Kurt Braunohler
Kurt Braunohler is an actor.
Stand-up came first, which explains the shape of the screen career: many small, precisely calibrated parts and no attempt at a leading man. Braunohler hosted the game show Bunk on IFC, has worked across Comedy Central, This American Life and Radiolab, co-hosts the podcast Bananas, and made the web series Penelope Princess of Pets with his long-time collaborator Kristen Schaal.
His comic setting is cheerful obliviousness, which is rarer and harder than it looks. The trick is that he plays men entirely satisfied with themselves, so a joke can arrive without him ever pushing it. Logan on Bob's Burgers is the purest version: a teenage antagonist voiced with total sunny confidence, which is what makes him funny instead of menacing.
Live action uses him the same way. He is Chris in The Big Sick, in a comedy about comedians where the job is to be pleasantly useless; a news anchor in Long Shot; Ty Daverman in Black Monday; and Doug in Barbarian, dropped into a horror film that keeps changing shape around him. He is also a fixture of the late-night panel circuit, on @midnight, Join or Die and After Midnight, which is where the improvising is most visible and where the persona was built.
Movies (5)
TV (6)
Where to start with Kurt Braunohler
For the cleanest few minutes of him, try The Big Sick: he plays a working comic with such easy self-regard that the scene does the work for him. Bob's Burgers is the long-running one, and Logan is the best argument for casting a stand-up in animation rather than a straight actor. Barbarian puts him in a horror film and asks him to stay exactly as breezy as he is everywhere else, which is funnier and more unsettling than it sounds. Black Monday gives him more rope across a series. Approach Who Killed Santa? A Murderville Murder Mystery only if you already like improvised whodunnits, and treat @midnight with Chris Hardwick as his natural habitat rather than a career highlight.