![]() No one is surprised by descriptions of birth as a physically nightmarish experience, but Wolf still pulls off a “birth is terrifying” joke by delivering an incredibly tight, streamlined version. Sometimes she does it by presenting the most succinct, incisive version of some well-trodden territory. Wolf identifies the trap and then almost always leaps over it. Wolf starts from a place she knows people will already recognize and then has confidence in her supremely careful joke writing to pull the premise into a funny, newly interesting angle almost in spite of itself. For audiences familiar with Wolf’s previous work, they are classics - the male-period bit in Joke Show is a reworking of previous period jokes from her earlier special. They are premises that feel like classics, setups that work - like introducing a shared language rather than surprising the audience with a new idea. If anyone has been doing it forever, the contours and the premises will feel like known territory, even if the person now shaping the contours and reframing the premises is a woman rather than a man. There’s a trap built inside “men have been doing it forever, and so women should be allowed to do it, too” comedy. There’s the vague ickiness of discussions about vaginal discharge, the sense of boundary-crossing as she describes how emotional men would be if they got periods, and it’s more of a chuckle of recognition than it is a jolt of revelation. She leans into the gentle friction of it. Women should be allowed to be vulgar, and Wolf should not be punished for making exactly the same kinds of jokes male comics have made for decades. ![]() “Women are gross” is also a fitting place for Wolf to end Joke Show because she wields it like an act of self-making. “Women are gross” is a nice summary of it all, and, because she loops it through a story about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it allows Wolf to acknowledge her most well-known public appearance and finish with a nice little political button. ![]() It’s true! The premise allows Wolf to thread together many of her bits from throughout Joke Show, which includes sections on male periods, birth, and her own abortion, as well as an extended section on feminism and equality. Near the end of her new Netflix special, Joke Show, Michelle Wolf winds up to a broad closing premise, an observation that carries her through the final several minutes at the end of the hour: Women are gross.
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