Kate Berlant notoriously does not “write” her standup routines. She knows how she’ll open, and she goes in with certain subjects in mind—the beauty-industrial complex, say, or social-media addiction, or wellness scams, or the existential search for self in a culture of constant surveillance and performance. But from there she’ll just . . . wing it, and what tumbles out of her during her improvised sets looks unlike any other comic act you’ve seen before. As a performer, Berlant is hyper-loquacious and unabashedly cerebral, shooting off errant sparks of philosophy and academic theory, and flitting among bits almost before the viewer has had a chance to register what she’s just seen. She is also a consummate physical comedian, a clown in street clothes. In one moment, she’ll flip her long curly hair and flash a seductive pout; in the next, she’ll cross her eyes, pull her mouth into a rubbery grimace, and shove her chin into her neck while sticking out her tongue. Her onstage persona is equal parts alluring and evasive, diffident and desperate for attention. She is pointedly uninterested in confessional humor except as a cliché that she can twist and pull into wacky new forms.
Berlant, who is thirty-five, grew up in Santa Monica, California, with artist parents. After moving to New York for college, she became a rising star of the city’s alternative-comedy scene, developing her signature stream-of-consciousness style at open mikes around town. When she was twenty-five, she met her fellow-comedian John Early, who became a kind of creative soul mate. As a duo, they put out experimental video shorts and appeared on “The Tonight Show.” Last year, Peacock released their sketch special, “Would It Kill You to Laugh?” A gregarious collaborator, Berlant also hosts a weekly podcast called “POOG,” with the comedian and writer Jacqueline Novak. In each episode, they pore over wellness trends with a mixture of utter sincerity and absurdist skepticism, until you can’t tell if you’re listening to podcast kibbitzing or a parody of podcast kibbitzing. Berlant told me, of her partnerships with Early and Novak, “Those creative friendships are the most important thing about life for me.”
During the pandemic, Berlant took a year off from performing live comedy. When she began doing standup again, her friend Bo Burnham, who had directed her FX special “Cinnamon in the Wind,” suggested that she might consider doing a one-woman show—and actually writing a set script this time. She began workshopping the play that became “Kate” at the Elysian Theatre, in Los Angeles, in 2021. It moved to New York City this past fall, and became a sold-out sensation. An eight-week encore run is currently under way. In the show, which is directed by Burnham, Berlant performs a pseudo-biographical monologue about her journey as an actor. The plot, insofar as there is one, centers on her struggle to cry on camera. The waterworks, when they finally happen, are just one of many bravura moments in Berlant’s frenetic eighty minutes of physical shape-shifting and faux-confessional soliloquy. When I spoke to her recently, in a luxury apartment on the Lower East Side that she was borrowing from a friend, she told me that, although she still primarily sees herself as a comedian, she hopes to keep doing theatre for a long time. “My dad always told me artists don’t call themselves artists,” she said. “But now I fully claim ’actress.’ I used to have so much shame around that.”
You seem to have had a very happy childhood, from what I’ve read, though you put forward the opposite in your show. You play your mother as cruel and domineering and your father as absent. And then you have this preshow art installation that plays home videos in a ratty living-room set, with a smoldering ashtray in it.
So, that part is funny to me, but it’s also terrifying, because I know there are some people who are entering that space thinking that it is serious. There are parts of this show that are really painful for me sometimes to perform, or to know that people are ingesting, because I have to live in the terror that they might think that it is my sincere attempt at performance. I was sitting on the bench the other night, and wearing the sign, and I heard someone say, “Oh, so it’s, like, art,” or something.
You’re referring to how you sit in the lobby before each show wearing a sign that says “Ignore Me”?
Yes. Somebody was commenting on me as though I was doing a sincere sort of subversive thing, which would be to sit in a spotlight with a sign on. In doing this show, I have to tolerate those moments of extreme discomfort for what hopefully is ultimately a larger payoff. Anyway, that fabrication of a childhood living room, a blue-collar living room, is completely not an accurate portrayal of my actual upbringing. Those childhood videos are real. We had to edit them, because I’m naked in essentially all of them, but I was constantly wanting to see myself. I went by Kitty my whole life until I was twelve or something, and so I’m constantly coming up to the camera, going, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” I was absolutely a ham. I spent a lot of time filming myself alone as a kid. I would talk to the camera, and monologue to it for hours.
