Skip to main content
It’s a dark day in America when a drag queen is asked to talk more about herself.
Lady Bunny is a lewd and crude 62-year-old superstar, an original Club Kid who once called RuPaul roomie—among the far less flattering names they’ve playfully hurled at each other over the years—and founded the New York drag festival Wigstock. With her new touring show, Don’t Bring the Kids—coming to Portland’s Helium Comedy Club on Wednesday, Nov. 27—Bunny will bring her ludicrously distasteful groaners aimed at both ends of the political spectrum.
“I did this during election season because I didn’t want to sit and obsess over something that I have no power over other than my own vote, and what is going to happen is going to happen,” she says of her latest tour. “I will not be happy with Trump or Kamala Harris, so you just have to keep pushing for the stuff that matters to you.”
Saying repeatedly that she is not a political person or entertainer, Bunny spent most of her Election Day interview delivering her political manifesto while deriding right-wing cruelty and ignorance, and left-wing insincerity and ineptitude. Raised a classic midcentury Democrat who protested the Vietnam War with her parents as a self-described peacenik, Bunny says the party disillusioned her after 9/11.
Politics “was my dad’s thing, I didn’t want to identify with him,” she says. “He made us miss The Brady Bunch to watch the Watergate hearings, so for me politics were verboten. When you were a Democrat in the South you’re a minority among whites, and that made me feel proud to be a Democrat because I was less likely to be an evangelical racist bigot toward gay people and be more likely to support women’s rights, and that was my assumption for decades. But now I realize that Democrats do not fight for what they say.”
Not unlike South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Lady Bunny mercilessly lampoons the left and the right, pulling her jokes from the gutter to take the piss out of public figures and audiences who think they’re too pure to get down in the mud. Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the U.S. House of Representatives minority leader, is one of Bunny’s targets, alongside Georgia’s far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“People call him ‘Budget Obama,’ but I would suck him down like an undercover clown,” Bunny says, laughing. “It’s not the most political show, but people have said that it helps them cope with what’s going on.”
Despite having personal politics that would hardly shock most of Portland’s furthest left leaners, Bunny said she is not sure if the city can handle her brand of humor. She had to cancel a planned 2016 show because her Portland booker barred her from doing politically spicy jokes at the last minute, which were pre-recorded throughout her planned set. She credits her comedy partner, British writer Edward Dyson, with helping her understand other people’s perceptions and keep her humor fresh and topical.
Bunny’s crass blue jokes and musical parodies push the limits of taste. She posits that her style of taking everyone in politics and pop culture down a peg, regardless of how they align with her personal beliefs, gives her the kind of bipartisan appeal that could help reunify the country amid all-time-high tensions. She says humor empowers her in a way that she feels that younger LGBTQ+ people need to hone and access for strength during turbulent times, instead of leaning too hard into critical “cancel culture” tactics. She cites how she would have handled the backlash in person that Kevin Hart received for homophobic jokes that caused him to withdraw from hosting the 2018 Oscars as an example (Hart later apologized for his remarks).
“I’m from the part of the LGBTQ+ community that, instead of going ‘Boo-hoo, cancel Kevin!’ would say ‘Kevin, you’re going to hit your son over the head with a dollhouse when you’re 3 feet tall? I’m surprised you don’t live in the damn dollhouse!’” Bunny says. “I know trans women face unique challenges, but I’ll tell you what: Don’t tell me that trans people are pitiful because I’ll never hear it, I’ll never see them as victims to be pitied. I’ll see them as exciting, I’ll see them as my sisters who inspire me to do what I do and who challenged nature itself and won. And the older ones did it with no help, with no Reddit for trans people.”
If anything’s going to change, Bunny says, activists need to align their real-world actions with the words they post online. Until that happens, she and Dyson are working on a sitcom pilot, for either cable, streaming or web.
“Honey, they don’t want anything on TV that’s not completely mediocre,” she says, “let’s be honest.”
SEE IT: Lady Bunny at Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 9th Ave., portland.heliumcomedy.com. 7:15 pm Wednesday, Nov. 27. $27. 21+.