Moses Storm Is Refreshing Hysterical New Voice in American Comedy
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Moses Storm is one of the most innovative fresh new voices in comedy, the kind that don’t come often. His show largely consisting of anecdotes from a traumatic impoverished childhood as an effeminate appearing heterosexual teenager who is obviously brilliant but terrifyingly insecure and fixated and angry.
Storm’s show Trash White currently streaming on HBOMax is a must see.
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The Daily Beast:In his first hour-long stand-up special Trash White, comedian Moses Storm describes himself as going “from the dumpster to HBO Max.” But as he explains in this week’s episode of The Last Laugh podcast, his real story is even darker, which makes his ability to find so much humor in it all the more remarkable.
Trash White is a big deal for the 31-year-old comedian, who grew up “well below the poverty line,” traveling the country in a repurposed Greyhound bus with his parents and five siblings, proselytizing on street corners about the end of the world.
Just seeing my story bounce off of a rational human being, it unraveled everything. It was a deprogramming.
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They were essentially a “doomsday cult,” though he’s hesitant to use that word, because a cult is “something that’s successful, that people are duped into, but we had a lot of trouble getting people to sign up.” There were times when Storm even felt “legitimately jealous” of the media attention paid to the Westboro Baptist Church, which he only later came to understand was a full-on “hate group.”
Early in the special, Storm acknowledges that he doesn’t necessarily look like someone who grew up poor. “I look like I was conceived at an Ivy League a cappella concert,” he jokes at one point, implicitly checking his white privilege. “It’s harder for certain people that don’t look like this,” he tells me, noting that he has managed to “weasel” his way into a successful show business career despite never going to actual school or learning to read and write until his late teens.
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Sharing so much of his dark reality on stage has led to some awkward moments with audience members, like the woman who came up to him after a show and told him he should stop using the word “homeless” because it’s considered derogatory.
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“I’m not one of these anti-PC comedians that’s middle-aged and has a special, like, ‘Triggered Much?’” he tells me. “I hate that stuff so much. If someone’s saying, ‘Hey, this word hurts my feelings, can you just not say it then?’ Then, yeah, that’s it. You learn new words all the time.”
But when it was “someone coming from privilege” that did not share his experience “condescending” to him by saying that he should use the word “unhoused” instead of “homeless,” he was immediately put off. “When you’re on the street, you want a roof, you want security, you don’t want a jazzy new name,” he says.