How did you get a camera to begin with? “Kate” is, in many ways, a meditation on your lifetime obsession with being in front of one.
My parents had a video camera, and then in middle school I asked for a camcorder, just a little handheld thing. I would film my friends without them knowing. The way people now behave in front of cameras has changed so wildly. Now everyone is constantly imaged, and everyone, even non-performers, are expected to know how to perform for the camera.
When were you cognizant of the fact that you had artistic parents?
My dad worked from home, and his studios were at the house. He talks about me being, like, “We’re not normal, you don’t have a real job.” I didn’t understand. I romanticized jobs. My best friend’s dad was a doctor, and it was, like, “Now, that’s a real man. That’s a real dad who goes to work and has files.” My dad was totally absorbed in his work all day, all night, but something about it just felt—I don’t know. I remember I always fetishized normal families.
Sure, but coming from working artists must have also given you a certain kind of permission to do what you do now.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s informed everything. It’s funny, New York magazine named me a nepo baby. It said, “Her father’s a sculptor,” which, yes, my dad is an artist. I guess sculptor isn’t how to describe it necessarily. It also said, “Her mom made the Stonehenge prop for ‘Spinal Tap,’ ” which is true, but I just love the idea of my dad being an obscure pop artist and my mom having fabricated one prop and I’m, like, “Yeah, that’s what got me here.” Ha, no. Still, I was, like, “O.K., I’ll take it,” because it almost elevates me to a famous person or something.
I mean, there’s absolutely no way around it. I was raised in a house where I was watching someone make a living making art all day, and that informed me in a huge way. In my standup, I arrived at an improvisational comedic language as a way to avoid working. I really do not sit down and write out my comedy, ever. “Kate” was my first time actually sitting down at a desk and writing. And I realized, Oh, so that’s my dad’s work ethic. I absorbed some of that, I think. I don’t work with my hands. But it’s about constantly chipping away at something every day. I can say I’ve never worked harder on something.
Did you feel like you were vying for attention in your house growing up, or did you have too much?
This is a key question. I would say I was constantly vying for attention from my dad. Here come the tears. [Pretends to cry.] My mom, to overcompensate for that, centered me completely. I was around exclusively adults. My parents’ friends didn’t have kids, and I really wanted to be seen as someone who could hold court at the dinner table.
Did you ever beg your parents to go on any Hollywood auditions? I mean, you were already nearby.
What happened was one of my best friends growing up, Samy Burch, who’s a really brilliant screenwriter, and who just wrote Todd Haynes’s new feature, had a mother who was a casting director. And her mother’s friend was casting “Lizzie McGuire,” and, as kind of a fun gag, a lot of us girls went in to audition. I was thirteen, and I got it, which truly has never happened again. The only other job I’ve ever received from a straight audition was for Tarantino. So, yeah, I had a leg up there, at “Lizzie McGuire.”
Hollywood nepotism strikes again!
I mean, I was talking to John [Early] about the nepo-baby thing, and John was, like, “Yes, unfortunately, artists beget artists as locksmiths often beget locksmiths.” I’ve never tried to separate myself from the reality of my upbringing, which is with Santa Monica artists. I went to private school. I didn’t get a Range Rover when I turned sixteen like some of the other gals, but . . .
Did you go to Crossroads, the private school in Santa Monica where all the celebrity children went?
I went to Archer School for Girls. I was supposed to go to Crossroads, and it broke my parents’ heart when I decided not to. I think I just was really scared about being around boys. I was, like, “They’re going to make me give a B.J. instantly.” I went for a half day. I remember the girls had Kate Spade purses and heels and they were making out and I was, like, “I can’t do this.”
I can’t even imagine growing up in L.A. The bat-mitzvah scene must have been nuts.
I dropped out of Hebrew school because it conflicted with the “Steel Magnolias” play-rehearsal schedule at school.
Ha! So you landed “Lizzie McGuire.” Did you think you’d leap right into a tween TV career?
