by Mo Gilligan was creeping up on 30 when his Instagram blew up, thanks to Drake. Then Gilligan got on British TV a bunch, and last year, at 31, his first Netflix special.
As I wrote for Decider when his special premiered:
The 31-year-old keeps the show moving through his first hour, thanks in large measure to a backing band, which plays him onstage and supports several musical numbers and act-outs.
No longer constrained to the short, selfie routines of his Gram game, Gilligan prefers to keep the audience on his side by painting pictures of a scene involving group dynamics — your relatives at a wedding, bullies in a classroom, girls in group texts planning a birthday extravaganza — and then acting out the individual parts.
The band helps Gilligan demonstrate various wedding dances, or supplies the beat when he chooses to update nursery rhymes (Gilligan, born just as Andrew “Dice” Clay was becoming the biggest comedian in America, isn’t about making the rhymes unfriendly for families, tho), or even just provides instrumental scoring for his physicality as he bounds about onstage.
The hour’s chock full o’ nostalgic routines, as in do you remember when In The Night Garden was a children’s TV hit in the mid-oughts, or when you’d try to sneak back into the house whilst playing outside with your friends without alerting your mother, or when a group of young women heads out to the dance club.
