Review: Jim Jefferies, “This Is Me Now” (Netflix)

I’m a fan of Jim Jefferies and a bigger fan of his weekly Comedy Central series.

Which makes his 2018 Netflix special that much more disappointing. This Is Me Now feels like a cash grab, and filming it in Britain makes feel even more so, as the setting allows him to talk about all of the American political mayhem of the past two years to an audience that hasn’t grown as tired of it as we have.

The stuff not about politics updates us on just how viral his bit on guns has made him.

As I wrote in my review for Decider:

You’ll also learn that while he’s grateful that his gun control routine has become “a calling card…I get really popular after a massacre, and that’s really not what you want.”

Even if that calling card gets him invited to a cushy gig — $60,000 for 12 minutes of work — performing at a birthday party at the behest of Mariah Carey. Names are dropped. Tales are told. Jefferies elicits multiple laughs impersonating Al Pacino describing Jefferies’s act back to the comedian. It’s a great story. Even if Jefferies describes it throughout as a hell gig.

Read my full review, in which I demonstrate how his experience as an Australian is and continues to be so much different from that of comedian Hannah Gadsby. Since she’s the one you’re mostly drawn into debates about this summer.

Even the trailer for this Jefferies hour is cheeky.

 

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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