I told my parents, “You’d better hold on tight because I’m about to rocket-launch to the top.” I got a manager from that, who I remember was this gay guy who was, like, “Show your tummy. Wear something cropped that shows your tummy at the auditions.” That’s forever burned in there. “Show your tummy.” I was, like, “You’ll never see my tummy,” and no one ever has. Then I botched a “That’s So Raven” audition, and I was dropped by the manager. It was fine. I was doing the school plays. And when I was seventeen, I started to do standup.
How does a seventeen-year-old start doing standup?
I started to get really into listening to standup. I mean, I always had a very romantic obsession with New York City, and therefore, uh, Woody Allen. Redacted! Now I’m, like, “Was there a world in which seventeen-year-old me was guffawing at Woody Allen’s standup?” I didn’t understand half the references. Then I started to become really into what else was coming out of New York, what was then referred to as the “alternative-comedy scene.” I loved Variety Shac and Stella and the short videos people were making. I was really into Eugene Mirman and the “Invite Them Up” standup scene, which put out a double CD that I listened to really obsessively. My senior year of high school, the “S.N.L.” oral-history book came out, and I remember clutching it and crying to my English teacher, being, like, “I have to go to New York!” My God, my relationship with my teachers, by the way. I loved school and I still do.
Were you a stay-after-class-to-hang-with-the-teacher person?
I was the one who was, like, “Well, the teachers and I have an actual connection.” That was significant for me.
So the idea of “Saturday Night Live” brought you to New York?
I never auditioned for “S.N.L.” That being said, I was asked to test once. [Laughs.] I was obsessed with Chris Farley. But, really, I was much more focussed on the alternative-comedy scene. In my senior year of high school, we could do an independent study, and I chose to do one on comedy, and that’s when I started writing standup for the first time. That’s the last time I was sitting down and writing out standup. I had note cards of all my jokes. God, it’s so crazy. I literally have the footage of the first time I’d ever done standup, but I can’t show you. I haven’t watched it in years. I think John is the only person I’ve ever let see it.
Is that a vulnerable document for you?
It’s very sweet. I mean, what I did was . . . O.K., well, first of all, I came out in a wheelchair. Then I stood up, so that’s kind of the first joke. I’d be instantly cancelled for it. And I was wearing a kimono.
Where was this?
The basement of my high school, in the black-box theatre. All the jokes were quite abstract. I told jokes about the Pope. It was bizarre. I was, like, “If the Pope sleeps on his side, does the word of God get in?” It was really Borscht Belt, and totally psycho.
How long did it go on?
In my mind it was half an hour, but there’s no way it was. It was probably, like, fifteen minutes. At the end, I remember it got kind of soulful. I talked about how here I was, on the cusp of going to college. I was really obsessed with Sarah Silverman’s “Jesus Is Magic,” and I think one of the last jokes I told was sort of something talking about my fears of going to college or growing up, but then, at the end, I was, like, “Mostly I’m just scared that some of you think I’m fat,” or something. Just kind of a classic Silverman joke. I was just trying to find out what the hell to do. Which takes forever.
Do you feel like there were any elements of your style, even from the very first set, that have stayed consistent?
I think there was this non-sequitur resistance to a coherent narrative, or to being a coherent person onstage. I don’t think I ever truly talked about my life or myself. It wasn’t like I felt I was avoiding something or trying to prevent people from accessing me. It just somehow wasn’t ever my language. The bits had almost no reference to my direct reality.
How about your clown-y physicality? Did you find that early?
I was always making faces. Forever.
So then you went East for college.
I went to Bard for one year, and I did open mikes at Bard constantly. I was coming into the city a lot. I took one Improv 101 class at U.C.B. when I was eighteen, and was, like, “No.” The teacher wasn’t taken with me, and I was, like, “I quit.” I just felt like that just was not for me. What’s funny, then, is that the first time I ever got put on a real standup show was at U.C.B. Chelsea. Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who went to Bard and later created “BoJack Horseman,” was a senior when I was a freshman. He put me on a show lineup, which was my first time doing a real set in New York. I just started to come to the city as often as I could, and then I transferred to Gallatin, at N.Y.U. I went all the way through grad school, and thought maybe I could be a teacher or be in academia forever. Then, of course, I was, like, “I don’t want to. I want to do comedy.”
