Written by Justin Pansacola

If you’re like us at Flaunt, you judge people based on how they look because you are a bad person. Moshe Kasher doesn’t look like he would be the kind of comedian he actually is: wildly frenetic, incisive, self-aware and leaping between self-deprecation and arrogance. Maybe it’s the skinny jeans or the combed over haircut. Either way, Kasher knows this. He knows what some of you are thinking and, like any great stand-up comedian, uses that to control the room. Last Thursday, the room was the famous Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in LA, where Kasher was featured in his own spotlight special. He had the packed, sold-out room sucking in air between jokes.

With a wonderfully demented opening act by Brent Weinbach, the night could have been a variety show; Kasher ventured beyond stand-up with a premiere of a short video sketch and, somehow, mime. Because why not? Mel Brooks said humor is defense against the universe, but in the case of Moshe Kasher, it feels more like an attack. His wit barrels forward relentlessly, and it’s most clear when he spends the entirety of the opener improvising darkly funny riffs on the front row.

“Are you Jewish?” he asks a young blonde woman on his right. “You’re not Jewish. You’re the opposite of a Jew. Like if you ran into a Jewish person, you both would disappear. You’re what Hitler was thinking about.”

He’s a comedian that has been rising in notoriety, winning accolades like being awarded Best Comedy Album in 2009 by iTunes and recent appearances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Chelsea Lately.  In the coming year, you’ll see him on John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up Show and he’s channeling the unusual circumstances of his life (raised by deaf parents, locked up in a juvenile mental institution at age twelve) into a humor book from Grand Central Publishing. Meanwhile, he’ll be in comedy clubs across the country. All of this is to say: he seems to be keeping busy.