Parking Lot Talk Show (2007) Lo-Fi Performance / Video / Internet Pilot Marc Horowitz Parking Lot Talk Show is what happens when you strip a talk show down to its wires and see what’s left. In this case: two found chairs, a plastic table, a sad palm, and a patch of sun-bleached asphalt outside a thrift store in Los Angeles. No lights, no studio, no laugh track. Just the quiet absurdity of trying to talk to strangers in the middle of a parking lot. The project emerged during Horowitz’s first year in LA, after relocating from San Francisco. Orbiting the alt-comedy world and exploring the outer edges of compact performance, he began producing micro-episodes—each one about a minute long. They feel like fragments of a failed idea, or better yet, a bad idea executed fully. The talk show format is recognizable, but it collapses almost instantly. Nothing lands. No rhythm develops. It’s less a punchline than a stumble—accidental comedy that becomes a low-stakes catastrophe. What emerges isn’t television. Not quite art either. It’s something closer to proto-content: lo-fi, nearly disposable, slapstick in its construction and tone. There’s a Midwestern chintz to it—a kind of anti-style that leans into embarrassment, awkwardness, and the aesthetics of cheapness. But this is not “bad production value”—it’s production failure as method. Think early Dan Arps installations, or a garage sale version of Between Two Ferns. A format held together by masking tape and intention. If there’s a lineage here, it sits somewhere between Andy Kaufman, early YouTube, and a neutered version of Jackass—but without spectacle, violence, or closure. This is comedy without catharsis. Anti-performance as soft provocation. A host with no crowd. A show that doesn’t want to sell anything, not even itself. Horowitz isn’t performing mastery. He’s performing confusion. The project doesn’t function in spite of that—it functions because of it. As in Human Video Game Experiment, the platform (YouTube) becomes both the stage and the archive. The episodes are not built to succeed. They’re built to register—a structure for failure, uploaded in real time. The project also channels a generational tension. According to Horowitz, Parking Lot Talk Show emerged out of a Gen X ethos: anti-corporate, slacker-skeptical, allergic to polish. With a background in marketing and a growing discomfort with institutional seriousness, he staged a format that both mocks and mourns the machinery of performance. The result is a talk show that talks around itself, a platform that barely holds, but still—somehow—invites participation. In one of the strongest episodes, a participant sits with Horowitz in a moment that hovers on the edge of nothingness—no narrative, no arc, no conclusion. The refusal to fill the space becomes luminous. The guest is present but unsure. So is the host. So is the frame. And in that uncertainty, a kind of shared vulnerability emerges—a suspended moment of low-stakes humanity. This isn’t comedy in the conventional sense. It’s a tableau of unresolved tension. As Lauren Berlant writes, comedy is “a tableau of repair… always teetering on reversal, exposure, and collapse.” Parking Lot Talk Show is that repair in process: nothing works, and yet it holds. Nothing happens, and yet something has shifted. It is art made from the leftovers of culture. A thrifted gesture. A cracked format. A show that barely exists—and yet endures.
