Mario Adrion: Live a Little ★★★★★

On Marc Maron’s podcast WTF, former The Tonight Show host and Oscar emcee Conan O’Brien once said “I think if a comedian’s too good looking…I really cannot believe they’re going to be any good. This is for us; this is our consolation prize.”

Alas, The Tonight Show is no longer the only prize taken from O’Brien. The consolation prize has been grabbed too, by Mario Adrion, a former model from Germany, a nation unrenowned for producing buckets of guﬀaws, but who, in Mario Adrion: Live a Little, is very, very good, as funny as he is comely.

Self-described as “devastatingly handsome” in a disarming video introduction, which features Adrion in various states of thirst-baiting undress, he enters in slightly oversized clothes, an immediate signal that he is going to rely on wits rather than body-ody-ody to win the audience over.

And he succeeds from start to finish, with a tight set that evokes laughter even when he describes life events that were challenging at best and, at worst, traumatic, even if they didn’t register immediately as such at the time.

Nothing’s sacred. “Hitler is kind of like my safe space,” he announces early in the show, and sure enough, if things ever seem to get too heavy, a Hitler joke will be lobbed out as a “palate cleanser”. Even his beloved grandfather isn’t spared, described as a “little bit Nazi”, or, “Nazi-ish” when he was recruited into the army at age 15 and sent to France, where he was soon captured and imprisoned.

Training as an engineer in Germany as a teenager, Adrion mockingly realized “I’m too hot to be educated,” and made his way to New York City, where he lived with other international models also trying to break into the industry. Most of the time the job was a grind and far from glamorous, days full of rejection and creepy promises. Even the titular “Live a Little” has a dubious connotation, but in looking back at his wild modeling days, Adrion has chosen hilarity over pathos, likely because “It’s hard being hot and sad.”