After being named a comic who won 2025 (Deadline) and performing a fully sold-out Pan-Asian tour this winter, Gianmarco Soresi is releasing a short set of new material filmed at the Pittsburgh Improv, Shelf Life: Volume 2 on his YouTube Channel.
The new set is the follow-up to Shelf Life, his first stand-up set released in 2020 which garnered him a New York Emmy nomination for the covid-era jokes that rang true and timely. The new 14-minute set is yet another collection of timely jokes that just cannot wait. Says Soresi, “America is descending into fascism too fast to save these jokes for the next special so I wanted to get this out there before people forget who Charlie Kirk was.”
As the title suggests, some jokes have a shelf life; they go bad after their timely subjects dissolve into fast moving information environment’s ether. So just as the covid-era jokes in the first Shelf Life from 2020 had to be set free before they were obsolete, so must the jokes in Shelf LIfe: Volume 2 see the light of day before they are no longer relevant.
Soresi is an introspective, observational comedian with a lot of material about his personal life, but he is also known for his opinions on politics and current events, which makes for jokes that have an urgency- a time and a place.
In Shelf Life: Volume 2 he reveals the kinds of fans he really wishes he had, explains the problems with having too many political opinions, critiques the opinion that his identity and his politics don’t match, and in the spirit of the title, points out how a lot of jokes truly do not age well. But even with this incredibly current material, est assured that the performance in this upcoming set will still have “the intensity of David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear” (NY Times).
