![]() If nothing else, someone so talented wouldn’t write jokes so unoriginal. Whatever the case, I rationalized that it must have been a singular aberration - a cheap shot coercively recommended or oversimplified by a less conscious or principled collaborator, but surely inauthentic to Wolf’s actual beliefs. Maybe it was that Wolf also poked fun at her own physicality while roasting Kellyanne Conway’s uncanny surname (“It’s like if my name was Michelle Jokes Frizzyhair Smalltits”) maybe it was that this felt somewhat innocuous, as fat jokes go, and I’m not interested in coddling awful and enormously powerful people or maybe it was that I needed a modern feminist hero who could make me laugh so I didn’t cry, and Wolf otherwise fit the bill. So much so that, despite my initial surprise at Wolf’s joke about Chris Christie’s size (“Republicans are easy to make fun of, you know it’s like shooting fish in a Chris Christie”), I ended up letting it go. It was invigorating to watch Wolf exhibit scalpel-esque precision on points that, when construed as jokes about Sanders’ looks, revealed the underlying beliefs of the opposing party. The latter misinterpretation - that Aunt Lydia’s actions aren’t as shameful as Dowd’s 63-year-old, plus-size body - was especially illuminating. And missing from those conversations, too, was the fact that her comparison of Sanders to The Handmaid’s Tale’s Aunt Lydia was about the character’s brutality, sycophancy and spectacular internalized misogyny, rather than actor Ann Dowd’s physical attributes. Obfuscated in these discussions was the fact that Wolf’s “ perfect smokey eye” line capped off a joke about Sanders’ constant, republic-endangering dishonesty to journalists and civilian audiences, rather than a misguided makeup choice. If the President of the United States and his policy-making cohort can’t gleefully critique women’s looks without backlash, they reasoned, then nobody should be able to. In the aftermath, instead of reporting on her quips about the political establishment’s “wavering values” on abortion, the ongoing Flint water crisis, or the actual, verbatim, “collapse of the republic,” pundits seized on Wolf’s jokes about Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ makeup to illustrate the comedian’s feminist hypocrisy - and by extension, the hypocrisy of all liberals. She wasn’t just funny she was nuanced, creative and apparently fearless. She fought fire with fire, hurling digs at the expense of the right and left politicians and media blatantly racist gubernatorial candidates and “well-meaning” corporations doing damage control. ![]() ![]() ![]() But in Washington that night, unbound by advertisers or the FCC, she responded to the increasingly chaotic state of American politics and discourse with an appropriately confrontational monologue. Wolf’s previous appearances on The Daily Show hadn’t left much of an impression on me, I suspect due to the gag effect of cable TV standards on her most controversial jokes. This wasn’t hard to remember I’ve watched it at least three times in the wake of her incendiary remarks at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That’s the same thing she wore to tape Nice Lady.” Certainly because I’ve always been hyperfocused on clothes and in all likelihood because she is a woman, the first thing I thought as comedian Michelle Wolf walked onto the set of her new Netflix show The Break was: “Huh. ![]()
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