He did seem to be telling the truth here. My hopes for a trainwreck were immediately thwarted. He looked good: fit, well-dressed, with a full head of hair. He looked like if a spritz of expensive cologne became a person. He knew what he was doing up there. Other than a couple of times when he reached for the mic stand and missed, there weren’t any signs that he was new to this. He did effective crowd work, charismatically told long stories, and nailed the punch at the end without losing the plot, and used the whole stage for energetic act outs.

In the interview with the Toronto Star that ran prior to his Yuks appearance, Piven said he loved stand-up because it gave a chance for an audience to get to know him better, stating, “Selfishly, this is a way for an audience to see who I am... It’s fun, it’s terrifying, but I think they can feel your truth.” And I think we did see his truth. He mostly told douchey anecdotes about going to the gym, about being famous. He did consistently worse impressions of celebrities he has met—his Jackie Chan and Mark Wahlberg impressions being particularly indistinguishable from one another. In a particular brazen act, in the midst of a joke asking why Mike Tyson needs a bodyguard, he did a joke about it being like, “Bill Cosby needing a mixologist.” When he said Cosby’s name, there was a huge reaction and he reveled in it, as if realizing that every laugh he got up there distanced him from needing to reckon with his own alleged transgressions. It was the audacious act of a man on the lam who thinks he’s permanently avoided capture. He made the requisite joke for all masculine American comics about Caitlyn Jenner, using mangina as a punchline. He was coarse and arrogant—An asshole.

There was one moment of vulnerability. Piven was telling a story about how he would run Entourage lines with this mother (his in-character yelling of “Lloyd” got the biggest reaction of the night) and he brought up that he had been raised on the stage. His parents were theater people and he was just a theater kid, always doing Shakespeare and Chekhov, and there was a brief ripple through the crowd as you could see all the jocks in attendance asking, “What the fuck is Chekov?” It was at this moment I realized our uncomfortable similarities.