“An entitled slacker chump who rides his beer gut like a chariot through the trust-funded wilds of Williamsburg, Swanson (comic Tim Heidecker, playing it straight) is a horseman of the Bro-pocalypse in writer-director Alverson’s corrosive statement on post-millennial America. The trench-mouthed character’s penchant for cheap antagonism and drunken invective can polarize audiences, just as the ambling, plotless structure asks them to regard this repugnant clod with heightened sensitivity—the better to calculate his damage. It’s bold stuff, a kind of latter-day evocation of the social antipathies of “Five Easy Pieces,” pushed to an absurdist brink. Laugh, cry or squirm? All of the above.” — Wall Street Journal

“This leaves Rick Alverson‘s The Comedy to approximate the sandpapery, stink bomb quality of Lewis’s aggravating art. A character study of an alcoholic, driftless 35-year-old of independent means who lives on a sailboat in the East River—an unreformable Arthur who amuses himself by hijacking menial jobs and periodically performing taboo-busting acte gratuits—The Comedyfeatures a deadpan lead performance by Tim Heidecker of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, making a mockery of family, friendship, romance, faith, and, in various views of his lardy torso, his own body. This darkness, illustrating Nietzsche‘s “Wit is the epitaph of an emotion,” is more disquieting than Compliance‘s, as one has to contend with the allure of such reprehensibility, choking back laughter.” — The Village Voice