What did you go to grad school for?
Performance studies, which has nothing to do with acting. I got into it because, at the end of my undergrad, I got really into reading about Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and the ritual process. I got really hooked on this idea, which really informed the way I approached my standup, of spaces of liminality, these in-between places and places of nonexisting. I was just lit up from that. I was, like, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing. That’s where I am onstage. I’m between identities. I’m here, I’m not there. I’m me, I’m not me.” I was never striving for any kind of cogent autobiographical presentation of self.
It seems like that’s been the consistent thing for you: the inconsistency of self.
As someone said, the self is a useful fiction.
When did you meet John Early?
I have a very porous memory, but I really do remember the first moment I saw John. I was at a show at, I think it was Jimmy’s No. 43. When I was coming up through standup, every bar in New York City had a comedy night. You could do five shows a night if you wanted. So I remember I was running from one show to another. I was leaving and felt a hand on my arm, and I looked and it was John, and I was, like, “Hey.” Then we ended up doing this short film a few weeks later, and it really was love at first sight. We just were dying laughing the entire day. I remember being frustrated whenever anyone would come over to talk to us, because we were, like, “Go away!” I just wanted to talk to him. Then I remember I got back to my apartment, we were texting until 4 A.M., and he was, like, “I’m going to kill myself if I don’t see you soon.” That began a two-year period of John and I hanging out every day, and having sleepovers most nights. I was living in my apartment with my roommate, and John was like a third roommate. He would come sleep in my bed with me. We had such a clear cognition of how huge it was that we met. I remember the week we met, we were, like, “See you on I.F.C. in a year.” I.F.C. was the cool channel back then. We just were sharing everything. We operated in very similar spaces as children. Our identities were completely wrapped up in making people laugh. But we also both had deep ambitions. We took it very seriously. There was no doubt in our minds.
I know that, for a lot of people who do comedy, the whole thing is they want to be up there by themselves. It’s really hard for them to cede any ground. But your collaboration with John feels so cohesive, and you put out all these videos right away. I still think about “Rachel” all the time. How did those Web shorts begin?
We made the Paris video the day after Thanksgiving. I remember I had a migraine. John was, like, “There was a girl in my high school who had a bracelet that said ‘I Love Paris,’ ” and we were just joking about that, and then we just were, like, “We should just make this.” It was a fully improvised thing. And we immediately just had a million ideas.
The sustained sketch is just fundamentally not in the culture anymore, which, again, fed into “Kate” for sure. In the pandemic, I saw this uniform language that was emerging, of the front-facing video—many of which, by the way, are so funny—but I felt a deep inner knowledge that that was not my language or not how I wanted to work. The idea of sustaining attention, maybe even for over an hour, felt like where I needed to live. I still have a white-knuckle grip on what is now very rapidly becoming an archaic mode of entertainment. Now four minutes is considered long.
It does feel like, at that time in New York City, in the early twenty-tens, everyone was trying to make short videos in hopes of getting a TV show.
Everyone wanted to be “Broad City.” John and I pitched a show and shot a pilot around 2016, and that was very much, like, “O.K., well, here we fucking go. We’re shooting a pilot with Hulu.” Needless to say, it did not get picked up.
What kept you going during those early years, when you were running around doing five shows a night and slapping together Web shorts?
This sounds so saccharine or something, but, I swear to God, I just loved doing it every night so much. I never had to keep going. I never struggled to want to do it every night, ever.
Were you broke, though?
Well, here comes the reality of my life, which is that, no, I had a full safety net. I didn’t actually live in fear of being broke and having nowhere to live, ever. I mean, a lot of your favorite comedians, folks, didn’t really have to worry about getting by.
But was there a point at which you were, like, “This isn’t enough for me”?
I did start to feel, like, “I want to act, I want to be in something,” and I moved back to L.A. in 2015. I never told anyone I was leaving. People thought I was still here for a while, and I wanted to still be perceived as being in both places. John and I were talking about it the other day. I was, like, “I can’t believe I left you.”
But he also moved to L.A. eventually.
Because we were essentially promised a Netflix series. We were told, “You’re going to have a Netflix show. You’re probably going to be shooting in March.” John moved to L.A. because he was told to, and then it didn’t happen. And I more or less proceeded to never get a job. I was doing mostly standup in L.A.
