Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Listen, I love me some vulgarity — and it ain’t tough to find. Streaming services are flooded with hilarious-if-raunchy comedy specials.
But I have mad respect for comedians who slay — who, in fact, leave entire theaters full of adults wiping laugh-tears from their cheeks — without ever dipping into dirty.
Clean comedy is harder. And honestly, that’s why Tig Notaro does it.
It was 11:56 p.m. on her final day of her final term in office — and things didn’t look good. “I had ’til midnight to get this bill passed, and I’d been working on it for years,” State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson says of her Paid Family Leave Act, aimed at protecting the jobs of folks who take leave to care for family. It had passed the Senate but needed 41 votes to clear the Assembly.
Fresh from a C-section, Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Berkeley) showed up with her newborn to cast the 40th vote in favor. “We were running out of time,” Jackson recalls, “and I thought, We’re not gonna get there.”
And then (get this!) moderate Democrat Joaquin Arambula, who reps conservative Fresno and had publicly spoken out against the bill, voted in favor — tipping the ayes to 41.
A casual observer might call it luck. But anyone who’s followed Sen. Jackson’s career — her stint in the State Assembly from 1998 to 2004, and her two terms in the Senate, which officially ended Nov. 30 — knows it’s the result of the senator’s political mantra:
“Never ever, ever, ever, ever give up.”
One is a self-proclaimed “walking protest” with fuchsia hair who sparked petulant tweets from the president. The other is a vocal vegan who riled up the Brits with her celebratory tea-time pantomime during a July game against England. Together, Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan led the U.S. women’s national soccer team to its second consecutive World Cup win this summer — and are hoping to rack up yet another victory in their next skirmish: a battle for equal pay.
The California natives and the team they co-captain have enjoyed much public glory as a result of their FIFA wins. In 2015, they were the first women’s sports team to be honored with a ticker tape parade in New York City, which they followed by visiting Barack Obama in the White House. Morgan was voted U.S. Soccer Female Player of the Year for 2018, and Rapinoe was named FIFA Women’s Player of the Year for 2019. Just last month, both were featured in Fortune magazine’s Most Powerful Women in Business issue.
Yet despite the honor and hefty profit they’ve brought to the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), they argue that the men’s team is compensated at much higher rates despite never having won a World Cup. Now, with the eyes of the world — and especially those of idolizing young girls — on them, they’re using their considerable clout to bring attention to that absurd discrepancy.
It was 2011, and writer Jenni Hendriks was in her car, creeping through Los Angeles traffic, when a news story on NPR enraged her. South Dakota was imposing a 72-hour waiting period for any residents seeking an abortion — and that was in a state, mind you, where there was only one clinic providing the service in the first place.
“I just thought, these women are already driving hundreds of miles to get access to this! I was super pissed off,” said Hendriks. She called her writing partner Ted Caplan and blurted, “I know what we’re writing next! It’s a road trip — a road trip with your best friend.”
And so they did. This month, HarperTeen publishes their book Unpregnant, the fresh, funny adventure tale of Missouri high school valedictorian Veronica, who is Ivy League bound when she finds herself disastrously pregnant. Horrified that her life (and perfect image) will be derailed, she opts to secretly travel 994 miles to the closest place she can get a legal abortion without parental consent: at a clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. To do so, she needs the help of Bailey, the school’s turquoise-haired, combat-boot-clad freak — who happens to be Veronica’s ex-best friend. Along their way, odd couple Veronica and Bailey pinball hilariously from pawn shops to strip dives, facing down cows, ferrets, and Planned Parenthood protesters.
All I ever really wanted to do was to make people laugh: Strangers in the PTA meeting at my son’s new school. Colleagues in a supposed-to-be-serious work meeting. The poor lady doing my mammogram. I especially love it when readers tell me they snorted so abruptly at the local café while reading this column that latte foam spewed from their nose. Propriety be damned, I sincerely believe it’s always the right time for humor.
Except … maybe … right now?
Lately, in the face of political, social, and environmental crises, my life’s goal feels sort of futile. And worse than futile, it feels indulgent. Who wants to giggle and guffaw when every day’s news is more sobering than the last and the Amazon is burning, you guys? What could possibly be the value in wisecracking and wit slinging when we could be (should be!) phoning our senators, marching in the streets, shoveling money to sane candidates, maintaining a consistent “self-care” wine buzz and educating the shizz out of the next generation so they don’t wind up screwed and humorless like us?
I spoke recently with comedian Katie Goodman, who brings her Broad Comedy show to the Planned Parenthood Central Coast Action Fund’s Politics, Sex & Cocktails fundraiser on Saturday. Katie’s troupe of five feminist funnygals travels the country performing benefits for orgs like PP and the ACLU. They dress up in breast costumes while singing “Boobs Look Funny When You’re Having Sex,” don Russian accents for a bit called “Pee Tape Prostitutes,” and take Republican lawmakers to task with the country ballad “Get Out of My Vagina.”
She loved the superhero’s truth-coaxing lasso. She slapped the comic-book character on the cover of the first issue of her feminist digest, Ms. magazine. And to this day, she buys her bracelets in pairs as a nod to the Amazon princess’s bullet-deflecting bangles. Gloria Steinem grew up idolizing Wonder Woman. The rest of us grew up idolizing Gloria Steinem.
She wasn’t trying to start a revolution. But it was September 2015, the House had just voted to defund Planned Parenthood — and Amelia Bonow…
Tour a museum with a mathematician, and she’ll point out the angles built into the artwork, the proportions of the figures. Tour one with a painter, and she’ll fixate on techniques, brushstrokes, and palettes. No surprise, then, that when I toured the Santa Barbara Museum of Art last week with a feminist studies professor and former bondage museum curator, well, the whole place smacked of sex.
Thought museums were sedate and sterile, did you? Take the arm of Jennifer Tyburczy, assistant UCSB professor and author of the new book Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, and you’ll discover they’re actually dirty dens of debauchery — in, like, the really good way.
If I had to pick five words to explain the astounding appeal of the Serial podcast and its beloved host Sarah Koenig, it would be these, uttered by Koenig earlier this season:
“That’s me, calling the Taliban.”
The most popular podcast of all time, Serial dives deep into a dramatic true story each season, untangling clues and cover-ups almost in real time, week by week. Last season, which was downloaded over 100 million times and earned a Peabody Award, was about the murder of a high school girl whose ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of the crime. This season centers on Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier who walked off his Afghanistan base in 2009 and spent five years in a Taliban prison.
It’s the kind of performance you’re dying to see — but can’t bring yourself to watch.
Comedian Sarah Silverman takes a dramatic-as-a-heart-attack turn as a wealthy suburban mom devastated by anxiety and addiction in the new feel-bad movie of the season, I Smile Back.
The role’s got Oscar nod written all over it: See the actress grind on a teddy bear, sleep with strangers, snort cocaine off a bathroom floor, lie right to the face of her saintly husband — and ache with excruciating, visceral love for her still-perfect children. Silverman is 100 percent committed and compelling as Laney, the Shakespearean-tragedy-of-a-mommy so terrified of being abandoned by the people she loves that she systematically, almost willfully, destroys any reason for them to stay.
