When comedian Eddie Pepitone spoke to us in January following the release of his first stand-up album, A Great Stillness, he mentioned how the record was actually the result of a documentary being made about him. Now filmmaker Steven Feinartz has released the first trailer for The Bitter Buddha, the documentary that’s been in the works for the past year.
Taking its title from Pepitone’s nickname, The Bitter Buddha follows the prototypical “comic’s comic”—or as Dana Gould aptly puts it in the trailer, “the guitarist that all the other guitarists go to see”—who has famous friends but lives in semi-obscurity. At 53, Pepitone may be an elder statesman of the alt-comedy scene, but he writes some of the most cutting, brutally funny material of anyone out there. (Check out the bit on A Great Stillness that re-creates a commercial audition, which perfectly exploits the comic distance between laundry detergent and crushing existential despair.)
The Bitter Buddha hasn’t set a release date yet but is currently hitting festivals. Updates can be found on its Facebook page.