‘Sommore: A Queen With No Spades’ On Showtime Claims Winning Hand With Taupe

Netflix knows what it’s doing. Or, rather, what we’re doing.

After Sommore taped her newest hour this June, the streaming giant made sure to have two of the stand-up comedian’s previous specials on the platform and soon saw them trending.

Sommore is 52. Leslie Jones is 51. While Jones broke out as a star as the oldest cast member ever hired by Saturday Night Live four years ago, you haven’t seen much of Sommore onscreen outside of her stand-up comedy. The difference is that Chris Rock vouched for Jones with Lorne Michaels after putting her in his movie, Top Five. Ain’t nobody vouching for Sommore but herself and the thousands of fans who come out to see her on tour, year after year, for the last 25 years.

And a full 17 years since co-starring in the concert film The Queens of Comedy with Mo’Nique, Sommore not only continues to embrace the brand, but has herself introduced in her new Showtime special A Queen With No Spades as “the undisputed queen of comedy.” She also calls herself a chandelier instead of a star or a celebrity, and in this hour elaborates on the light fixture’s uniqueness: “I’m not afraid to have my own thoughts. The chandelier is the one object in the room that doesn’t have to match anything.” But in her opening minute, she also jokes about how her own wardrobe fits that thematically.

“So tonight I got on church jewelry, club clothes and ho shoes,” she jokes. “I could pussy pop or praise dance in this bitch tonight.”

Fans of Sommore will note the comedian enjoys returning to recurring themes with each new hour-plus of material from 2013’s Chandelier Status to 2015’s The Reign Continues to now. Among them: reality TV drama and how it amplifies the difference between stars and celebrities, keeping it real onstage to cut through life’s b.s., and joking about sex in terms of age, money, and status, whether it’s about how to get a man or how to keep one.

She outs herself here as a fan of legal weed, even if she sometimes gets too high. “It’s made my job easier” as a comedian, she boasts, before going on to talk up her audience as the best party with only the best invited to her party.

Her first special in the Trump era brings us to the title, for she feels like we’re living in a game of spades with no spades in her deck. “That’s when you find out what kind of player you are,” she says. Sommore’s take on Trump is like no other you’ve likely heard from a comedian: “Trump running this bitch like Death Row Records. Trump is Suge Knight: 2.18. And bitch, anybody can get it.”

She describes the current president as a gangster who can be bought, as someone who assembled his cabinet as if he bought it from IKEA, and as someone preoccupied with erasing everything Obama had accomplished, if not also the man himself. Which brings her to this take on the Charlottesville march and riot of 2017:

Sommore loves that she attracts a racially mixed crowd, and was bemused to see a race riot that only involved one race. But she thinks she understands what the “pure whites” are so upset about, even if she disagrees vehemently.

“Keep it real, taupe is winning right now!” she says. “Ain’t nothing wrong with taupe…Buckingham Palace just went taupe.”

From Obama to Drake to Meghan Markle, interracial babies aren’t just beautiful; they’re our future.

She still wishes our culture didn’t worship celebrity so much, even if she remains guilty of it, too, with her love of reality TV drama and love/hate of Instagram filters. “We listen to Kanye West and not Cornel West. That’s where we’re at.”

Likewise, she recognizes her own pettiness, as a means to launch into her own spin on Jeff Foxworthy’s most famous bit; in Sommore’s case, it’s if you do this, “you a petty motherfucker.”

But as with any new hour-plus from Sommore, she always brings it on home with some new rules for improving your sex life. This time around, it’s the realization that as we grow older, we grow heavier, and need to change our expectations and find out what we and our partners really want and like in bed. Nothing surprises her anymore, not even learning that truth about Bill Cosby.

Her closing act-out may have you either bowing to the queen or shouting out yes. Either way, Sommore will not be denied her crown.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

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