‘Buy the Dip’ Mixes Politics and Parenting in a Dark Comic Special

I appreciate Nimesh Patel’s willingness to subvert the expected. He plays with his identity as an Indian-American comic, but doesn’t rely on the usual stereotypes, doing some goofy gas station attendant voice or leaning his whole set into ethnic jokes. Does he do them? Sure, but they’re more of a color within the material rather than, “I’m that wacky Indian dude.” His identity informs the comedy without becoming the entire reason for it. Patel lives for the dark jokes, the ones that bring along those willing to loosen the necktie: politics but make it one of those jokes where the audience looks around to make sure it’s ok to laugh. I love those kinds of comics. Smart and daring.

Released September 22 on Netflix, Buy the Dip is Patel’s latest stand-up special, a roughly 45-minute set that bounces through new fatherhood, healthcare, his aforementioned Indian family, racism and the corruption of American politics. And honestly, it’s one of the better specials released lately.

Patel spends about 10 solid minutes shitting all over Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, while making it very clear he’s no fan of the current administration whatsoever. (Preach, brother. They’re ass.) The dunks on the FBI edgelord are masterful; the Patel-on-Patel verbal violence is devilishly excellent because the underlying sentiment is basically, “Come on — this fucking guy?” There’s something especially satisfying about watching Patel refuse to treat a shared cultural background as some automatic reason for solidarity.

But Buy the Dip isn’t Patel going full Bill Hicks and hammering the government for 45 minutes. When he is critical, the bits are fun and genuinely funny because he rarely beats you over the head with the point that everything is horrible and we’re all drowning in a Capitalistic Hell. Patel does a commendable job slipping in stark, bone-dry one-liners that get the delayed laugh rather than relying on joke-setup-joke. He drops in something fucked up, lets it breathe for a moment and moves on without acknowledging it, like an ethereal ice pick you don’t realize is coming until it’s already lodged in your brain.

Patel also centers a decent amount of his material on being a new dad, which makes sense from a comic who’s going through that particularly intense period of life. Thankfully, he takes that same dark humor and turns the jokes into weapons of sarcasm rather than the usual, “Boy, I don’t ever sleep!” shit we’ve heard a million times.

That’s really what makes Buy the Dip work. Whether he’s talking about his kid, his family, healthcare or the assholes running (ruining) the country, Patel trusts the audience enough not to underline every punchline. The joke hits, he moves on and sometimes your brain has to run a few steps behind him to realize just how nasty it was. In a world full of Kill Tony’s Trump-loving Tony Hinchcliffes, be a Nimesh Patel.