I want to talk about your standup, because it is so hard to describe to people. It feels kind of dangerous, in that you allow yourself to go off on tangents, but also you always seem to find a way to land the plane. How did you begin to find your comedic language, in terms of what you found worth talking about onstage?
I used to monologue into my Photo Booth app, to try to find material, to free-associate. I started doing this open mike in the East Village that wasn’t just a standup show, it was poetry and music, and maybe there’d be four comedians in three hours. That’s when I started doing the stream-of-consciousness stuff, because I felt like the expectation was just much more abstract there. It wasn’t this thing of people waiting for a joke, but I would get a big reaction. I think it just was a relief in those environments to have someone be funny, because it was such a kind of serious, strange place. I was doing that also at comedy shows, and it wasn’t like I was bombing, but I would come offstage and people would be, like, “What the hell was that?”
Do you just go up and go into a fugue state? I know that you notoriously improvise most of your act.
I always know where to start. You have to have an opening, and you have to have an ending. The goal was always to kind of go off track, and that would be the best part. I thought of it more as improvising around this spine that was there if I needed to go back to it.
There is a sense of, I mean . . . the performance is about my relationship with God. It’s true. It is a total surrender, and it feels very mysterious, and the elation that can come from it is very intoxicating and liberating, but it’s also very scary. Ahead of shooting my FX special, “Cinnamon in the Wind,” I went to Edinburgh and did a whole month of shows. That’s when I was really, like, “I would love to have more written.” I remember feeling that. And that’s what’s really liberating about this show, is that I know what’s going to happen. I know what words are going to come out of my mouth. And what’s been remarkable is that within that structure, there’s a lot of spaciousness. It’s highly, highly choreographed, and that’s a whole different kind of challenge. Repetition inevitably breeds difference, of course, and so these little shifts or tiny changes feel really significant. I love doing it. I’m going to slip into such a depression when it’s over.
So tell me how “Kate” came about. Writing it was your pandemic project, more or less.
I wasn’t doing anything for a year, and then I went onstage for the first time to do an hour. It was a very difficult time in my life. I was, like, “I need something to pull me out of this, and I need to get back to work. I’ve got to redirect.” Bo [Burnham] came to the first night that I did standup again. I had a camera onstage, and I was kind of playing with that, filming the audience. It was a very loose hour. I was backstage, and Bo was, like, “Yeah, that was really funny, and you can coast forever.” And then he was, like, “What would it be if you wrote a show?”
Was he negging you?
No, he was really loving. “Inside” was out, or I think he had just finished that. I reaped the benefit of him just not being so inside his own thing. He was really focussed on my show, but it wasn’t, like, “Oh, listen, let me help you with this.” I said, “I actually do want to try to write something. I want to write a play.” He was, like, “Great, I’ll come back.” I started to write, and he would come, and then we would go out after and get food and talk about it. Eventually, I said, “Will you direct me?”
There were so many iterations of this show. For a long time, at the beginning the house was black, and I would be in the back with a flashlight being, like, “Dad? Dad? Dad?,” looking for my dad, shining the light in the audience’s face. For months, I did this. The show totally transformed. That’s what I enforced on myself. I said, “I’m going to do this show once a week, and it has to change every week, and it has to get better.” I remember Bo saying to me, “It just needs to get a little bit better every time.”
So you were kind of live-workshopping “Kate” weekly in L.A.?
Yeah, at the Elysian Theatre. I would do two shows a week. Then three shows a week, then four shows. I think I did forty shows at the Elysian, and then I did ten in London. It took nine months. I was experimenting with this new way to work. I’ve always had, and still have, this real block, where I can’t write.
Ah yes, writer’s avoidance. I know it well.
In school, I could write academic papers. I was so smart before my attention span was completely calcified from social-media addiction. It’s devastating. Every few weeks, I’m, like, “I’m going off. Enough is e-fucking-nough.” Anyway, I do have this resistance, as most of us do, to doing the work we’re actually supposed to do. With “Kate,” I never actually thought I was going to quit, but there were plenty of times of being, like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” I was very anxious, because the theatre in New York was secured. The deadline was there before the show was there, which is the only way I really know how to work. We put it up before it was ready, in my eyes. But thank God for Bo. The show really is like a conversation between the two of us in so many ways.
