I Loved the New Mary Beth Barone Special
It's cathartic to hear something actually brave in a field of cowards who think they’re defying the status quo by attacking trans people and the victims of sexual assault.
Last week the New York Times asked if Mary Beth Barone, the Overcompensating star whose new special Galaxy Brain is out on Netflix, can revive feminist standup. It’s a hefty responsibility to place on an individual. If all that’s needed to bring back feminist standup is an intelligent, talented feminist comedian, then I’d have to wonder why a long list of artists has yet to bring it back. If, on the other hand, we ask what it would take to diminish the tides of antifeminist standup that have come to inundate comedy, then we might see that this is clearly beyond the power of any single person.
Consider: the comedian Beth Stelling recently wrote that Andrew Schulz, who is represented by the monopolist promoter Live Nation, bumped her out of a weekend of shows at the Denver club Comedy Works. A few weeks earlier, SNL alum Melissa Villaseñor said Schulz bumped her shows at the Brea Improv. Netflix, the biggest comedy distributor of our time, just released a special by the serial sex predator Louis CK, who headlined its May festival in Los Angeles. (That festival also featured the convicted rapist Mike Tyson.) The streamer’s Roast of Kevin Hart, meanwhile, gave a stage to alleged pedophile Jeff Ross and Nazi carnival barker Tony Hinchcliffe, who 10 years ago was the subject of a temporary restraining order for domestic violence. Netflix executives attended Shane Gillis’s record-breaking show at Lincoln Financial Field last month, where Gillis was supported by anti-trans comedian Dave Chappelle and fingerless glove-wearer Jay Oakerson, whose podcast Legion of Skanks could fairly be described as pro-rape. In an episode a few days later, his cohost Luis Gomez—also present at the Gillis show, with the nazi Nick Rochefort—joked with Matthew Broussard: “You're so date rapey. You have that vibe. That's why I'm surprised you haven't been on the show before.”
Owen Myers
The bad news is that the problem is structural; one person cannot undo all of that. The good news is that feminist comedy never went away, and as Barone’s success demonstrates, neither did its audience. While I am a longtime balker at the notion of “adjective” comedy—why should the antifeminists or anyone else get the default position?—I cannot deny feeling invigorated by Galaxy Brain’s sharp commentary on the sorry state of contemporary standup. “All the comedians I loved growing up are either disgraced or racist or obsessed with trans people or D) all of the above,” she jokes early on, in a bit that makes its way to one of the scariest men in her business: “What’s worse than a sexual predator? A sexual predator with nothing but time. Chris D’Elia was accused of being a pedophile, so he took a year off and in that year he had a baby. So now he has more access to kids than ever.”
Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I don’t think I’ve seen a comedian mention the D’Elia allegations onstage since Alice Hamilton’s CEX KRIMINAL in 2022. In the years since, D’Elia has more or less returned to being a famous, successful touring comic and podcaster. Plenty of comedians talk about pedophilia these days, in particular the Epstein affair, and their work gives the impression that they conceive of it mostly as an unfortunate character trait. At one point during the Roast of Kevin Hart, Gillis looked out at the crowd and remarked, to laughter, “There’s a lot of pedophiles here,” when in fact there was one right beside him on the dais. A short while later, Oakerson went a step further: “Jeff Ross, if you’re not a pedophile, God sure thought you were gonna be.”
Seth Simons
In jokes like these, one of the worst crimes imaginable becomes an easy punchline: trivial, laughable, something to be dispensed with en route to the next easy punchline. A friend recently remarked that it’s obvious these comedians don’t think pedophilia is all that bad; if they did, and if they truly believed they were in a room with pedophiles, wouldn’t they do… something… else? By contrast, Barone asks us to sit with a terrifying reality. D’Elia got away with it; worse still, he was given the freedom to reoffend. Who allowed him to get away? Who gave him that freedom? Why hasn’t anything been done about it? “There’s gonna be some tough concepts,” she says. “Some comedians don’t have tough concepts.”
It’s true, and it’s refreshing—I’ll even say cathartic—to hear something actually brave in a field of cowards who think they’re defying the status quo by attacking trans people and the victims of sexual assault. (People forget Chappelle went after Louis CK’s victims. He did that!) But let me not give the impression that Galaxy Brain is entirely a discourse on comedy’s charlatans. Barone skillfully threads commentaries on sex, politics, and pop culture with funny stories from her own life, like the time her dog took a shit in a revolving airport door. She weaves in crowd work without ceding her own point of view, works through her grief over the loss of her father, and lands a clean hit on Oppenheimer that made me laugh out loud three years after I saw the film. Her rich material is beautifully framed by director Ky Newman and lighting designer Patrick Seeley, who manage to turn the stage—a reflective black floor and backdrop constellated with warm and cold bulbs—into a deep, inky starfield. It’s a great special, the rare kind that demands to be seen as well as heard. I can’t wait for her next.