Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Review: The Joke’s Still Funny

Does a joke get funnier the more you tell it, or is it only if you tell it sporadically over a long period of time?

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have been telling their one joke about their fictional band, Nirvanna, for almost 20 years. It’s pretty simple: Aspiring musicians Matt (Johhnson) and Jay (McCarrol) have to make it to the Rivoli in Toronto for their gig that night. Only they don’t have a show because they’re not really a band and the Rivoli has no idea who they are.

They’ve told this story as a 2007 web series, then a 2017 sitcom on Vice, and now as a feature, but it’s still the same joke: a crazy scheme to get onstage at the Rivoli that ultimately becomes a bigger deal than the nonexistent show. Since they’re going to the movies for this one, the stakes have to be a little higher, and so the barrier to performance is that they accidentally turn their mobile home into a time machine and get stuck in September 26, 2008. So, do they get back to the future so they can make it to their possible show?

That’s the inspiration behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, a grammar-mangling follow-up to what was originally Nirvana the Band the Show but had to change its name because of the obvious copyright infringement issues. In the intervening years, Johnson and McCarrol have applied their documentary-esque style to the movies for darker fare like The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, and BlackBerry, but Nirvanna has always been there for them, and now they’re at it again, like a millennial Vladimir and Estragon.

But what justifies telling the joke again on this scale? It’s actually an ingenious inversion, undercut by the tension that’s always been part of the show: that Matt is an idiot and Jay probably would have been better off without him. So, if he has a chance to not spend so much of his life failing to get a gig at the Rivoli, what would he do?

The show’s humor is really in the blurry line between the real and the fiction, that Johnson and McCarrol have perfected the art of immersing audiences in their weird little world. There’s an effortlessness to it, mixing both vérité visual tricks and visual effects that are subtly low-key. Most importantly, there’s a charming ambiguity about how many people are in on the gag. To this day, there are constant arguments within the rabid fanbase as to whether the Rivoli even knows about this. The fourth wall is their plaything. There’s a delightful moment in which a random passerby asks, “Are you Jay McCarrol?” and you won’t be quite sure if they’re a plant or not.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may not win over many or even any new fans, but devotees of the TV show, and even diehards from the single-n Nirvana web days will relish having their favorite gentle idiots back and hearing the same joke on a bigger stage. Sure, Matt’s a little paunchier (as one time-traveling variant of Jay cruelly notes), and Jay’s a little greyer, but Matt’s hat’s the same, they’re still being followed around by two guys with cameras for no reason, the affable friendliness of the people of Toronto is still as much a character as always, and the Rivoli is still there. Most importantly, Johnson and McCarrol’s weird mix of Jackass, Portlandia, and Letterkenny is undented, and their willingness to skirt the rules of copyright to make a reference work is still intact. Yes, even after all these years, the joke’s still funny.

This article appears in February 13 • 2026.