Anna Przy Makes Falling Apart Funny
Viral comedy star Anna Przy brings her Big Dumb Crybaby Tour to Houston. The post Anna Przy Makes Falling Apart Funny appeared first on Houston Press.
Watching an Anna Przy video is like watching the world’s most optimistic mental breakdown in action. Typically, she runs around her backyard in Michigan screaming about how scary the world is in a high-pitched voice that sounds like it’s on the verge of cracking. Sometimes she waves BBQ tongs at the camera while imploring the audience to “keep it up, cutie.” Other times, she obsessively vacuums the soil (she says because it’s dirty outside). Her advice is genuinely uplifting (“all of this is made up, and you can make up better stuff for yourself!”) but delivered as if she is hanging onto sanity by her fingernails.
It’s a weird way to do comedy, but it has built up a rabid following of over a million people across TikTok and Instagram. Now, she’s on her first national tour, the Big Dumb Crybaby Tour, bringing her unique mix of trauma dumping and jokes to Houston.
After being an event planner in Michigan for 13 years, Przy, found herself utterly adrift during COVID with no events to plan and slowly going crazy from isolation and anxiety. In 2020, she released the first of her manic affirmation videos to almost immediate acclaim. The rest of the world was falling apart, too, and she at least put a happy face on the madness.
“The pandemic hit, and I was pretty catatonic, actually,” she said in a phone interview as she drove to her gig in Baton Rouge. “But it was kind of the mental health crisis I needed to break me out of that mode. I was talking to myself while I was shouting about it outside.”
Przy’s style evolved over the next five years as audiences grew to understand her particular approach to comedy. It’s the sort of act that is hard to explain but instantly recognizable as funny when you see it in action. Przy’s absurdist physical comedy provides the laughs, from rolling down hills as she speaks to twirling brooms like a baton. Like a walking embodiment of chaotic good, her capering lightens the mood as she acknowledges modern woes like burnout, negative self-talk, and fear of the future.
