No Nonsense

Whether you call her an experimental comic or an off-kilter performance artist, Berlant will be a highlight of All Jane No Dick, an all-female comedy festival that runs today through Sunday (more picks here). She spoke to WW about the theater of academia, going to therapy as a kid and cracking jokes about the pope.

WW: You use a lot of academic language onstage. Was that a self-aware choice, or did it emerge more naturally?

Kate Berlant: I've always gravitated toward the language of expertise, sometimes as a kind of a joke. I think the theater of academia—the theater of people talking about what they know—is a post-Internet way of talking. It's having all these different ideas at once and incorporating all possible viewpoints. It's in academia, too, but I think it's really linked to the Internet. We have this illusion of constant knowledge and access to all points of view.

When you were in grad school during the day and doing comedy shows at night, was there any code switching you had to do between those two spaces?

It was pretty seamless. That language is important to me. Learning about ideas is a big part of me. I love school. That sort of language allows you to access certain ideas, and that's a really interesting and complicated process. 

Do you believe in what you're saying, or are you just spouting gibberish?

It's both. I definitely believe in it. It comes from a place of sincerity, but I think all good absurdity is sincere. It's complicated: I'm using it for the possibility of confusion, but also for the musicality of that language.

You've gone to therapy since you were a kid, and you've said that also informs your comedy.

I remember being really young and being asked: "How do you feel? How are things for you?" But as a kid, and even now, I've been very suspicious of the therapist. You're presenting your life, but you're still curating how they're getting it, so you're thinking about the difficulty of being really honest at any time. Therapy is learning how to create narrative, but in a language that's often really private. It's about navigating the self. My standup is kind of like that—how to process your environment, how to process people's expectations of you.

In a Playboy interview, you talked about feeling radically desexualized as a female comic.

Female comics are either radically desexualized or radically sexualized. Classically, the choice is to pick one, which is a non-choice. People say to me: "I love your stuff. I love that you don't talk about blow jobs or sex." That's always irritating. I know they're not coming from a bad place, but it suggests I'm distancing myself from being a woman. It's not a distancing act. I'm not trying to skirt the fact that I'm a woman onstage by not talking explicitly about sex.

In the same interview, you described the generative potential of excess. What did you mean by that?

That's classically a feminist idea—that women are too much. They're being too loud, or they're too smart, or they're too pretty to do comedy, or they're too ugly to live. I think a lot about this idea of excess and of performing excess. When people think my standup is too confusing or too crazy, I like repurposing that constraint into something generative or directive, rather than accepting that criticism. In a lot of comedy, the goal is to be digestible. You want something that people can immediately connect to and immediately consume. There's no process of confusion, which isn't rewarding for anyone. It goes down easy, but you're left with nothing. Female comics are supposed to be palatable. I remember one potential manager being like: "Don't you have anything that's more basic? Do you have any interest in doing material that's more typical?"

How much do you think about performing gender when you're onstage?

I think about performing gender a lot. Coming from all-girls' middle and high schools, there's this feeling of utopia for me when it's all women. In my life, I tend to wear lipstick. I tend to wear dresses and skirts. People have told me not to dress up to perform. It's like if you're femmed up, people aren't going to listen to you or take you seriously. I hate the suggestion that you actively need to dress down or subvert your femininity to thrive in a historically masculine role. It misses the point in a huge way. 

As a high-school student in Santa Monica, you had a fake ID so you could perform at the Laugh Factory. What was your comedy like then?

I did a lot of one-liners. The first jokes I ever wrote down were about the pope, which is insane. I had no attachment to the pope. But my pope stuff killed. Like, can the pope even hear the word of God if he sleeps on his side? Which makes no sense, because one ear is exposed if you sleep on your side. It was this weird Catskills humor. It wasn't like, fuck the pope. That would have been awesome. It was more like, what's it like to swim if you're the pope?

SEE IT: All Jane No Dick runs Oct. 15-19. See alljanenodick.com for full schedule. Tickets and passes $5-$80.

WWeek 2015