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People in the comments section of my Instagram always write funnier captions than me. Some of us, especially Hollywood people, are like, “Oh, the average person is an idiot.” It’s just not true. When you have a good premise, the joke writes itself. Instead of underserving it or capitalizing on the moment, I wanted to wait and do it with thought.ĭuring these early stages, what is the biggest challenge of formulating a joke? Now is a time where if you’re gonna talk about something that is painful to people, you have to be mindful and measured. I think the days of cheap laughs are over. How do you reduce this to 140 characters? To come forward with a story that’s traumatic for you and then for someone to send a Parks and Rec gif is just like, Ugh. But I didn’t feel comfortable tweeting very much about it. We all have the instinct where if you tweet something topical you get likes, especially if it’s something defending women. When the Harvey Weinstein news broke, so much stuff started flooding back about my early days in show business when I was taken advantage of and manipulated. What made the subject of #MeToo or Time’s Up something you wanted to explore in your stand-up, opposed to, say, tweets or an episode of TV?
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Download the episode from Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.Ī comedian at your level has a lot of options. (She also talks sex robots, the Roseanne reboot, and why she has more fun onstage these days.) Read a short excerpt from the conversation or listen below. In this episode of Good One, Vulture’s podcast about jokes and the people who tell them, Cummings dissects her bit about an ostensible huddle with her girlfriends, in which they reconsider everyday behavior and diction in the midst of the #MeToo and Time’s Up moment. Still, Cummings’s self-reflexive fourth special marks a maturation in her comedy, and finds her in search of more nuanced ways of looking at old problems, while maintaining the level of joke writing she’s known for. While chastising a friend who broadly generalizes about “all men” and “all women,” Cummings stops herself: “I know it’s weird that I’m criticizing that, because generalizing about men and women did pay for my house.” Maybe it’s inevitable that the Whitney and Two Broke Girls creator would come to this conclusion, because it’s reflective of the soul-searching going on in stand-up. Maybe the most telling line of Whitney Cummings’s latest special, Can I Touch It?, arrives as she considers her body of work alongside the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. Photo: Vulture and Shropshire/Getty Images