Eric Andre's Legalize Everything gives his fans exactly what they want

The A.V. Club

"Andre is known for his ample blue material, but with the comedian now 37 years old, some of his musings border on juvenile, if not admonishable at times," says Preezy Brown. "In Legalize Everything, jokes about flatulence, which he incorporates incessantly, come across as amateurish. And in the age of the #MeToo movement, alluding in lighthearted fashion to transgressions committed by comedians Bill Cosby and Louis CK may not garner the most favorable reaction. However, these lowlights are few, as Andre keeps the audience on their toes with his ability to traverse from one topic to another. This allows him to go from viewing porn through a feminist lens ('I watch reverse-role bukakke, where six to ten women squirt on an Asian businessman’s face. I’m the most progressive motherf*cker on Pornhub, capisce?') to unpacking the irony of reggae being used as the theme song to a television show in which Black people are brutalized and detained." Brown adds: "Andre gives the people exactly what they want—nonsensical, slapstick humor that comes with a dash of thought-provoking analysis on the construct of America and its moving parts. Every bit, joke, or gag isn’t a home run on its own, but Legalize Everything is a praiseworthy effort that finds Andre holding court with the guile of a seasoned jester."

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• Eric Andre says says standup "might be the hardest thing ever": “You write a joke and if it doesn’t work, you throw it out, which is like 90 percent of ’em," he says. "The 10 percent that do work only work for a little bit and then they get stale and moldy and they’re done.”
• Andre recalls the advice Dave Chappelle gave him: "Don’t worry about being funny for 60 minutes. You just have to be interesting for 60 minutes," Chappelle said, according to Andre. "Yeah, people kept asking me about that—I hope that that wasn’t the company Dave secret," he says. "I apologize to Dave if that was his David Copperfield top-secret advice. But yeah, I was hanging out with him backstage at a Hannibal show, and he just gave me that little piece of advice, and I thought that was such sage wisdom, and I was really appreciative of it."
• Andre whittled his 90-minute set to 51 minutes for Netflix: "I wanted to have the shortest special on Netflix. I wanted it to be like, you can't breathe," he says.