Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Michelle Wolf: Joke Show’ On Netflix, Finding Comedic Equality Below The Belt

Netflix cancelled her weekly variety talk show after just one 10-week season in 2018, but Michelle Wolf didn’t let that bad break-up from The Break stop her from releasing her second stand-up special, Joke Show, on the streaming platform rather than go back to HBO, where she had made her stellar debut two years ago. Did she choose her venue and her jokes wisely?

MICHELLE WOLF: JOKE SHOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: “It seems like, over the past couple of years, we’ve developed this amazing ability to get mad at anyone for any reason.”

That’s how Wolf opens her new hour, and she would know. The White House Correspondents Association booked the rising stand-up to deliver its 2018 keynote address, then expressed faux outrage and shock at what this supposedly Nice Lady (the title of Wolf’s HBO debut) said about then White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the press itself, to the point of not hiring a comedian this past year. But the 35-year-old comedian, who had written and performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah before becoming a break-out stand-up star, isn’t about to rehash any of that here.

She has bigger proverbial fish to fry for the sake of feminism.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: In both manner and precision, Wolf’s new hour for Netflix doubles down on what Nikki Glaser brought to Netflix earlier this year in her hour, Bangin’. Relentlessly funny, graphic testaments to the ability of women in comedy to sling sex jokes just as successfully as the fellas.

Memorable Jokes: Wolf sets the tone right from the beginning, as depicted in the trailer, where she turns the Instagram hate she received back against her haters, employing a devastatingly persuasive argument against using the word rape to describe sex between animal species.

She devotes the bulk of her hour, though, to her fellow women, onstage and off, particularly when it comes to the jokes comedians tell about their bodies. And so there are premises and bits and chunks and more about menstruation, from wanting to change the term from periods to “bloody tissue falling out of a hole” and wondering what men would call tampons if they had to use them, and how they might use them. “I talk about them a lot because I want men to feel more comfortable,” she says. On childbirth, Wolf jokes that we’d all be better off describing it as if it were breaking news coverage of a hurricane than if it were miraculous. “The stuff that happens to women is gross. Gross!”

She also hopes to demystify abortion through humor. “We don’t talk about abortion in a real way,” Wolf says, and proceeds to get very real about her own.

Her comedic flow is not always so heavy, so to speak. She offers advice in thinking twice about our nicest neighbors, and in whom to seek out for a decent massage.

And she’s got plenty of straightforward dick jokes, too.

Our Take: So what’s this all about, anyhow?

Going back to Wolf’s opening bit about otters, the lesson she draws from interacting with her Instagram haters is that: “You don’t have to have a stance on everything. You can just like some things. It’s OK.”

But that’s not where we’re at in 2019, are we? Wolf certainly doesn’t believe so. Rather, she says: “Social media has made every opinion valuable. Especially if it causes a controversy.” And so we get sucked into the maw for the sake of our own hot takes, or as Wolf describes Tweets, “tiny manifestos.”

And yet, Joke Show also represents Wolf’s own manifesto on feminism. She wants us to laugh at but also recognize the dumb idiot men who necessitate warning signs, while also reminding women they must remain wary of the brute strength of said men. She wants white women to laugh at themselves for recognizing their fault in not lifting up other women. But she doesn’t want any of us to forget that women should be treated equally, in live as well as in comedy.

That’s where she does momentarily return to the scene of last year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, noting that the reporter sitting next to Wolf on the dais called her vulgar even before she delivered her keynote address. “Oh, if you think I’m vulgar, you should hear male comics,” Wolf replies now. Or men in powerful positions. Why do they get a pass?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Wolf says society doesn’t want to allow women their vulgarity because women refuse to speak up about how their everyday lives and bodily functions are just as gross as the men. It’s all too fitting, then, that Wolf’s Netflix special comes out just days after Eddie Griffin’s Showtime special, in which both suggest giving women time off from work during menstruation while offering opinions on how men would act if they had monthly periods. We don’t bat an eye at Griffin, while we doth protest too much at Wolf for saying the same thing. It’s symbolic of the longer, more damning accusation that women might not be as funny because they even dare to joke about such topics. All while men to make as many dick jokes as they please.

Part of me wants to take a big stance on Wolf’s new hour for the sake of further argument. Part of me wants to just laugh and enjoy it. We’re both right.

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.

Watch Michelle Wolf: Joke Show on Netflix