I’m so lucky. I have a few people in my life who make me feel really taken care of creatively in that way. John, Bo, Andy DeYoung, who’s the director who John and I started working with right when I was moving to L.A. Jacqueline [Novak], of course.
I was going to say, it’s such kismet that Jacqueline, who you host the wellness podcast “POOG” with, is also touring with a one-woman show. I love “POOG,” by the way.
“POOG” was the gift of the pandemic. I never listen to it. It is just truly raw—it’s not planned. It’s totally meandering.
It’s another beautiful collaboration. Why a podcast?
We got into it so late, even for the joke about everyone having a podcast. It was so ridiculous to launch a podcast at that point. So it was, like, “Who fucking cares?” Everything shut down. Being able to do that, to talk to Jacqueline every week, was really lifesaving. That’s the place where I feel the most nakedly. The desire for philosophical truths or accessing some kind of revelation is more openly desired.
Because it feels embarrassing to desire that onstage?
Yes, you have to conceal the fact that you’re trying to discover what your life means.
There’s been a lot of discourse around the show, about how much you’re trying to reveal versus conceal, and whether or not it’s all planned. I read an interview that you did with Nathan Fielder, in which you were talking about how some of the critics of the show said that you don’t “really go there.” And it bothered you, because you’re, like, “That’s the entire point of the thing.”
I think it was a friend of a friend who was, like, “Oh, I just wish she had really gotten there.” And I just said, through my teeth, “You missed the joke.” Also, it’s, like, O.K., wait. You have this desire for confession, which is as old as time. And the aesthetics of confessional standup are so artificial. This thing of a guy in a hoodie talking about life and being, like, “Here’s my pain.” This insistence that that’s not artifice was always so confusing for me. I’m, like, “Well, it’s an act.” We all know the people going onstage are performing themselves, but there are these certain performances that conceal that process and are very beloved.
I always felt incredibly myself up there when I was never talking about myself. That was absolutely the most authentic portrayal of myself, even if the content wasn’t personal. We are in this place culturally of needing to have clean narratives around identity and pain and trauma, and there is social and economic capital to be gained by making that trauma consumable and legible.
Sure, of course. And obviously there’s the dialogue about the confessional versus obfuscating parts of the show. But I’m thinking of the end, where you are bawling and insisting that theatre is your religion. Is that a joke?
Genuinely, the show is my religion. I do have very deep feelings about physically going to the theatre, and seeing performers and being together and consuming things directly and not through screens. I do think our humanity’s kept alive in those rooms, sincerely. But, also, I think something opened up for me when I realized the show is about failure. I started to realize, Oh, right, whenever you make anything, it will never be the thing that you sought out to make ever, ever, ever, ever. There’s something that’s essentially unpinnable about the show, which has always been exciting for me, and which is why it keeps my interest every night—because I don’t fully understand it. I’ve never needed to understand things to love them or feel connected to them. This show is also about acting, for sure, and about needing to be seen and wanting to be seen.
It’s about playing with cliché and playing with artifice, which I think is the main thing. I remember that, my freshman year, I took a class on aesthetics of film. And we were reading Carl Dreyer quotes, and there was this one line that I didn’t even fully understand then, where he talks about using artifice to strip artifice from artifice. I was, like, “That is it. That’s where I operate.”
So there’s a sense that what feels like artifice to others is blatant honesty with yourself?
I’ve felt this with John a lot, too, being somebody who’s a performer and who moves through the world in a hyper-hammy way. Being perceived as false or fake or not authentic or not real enough—all of those tropes are used as a criticism of the clown, or of this idea of hiding behind humor. That’s always been such a toothless thing to me. I’m, like, “What are you talking about?” It’s all performance. Who is the stripped-down person you crave to see? I also don’t believe that you want that.
It’s like in the show, when you finally make yourself cry, it’s so clearly layers of effort that it pays off as the punch line.
They say you’re a real actor if you can cry. But it’s not true. That is just a magic trick. If you do it enough times, you’ll be able to do it. It doesn’t have to be tied to real emotion.
