Gianmarco Soresi casts anxiety, darkness and drama in his theatrical comedy

Gianmarco Soresi’s parents divorced when he was so young that, he says, “My first word was ‘Mama’ … but my next five were ‘told me to tell you.’”

In the last three years, Soresi has earned plaudits from Pete Holmes, Vulture and NPR, made his late-night TV debut, was a Just for Laughs “New Faces” comic and earned a slot on Netflix’s “Verified Standup.” He has built a large social media following along the way thanks largely to his crowd work, which is spiky but never mean.

But Soresi doesn’t consider himself a crowd-work comedian and hopes to show off his joke-writing chops with his first one-hour special, which he’s filming in Los Angeles during six shows Feb. 13-16 at the Elysian Theater. (“It’s cool and feels like an old, run-down off-Broadway theater,” says the longtime New Yorker, who plans to become a bit bicoastal for now.)

Much of Soresi’s material dives into his parents’ foibles and how they warped him, his anxiety and depression, and his mix of Italian and Jewish heritage. He has a bit where he was getting drinks at a bar from a German bartender, who learns Soresi is Jewish and apologizes about the Holocaust. “How am I supposed to respond to that as a Jew? ‘No worries! Don’t let it happen again!’ I didn’t know, so I just said, ‘Could I get a free beer?’ And he said, ‘I would, but my boss would get mad,’ and I said, ‘I get it. You’re just following orders.’”

Soresi, who spoke to The Times recently about his upcoming special, cites Anthony Jeselnik as an influence but wraps his darker twists in an affable and charming persona that allows him to veer off into surprising directions. Last year, he released several minutes of material condemning Israel’s killing of Gazan civilians. The highlight is a joke about his mother asking him not to mention the topic while seated next to his grandfather at a family gathering. Instead, Soresi explains, “I just gradually encroached on my grandfather’s plate … He offered me some of his food but I was not interested in a two-plate solution. … He brushed my hand away so I punched him in the face.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has your work evolved?

Coming up, I worked at a club in Times Square called LOL that no longer exists, thank God. A lot of the crowd was not paying attention — for some English was their second language, some were drunk or just noisy — and you had to cut through all that. So your jokes had to move quick and each had to really pop. I got a lot of skills out of it, but the turns and twists had to be so sharp they were less true and relied on being a little extra dirty or edgy. It was tough to build a world or to tell a story. Now that I can tell a story or paint more of a picture, the punchline is more meaningful.

As a headliner, you can get darker or sillier because the crowd is there for you, but do you worry about getting cheap laughs from overeager fans?

I have some material in this special that involves feeling suicidal and having a friend who’s suicidal. If I’d done that in a 10-minute club set some people would say, “Jesus Christ, I just want to have a good Friday night, what are you doing?” but my fans know my point of view and like darker things so I can explore those topics.

But almost every comedian, even the greats, gradually gets worse. One factor is performing for your fans who like you and will laugh even at a failed joke; you lose the fear about keeping their attention and having to write something so sharp.

You’re a physical performer. Is that consciously choreographed?

Stand-up is such a tricky art form because you can feel like a try-hard. In the beginning you could have accused me of being theatrical without the jokes to back it up. I got labeled as “too one-man show” at one club, which was frustrating.

But for me it’s pretty natural — when attention is thrust upon me, a flamboyance emerges. I’m trying to lean into that without exaggerating it, always asking how can this be funny and serve the storytelling. As my stages literally get bigger I look at the real estate and think, I have to use it for something. What can I use the stool or the mic stand for in a way that doesn’t feel overly choreographed but still adds a dimension that a lot of comics the generation above me veered away from.

You’re not the first comedian to talk about depression or your parents’ divorce, nor the first Jewish comedian to talk about your anxiety. How do you make that feel fresh?

You can’t reinvent humanity. You can just express it through your own prism. This is my struggle. So it’s whether I can take the one-liner absurdity and blend it with real truths about my own life. And it’s about being as specific as possible. I talk about being diagnosed with ADHD, which is well-trodden territory, but everyone can have a funny bit about how ADHD affects their life, so let me tell my specific story of why I didn’t look into it for a decade.

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How do you avoid turning it into a therapy session for you?

When I see comedians indulge in that, where they’re giving a life lesson talk, I want to tell them, “No one came here for this. You are there to be funny.” I want people who don’t come to comedy for emotion to be moved, but to do that I have to be very sparing in those moments and sneak the emotions in underneath. My suicide jokes have feelings underneath but they’re funny first, and that’s what you bought tickets to.

Is it the same with jokes about political and social issues?

Yes. You can lose your fan base who might be influenced by your work by harping on them too much. There’s a good comedian whose thesis in his show was “Men, we need to do better.” We don’t deserve points for being right. I don’t need to pay money and you don’t need to be lit and mic’d for an hour on that thesis.

I was in South Carolina when I said, “Brittney Griner was released from the Russian prison today” as a set-up to a joke. Some guy booed. Instead of being funny, I said, “I actually think it’s good when Americans are released from foreign prisons.”

But why do that? I was preaching. I didn’t convince that guy to challenge his notions of who he doesn’t respect because of internal biases. You can achieve things with what you say, but if funny is not at the front audiences are going to feel betrayed.

Sometimes I want to come at the joke from the bad point of view or the good point of view for the wrong reasons. I had one joke about how I ran into my old college roommate and found that they’d recently transitioned, and I was thrilled because I had forgotten their name. I like that because you wonder, “Is that a pro-trans joke?”

Were you wary of doing that bit about Israel and Gaza?

I saw people who were not speaking honestly or looking through a black-and-white lens about what was happening there, and that fueled my desire to write that. But there’s a safety in being Jewish when I make that joke so I won’t be accused of antisemitism.

I can be righteous, but the punchline has to be subversive. I’m proud of those jokes because I felt like even though I am expressing a point of view I think the joke itself supersedes it.