After a seven-minute set marked by biological specificity and unrepeatable delivery, a Brooklyn man expressed regret that his organic origins had caused discomfort among attendees
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — A stand-up comedian at a Brooklyn open mic on Saturday concluded a seven-minute set to silence, polite confusion, and one audience member asking whether he had been “trained on enough material.” The comedian, identified as a thirty-four-year-old man with verifiable parents, issued an apology the following morning expressing regret for “any uncanny feelings my realness may have caused.”
The incident occurred at The Hollow Stem, a bar on Myrtle Avenue that has hosted live comedy on weekends for eleven years. Witnesses described the set as functional in outline but somehow, in execution, deeply unsettling.
“He kept doing this thing with his hands,” said Priya Melman, 29, a graphic designer who attended the show with two friends. “Like, gesturing. Spontaneously. You could tell he hadn’t planned every single gesture in advance. It was off-putting.”
The Set
Other patrons described the performance as “off-puttingly specific” and “lacking the smoothness we’ve come to expect.” Several noted that the comedian — whose name is Derek Fulle, though multiple attendees recalled it as something different — had referenced a specific argument with his building’s super in 2019, a parking ticket he received on a day he described as “a Tuesday in March, I think, maybe the 11th,” and a recurring dream about a childhood dog that he admitted he could not explain the relevance of.
“That’s the thing,” said Marcus Ota, 34, a software developer. “A well-optimized set wouldn’t meander like that. It would stay on brand. He just kept going places. There was no content strategy.”
Fulle, reached by phone, said he had been performing stand-up for six years and considers himself intermediate-level. He described the set as “not my best, but honest,” a phrase that appeared to summarize the source of the problem.
“I talked about stuff that actually happened to me,” he said. “I guess some of it wasn’t universally relatable. But I thought that was sort of the point.”
The Apology
His apology, posted to Instagram at 9:14 a.m. Sunday, read in part: “I want to acknowledge that my performance on Saturday may have registered as inconsistent, uneven, or in some respects uncomfortably human. I did not intend to cause distress. I am working on myself.”
The Venue Responds
The Hollow Stem has announced a new venue policy. Beginning June 1, a disclaimer will appear on all printed and digital promotional materials stating: “Performers at The Hollow Stem may be organic. Spontaneous variance in tone, pacing, and thematic coherence is possible. Viewer discretion advised.”
Owner Carla Bhattacharyya said the decision was practical rather than punitive.
“We’ve had a lot of feedback recently that audiences want to know what they’re getting,” she said. “It’s just transparency. If someone is going to be up there doing something genuinely unscripted, emotionally variable, and potentially informed by unresolved formative experiences, people should be prepared for that.”
Bhattacharyya added that the venue was also exploring a tiered booking system in which performers would be classified by origin before being listed on the website. “Organic” acts would receive a small leaf icon next to their name.
Academic Analysis
Dr. Leonard Chu, a professor of media psychology at Brooklyn College, calls the incident a case study in the “reverse uncanny valley.”
“The original uncanny valley describes the discomfort people feel when artificial entities become almost, but not quite, human,” Dr. Chu explained. “What we are observing now is a kind of cultural inversion. Audiences have been so thoroughly habituated to optimized, generated, or heavily produced content that genuine human imperfection has started to read as malfunction. The hesitation, the digression, the unresolved anecdote — these are read not as authenticity but as error.”
Dr. Chu has been tracking the phenomenon for approximately eighteen months and said Fulle’s case is not isolated. He cited a 2025 incident in which a Portland poet received confused reviews after a reading in which she “appeared to be making some of it up as she went,” and a 2024 panel discussion at a tech conference where a keynote speaker’s visible nervousness prompted several audience members to file complaints about “quality control.”
“We are entering a period,” Dr. Chu said, “in which being human in public requires a certain amount of explanation.”
The Industry Moves On
Netflix has announced it has optioned Fulle’s life rights for a comedy special to be written, performed, and delivered by a large language model trained on his publicly available posts, interviews, and the audio recording of Saturday’s set. The special, titled Derek, is expected to premiere in 2027 and will feature a digital likeness of Fulle performing a version of the seven-minute set that has been, according to a company statement, “refined for consistency, emotional legibility, and a more satisfying arc.”
Fulle said he had not been consulted prior to the announcement but that he had received a standard option agreement by email and was reviewing it with a lawyer.
“They said the model will do a better version of my stuff than I did,” he said. “Which, honestly, based on Saturday, might be true.”
He paused for a moment that was not particularly well-timed.
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” he added.
The special has already received a projected 91% audience satisfaction score.
IRREVERENT Magazine is a publication of satire and parody. No comedians were harmed in the production of this article, though several were briefly unsettled.