Doomscroll by Blake Ung: A Creative, Comedic Exploration of Pain & Torture (Review)

What if your explore page was just one guy trying his best? In Blake Ung’s Doomscroll, “Blake must do whatever the projector says, and the audience has the clicker. Just like on Reels or TikTok, the audience can skip past jokes they don’t like or they can go back to previous slides and make him do it again. Some of it is stand-up, sketch, music, or if you really don’t like any of that, you can make him do pushups for 30 minutes.” This is one of the most original performances that I’ve ever seen, and I was lucky enough to pay for one of the livestream/recordings of it. There are so many good stand-up bits, comedy songs, and impressions in the show, but what I found most interesting to me was how the show played with the idea of pain. There are, of course, obvious connections to the violence of social media and consumption of it, but I wanted to go beyond just that. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribe The show’s slapstick bits’…