To the comedian John Early, few situations are more ripe for humor than hosting a dinner party.
“It is the most pleasurable thing you can do — in theory,” he said, taking a bite of lemon rice at Chola, an Indian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan.
“What mostly happens is that I get three hours behind and I am caught in a prison of joking, and then the food’s late and I’m in the kitchen. There is something very upstairs-downstairs,” he added, about the split screen of his role as host — struggling to finish cooking while popping his head out to entertain his guests. He flashed a cheeky grin, his arms waving like an inflatable tube man at a car dealership.
Mr. Early, 38, has made a name for himself doing exactly this: poking fun at the ways everyday life can feel like a performance.
On television comedies like “Search Party” and the remake of “Wet Hot American Summer,” he has played a manipulative narcissist and a hypercompetitive theater kid. In his stand-up routines, he roasts his audiences with a cheerful verve: “An entire generation of people pretending to hate the word ‘moist,’” he declared in his 2023 comedy special, “Now More Than Ever.”
Much of what Mr. Early finds so funny has to do with what and how we eat. Over dinner, he chuckled as he described what he sees as an alarming trend of internet-speak making its way to menus. “It will literally say in a description of a dish, ‘Calabrian chiles, all the things.’”
He joked about restaurants’ current obsession with rusticity and found objects. “Butcher paper, an old canned tomato tin with your silverware and napkins in it. I took my parents to this place and they were like, ‘$500 to sit on milk crates?’”
Food stars in some of the sharpest bits of his comedy routines. On his generation’s lack of hard skills: “Everyone just wants to make cake pops or make videos of themselves making cake pops.” On the absurdity of Postmates advertising slogans: “They’ll be like, ‘Don’t let breakfast bully you into putting your pants on!’”
Mr. Early insists he is just lampooning himself. “It all comes from my own food obsessions, the way that I am a puppy dog with all this stuff.” he said. He reads every list of best restaurants. He stays up to date on “Top Chef.” He adores his rice cooker.
That genuine love for food underpins his latest project, “Maddie’s Secret,” an independent film he wrote, directed and stars in, playing a sincere cooking content creator named Maddie who’s navigating a budding career at a media company while struggling with an eating disorder. The movie will have a limited theatrical release nationwide on June 19.
The premise came out of an observation: Online cooking videos, he said, had gone from gentle and instructive to aggressive and even sexual.
“It’s noodles slapping a pan,” he said, making a squelching noise.
“Or for the men, the phone is down there,” he continued, his hand hovering over his lap. “They turn the sandwich with layers of meat — The New York Times cannot print what that looks like — and they are squeezing the layers of meat directly to camera and it is oozing sauce and then people take these bites. Mmmmmm!
“And they do these faces that I have seen — or friends of mine have seen — in porn.” (This part of the interview bore an uncanny resemblance to the “I’ll have what she’s having” scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”)
“It felt so perverse to me,” he said, reminding him of the camp and eroticism of “Showgirls,” the 1995 cult-classic film about an aspiring professional dancer.
What if, he wondered, he were to make a movie that plopped an earnest domestic goddess of the PBS cooking-show genre into today’s noisy world of online content?
“It was cracking me up the idea of shooting a Bon Appétit-like place as if it were ‘Showgirls,’” he said. “As ruthless and perverse as that, with an Elizabeth Berkley ingénue with hopes and dreams.”
In the movie, Maddie posts a recipe video that goes viral, prompting her sudden promotion from dishwasher to on-camera host. Her rapid rise causes tension with her friends and colleagues, and heightens her body-image issues, landing her at an eating-disorder treatment center. The movie plays like a ’90s after-school special, fully committing to the melodrama without a hint of irony.
“I wanted to follow the tropes of the genre,” he said. “I knew the risk of this movie, but also its potential virtue, was to not be cautious and lean into the drama.”
The movie isn’t supposed to be educational, didactic or even representative of the experiences of women or people with eating disorders, he said, though he did conduct interviews with people who had spent time in treatment centers. The food is the medium, not the message.
“I wanted to make a movie that was propulsive and full of feeling,” he said.
“Maddie’s Secret” will remind fans of Mr. Early’s biting satire that he is, at his core, a sentimental Southerner. He grew up in Nashville, where his parents were Presbyterian ministers. After graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he began performing in bars and making online comedy videos before landing a starring role in “Search Party” and moving to Los Angeles in 2016.
“I could suddenly afford to go to restaurants,” he said. “There was this whole apparatus of Infatuation, Eater, Bon Appétit. It felt like food had transformed from something that was snobby and highbrow to more accessible.”
He wholeheartedly bought into the world of orange wine and chile crisp, and his movie is filled with sly references to that era of food culture. A chalkboard grocery list in Maddie’s kitchen is a catalog of 2010s trends: “Yuzu, Meyer lemon, turmeric.” Maddie’s recipes sound like an all-day cafe menu from 2017: “Grilled halloumi with yuzu kosho crisp.” Maddie speaks like an Instagram caption: “This dish does have major breakfast sandwich-y hangover vibes.”
For all the jokes about the millennial aesthetic, “I promise you that I have softened toward my fellow millennials,” he said. “And therefore myself.”
That softer side shone in his most recent role as a 20-something son in a stripped-down Off-Broadway production of “What We Did Before Our Moth Days,” a play about a family in crisis written by the actor Wallace Shawn. He said performing monologues on a spare set made him more appreciative of art that’s indifferent to trends.
As he spoke, he splashed butter chicken onto the sleeve of his striped dress shirt, and a server rushed over with a wet towel and began dabbing the stain aggressively. Mr. Early kept thanking the server, busy at work on his arm, then suddenly stopped and burst into laughter.
“Life,” he chuckled. “It’s just monkey bars between the next stain.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
