with a bite of subtly incisive critique. The enemies at the butt of Jerry’s jokes are, usually, innocuous — foibles, tryhards, and silly non-necessities like jet skis and Pop-Tarts. Ryan’s enemies are himself and, at times, the larger cultural landscape. Despite these differences, the comedians make a good pairing — light, clever, their work reminds everyone in the theater of the inherent comedy and delight to be found in the details.
At The Season, we cover LDS artists and try to seek out where Latter-day Saints are engaging in the highest echelons of the arts. Ryan Hamilton is, among LDS artists, a rival of any wildly successful person — up there with Michelle Dorrance, Brandon Flowers, Brandon Sanderson, and any other notable Brandons. We focus on the art more than the disciple here, believing that focusing on a person’s connection to the church can be reductive. But does Ryan Hamilton’s faith emerge in his work?
Hamilton capitalizes on every quirky aspect of Latter-day Saint perception and behavior, leveraging his broad smile and uncannily optimistic features — traits explicitly pressed into many missionaries — into a funhouse mirror caricature. He captures the self-ignorance and carefree cringe of an Idahoan dad and the sort of accidental teetotaler-ism that can only be obtained by someone raised in the bubble of a culture whose maxims are given by osmosis more than consciously adopted.
And yet while this portrait seems to an LDS audience indelibly connected to Latter-day Saints, Hamilton expertly scrubs all signs of the church and religion from it, in a manner so sweeping and thorough it seems hardly noticeable. Hamilton understands, in ways that most Wasatch Front artists fail to grasp, the caustic, polarizing effect of active church membership in the coastal world. Without Mormonism, Ryan is a delightful, bumbling weirdo, a hilarious self-caricature of a man with a tight sense for observation and a delightful drama in his storytelling. With Mormonism, the narrative would transform — Ryan would instantly appear as a pitiable figure, a brainwashed child living a half-life in a city that he could fully experience if only he'd leave his silly religion behind because this is the state of the Latter-day Saint in the modern imagination — that of the poor ideological prisoner, the naif, the sap.
Ryan Hamilton proves otherwise in every way. He walks between worlds as few can manage, embracing his rural roots and navigating the requirements of high-powered comedy. And while his Mormonism is unmentioned, the hints of it are unabashed. He has freely talked about his avoidance of alcohol, though he didn’t expound on his reasons. His mother is an “angel of heaven." A set he performed on Jimmy Fallon in 2019 provided us an apt glimpse of Hamilton’s perception of the divine: he imagined a discussion between his guardian angel and God, where both decided that the hapless comedian could handle a few more embarrassments.