Do you have a surefire formula that you’re using every single time to make the tears come?
There were times I was not able to do it in L.A. I just had to train myself. And there are nights where it takes me a long time. And the nights where I think it’s going to happen too soon and I have to slow it down. I don’t think about emotional things to go there. It’s just the semiotics of crying. You just do it. You just pretend you do the thing and you do the thing. It came out of this idea that, when you are telling your truth, or telling the dark thing about you, that’s a real performer. That’s real generosity. That’s what’s really going to connect you to people, is revealing that wound. But that is not true. I cannot think of the last confessional moment that sent shock waves.
“Rothaniel,” maybe?
That was special. It was this beautiful film about a night. But, I mean, I’m really interested in what criticisms of my show would be around disappointment. Like, “Oh, she wasn’t fully there.” Which, O.K., I accept that.
I think my colleague Alexandra Schwartz wrote something that was more along the lines of “I think she might be taking a piss out of the audience a little bit.” Like there’s antagonism there.
This is something. I don’t know who wrote this. It may have been your blessed colleague. Someone said there was a moment in the jazz club where I broke and laughed and, like, “There was Kate, and I wanted more of that.” And I was, like, “Uh, that’s fake.” If I ever laugh onstage, it’s fake, or I can hold back. I don’t believe any performer is up there unable to contain themselves. You give into it because it’s pleasurable. It’s pleasurable to go, “I want to laugh. I’m going to laugh.” It’s a performance. If you get onstage, if you’re in front of a camera, if you’re going, “Hey everyone, look at me,” then it is no longer you.
But how do you feel about the audience? What is your essential attitude toward the crowd that comes to see you and pays for a ticket?
I feel incredible gratitude. I love my audience. I just want to entertain. I want to be seen as a generous performer. I do feel some antagonism toward the crowd, just to survive. Sometimes you have to go, “Fuck them.” Just for yourself. You have to be, like, “Who fucking cares?”
What do you think about when people talk about you as an industry favorite or “Oh, every comedian’s favorite comedian.”
I’ll take it.
But I mean, are you just, like, “Give me a fucking lead in the movie, if I’m everyone’s favorite comedian”?
Yes. I want leads and I want that deeply, but I’m also so gratified during the show. Because this is the best time of my life. I know I’ll be chasing this for the rest of my life. I’m already nostalgic for this time. I’m overwhelmed by the response to the show and the fact that every single show is sold out and that people are coming multiple times. I mean, it’s my absolute dream come true. It’s also the joke of the show, that I set out hoping that, yes, Mike White will see it and put me in the thing. Of course, I nakedly want work.
I’m sure you are getting work from it.
No, I don’t have an offer yet, honey.
So that’s real in the show, when you say, “Where are the calls?”
Yeah. But I’m good. I have a lot of hope and I have excitement. I don’t have a job after this. I’m not complaining, but I just mean that the show is about a woman who’s trying desperately to prove that she’s castable. So it is about me.
I think I just want to press on the gears one more time about the authenticity question. Just because I’m fascinated by your relationship to it. Has it been something you feel like you’ve been honing throughout your career, this idea of what is true, what is a lie, what is performance, what is not?
I’m very interested in social performance, in performing ourselves and, when that performance fails, what happens? You see that just walking down the street. You see that interacting with anyone, whether they’re a performer or not. You see the performance, you see the cracks in it.
But the artifice stuff, I’m interested in that on a personal level in the way that I assume we all are, which is, like, “Who are we? What are we? What am I?” I took an acting class where this teacher would make you get in front of everyone and just look at everyone and ostensibly feel your defenses drop, or you would just be bare. I was, like, “This is the fakest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” And I would watch these gorgeous actors get up there and they would start crying and heaving, and everyone was, like, “She’s really going somewhere.” But then I was, like, “This is bullshit. This is crazy. What is this?” This idea of the supine vessel, and the text just washes over you? This idea of a core that we’re going to get to? You’re never going to get there. You’re never going to.
Yes, even if you took everything away from me, I’d be in a movie in my head forever.
You’re exactly correct. If you can never see a movie and never see an image, or never see a mirror—then maybe. But, no, we are all actors. This is just what it is.
