Zach Galifianakis

Watch him wait. Behind two pot plants on Between Two Ferns, which he began in 2008, Zach Galifianakis asks a film star a question no professional interviewer would ask and then does nothing at all while the star decides how to take it. The pause is the joke, and so is his flat refusal to help. He came up through New York stand-up in the early 1990s, in the alternative rooms where being disliked for a minute was part of the act, and he has never entirely left that stage. The hostility never goes anywhere, which is what makes it funny rather than nasty.

The Hangover (2009) turned the act into a character. Alan Garner is a grown man with a child's certainty, and his non sequiturs move the plot because nobody else in the film knows what to do with him. Todd Phillips has directed him four times, and the returns have been criticised for repetition, fairly, with Due Date (2010) and the Hangover sequels asking for the same oddness with less reason. He has done voice work since, and with Baskets (2016–2019), which he made with Louis C.K. and Jonathan Krisel, he went back to television with something built around him, playing twin brothers Chip and Dale.

There is sadness under the act, and the right show finds it. In Bored to Death (2009) he plays Ray Hueston, a Brooklyn comic-book artist with a long list of grievances and a short fuse, opposite Jason Schwartzman and Ted Danson. Danson gets the laughs; Galifianakis gets the only real feeling in the series. We did not expect to be saddened by a stoned man complaining about his life over dinner, and we were, because he delivers every grievance as though it were entirely reasonable and the world simply had not got round to fixing it. The scenes in which the three men eat and drink and solve nothing are the ones worth keeping.

He is less sure when he has to be part of the machinery. In Birdman (2014) he plays Jake, in the ensemble around Michael Keaton's vain actor, and does it cleanly enough that our review found no reason to single him out, which in that company is a compliment of a kind. In Lilo & Stitch (2025) he and Billy Magnussen play the alien pursuers Jumba and Pleakley, two comedians in bad shirts on a beach, which is a good idea, and he is oddly muted, playing the part rather than being funny in it. When the film is for children and the scenes are short, the waiting he depends on is the first thing to go.

He has said, of stand-up, "I always think the audience is wrong." That is the whole method: he stands there being odd until the audience gives in, and a film either gives him the time or it does not. The dinners in Bored to Death are worth finding even in a series that goes nowhere much, and Baskets was built for him. The sequels can be skipped without loss.