Well, then, what’s the benefit of therapy or something where you’re trying to know yourself better?
Well, I love therapy, I think therapy does maybe make you become yourself or help you become yourself. I don’t use therapy to strip away conditioning. Therapy is theatre. Some of the best acting I do is in therapy. And if I can convince myself, I’m, like, “Whoa. That was good.” And acting works. It works. I would say I live an authentic life.
Maybe it’s useful to look at it in an oppositional way. What does it look like to you when you see somebody who’s not living authentically? What does that look like?
I think we really crave connection, and I think that we will basically do whatever it takes to maintain and create connection. And that often leads to self-abandoning or contorting to do what you need to do to get the love or the attention. So we all do that. And I think those are some of the performances that you really see people locked into. John talked about this a lot, growing up in the South, the need to be in someone’s good graces and to be liked. We all do that.
Do you feel connected when you do the show? Do you feel connected to people you’re performing for?
That’s a good question. Sometimes. I mean, the show does make me feel very connected to people. It makes me feel very connected to myself, primarily.
Maybe that’s what the “going there” discourse is all about, in that some people feel more connected to a certain kind of confessional performance.
It’s this wanting access to someone. All we have now is access to each other and images, and ostensibly raw, authentic moments of people living their lives and whatever the fuck. You want more? Sorry, what are you after? So you want complete and utter surveillance capitalism constantly? O.K. And then you also want to go to a theatre and watch someone dressed up and also giving you a snapshot of life or some skeletal, naked, quivering depiction of them?
In certain ways, what you do, to me, is a throwback to a certain kind of style. Like, I look at old videos of Liza Minnelli, and she is performing.
She’s sweating! And that is true. That is a greater truth. That is a deep truth. The effort.
Berlant is sweating up there. What more do you want from her other than sweat equity?
I really tried to make a show. A show that would make you laugh and then be strange. It’s funny, because that’s one of the things Bo said to me really early on: “You have to do a show where someone can say something that happens in it when they leave.” Because it’s hard to take a joke maybe from an hour of my standup and be, like, “Oh, she has this bit about that.” Bo was, like, “Something has to happen.”
But I was thinking about this authenticity thing, and I remember reading about masks and performance and the actor/performer wearing the mask. And it’s the outline of the skin of the actual performer. That moment, that area where you see they’re wearing a mask, that slippage is really interesting. I’m, like, “Oh, well, that’s a really fertile place.” And, in this show, I think the strangest of it, or the way it eludes me, is fertile ground. But I didn’t ever want to make something that was evasive. I want people to feel like they are immersed in something.
Do you ever have nights where you forget your lines?
So that was always a huge fear of mine—no. The other night I had a weird, almost out-of body experience, where I was onstage and I looked out and I was, “Oh, my God, I can’t fuck up. They’re all staring at me. I’m alone up here. There’s nowhere to hide.” That’s what’s really interesting about doing this show. There are moments where I can feel like it just comes out and I’m thinking about completely, a hundred per cent, my brain is elsewhere. And I was doing the show and I was, “What’s next? I don’t know.” But then I did know. I didn’t drop a line. I pretended that John was there, and it worked. Then I felt better, and I just did the show, and it’s fine.
What is exciting to you right now in the world of comedy?
You mentioned Nathan Fielder. Ostensibly, artists are supposed to make things about the time in which they live, or it feels something like the world that they’re immersed in. And “The Rehearsal” really did show a double world. We do live in two worlds. There was something about that collapsing, and how hyper-ambitious the work that he does is and how he deals so intimately with the ideas of persona and artifice. And “Finding Frances,” which he made, is one of my favorite movies. I’m very excited about what he’s doing.
How do you feel about show biz in general right now?
It is so weird out there. The streaming wars, everything collapsing, the death of the monoculture. John and I are in the early stages of getting a TV idea together. But I don’t think anyone’s really buying TV ideas right now. So, in that way, I’m excited about movies. I have a script that I’m working on with Samy Burch that I’m really excited about, which would be a longer version of the “Rachel” sketch. And I’m starting on the very early stages of this documentary-hybrid feature. When I jump off of this, I need to jump into that. I operate either fully in or fully out. I identify as a lazy person. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
