Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Leanne Morgan: I’m Every Woman’ On Netflix, A Small-Town Southern Woman With Comedic Advice For Mothers Everywhere

Not to be confused for the Chaka Khan song written by Ashford & Simpson and covered as a megahit by Whitney Houston, the title of Leanne Morgan’s first Netflix special serves as a reminder to women everywhere that she feels their pain. Even more acutely if they are wives, mothers or wearers of big panties.

LEANNE MORGAN: I’M EVERY WOMAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Morgan earned her way onto Netflix thanks to previously proving her popularity on YouTube.

Her 2018 special, Leanne Morgan: So Yummy, has reportedly raked in more than 50 million views on YouTube (where it’s still only available to buy/rent), although it’s also free on Amazon Prime Video. Her subsequent special, All Daughters Are Mean, was distributed first on the Dry Bar Comedy platform, and has garnered 2.5 million views on YouTube since its re-release there in June 2020. Netflix saw those numbers and could do the math, without even needing an algorithm.

Morgan’s Netflix debut covers similar ground, always focusing on stories about her husband and her three kids, and their life in Tennessee. Now she has a grandbaby to fawn over, and at 57 when she taped this 74-minute set in Kentucky, she cannot possibly imagine leaving her husband and re-entering the dating pool herself. In her opening joke, she reveals she’s wearing a big ol’ girdle and can feel back fat slipping out, but she assures us she was cute in the 1980s.

“I wanna blame the mean, stupid COVID…and Vladimir Putin,” she says. “But I can’t.”

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: NBC’s Today show introduced Morgan this week as “The Mrs. Maisel of Appalachia,” but in terms of real-life comedians, Morgan might remind you a bit of Christina P., albeit Morgan is a little bit older and more than a little bit family-family in the delivery of her material.

Memorable Jokes: If you hadn’t seen or thought about a Jello salad in a while, Morgan is here to remind you not only that they exist, but that they’d become a staple in her household, especially during the pandemic once her elderly parents needed more care and her own mom couldn’t eat solid foods.

Morgan and her husband met in college at the University of Tennessee, and have been married three decades now, even though their differences were as apparent then as they are now. She jokes she doesn’t think he’d pull her out of a burning vehicle, and she knows he’s such a Type A personality that he’d chastise her during couples card games. Then again, her husband was running his hometown Burger King when he was only 15?!? And after 25 years of working for a large company that had him out of the Morgan house, he suddenly became a fixture in person during the pandemic. “It’s made him a real butthole,” she quips. In comparison, she says: “I am an underachiever. I haven’t done much right. But I’m fun!”

Her oldest son raised 200 chickens while going to college, selling the cage-free eggs to local eateries. “Y’all want to know what I was doing at the University of Tennessee in 1983?” she asks. “I was doing horrible things!” 

Illustrating her Gen-X-ness, she elaborates by saying “I can bust a move,” but how she dances in her 50s is much more of a slight swaying back and forth, because she doesn’t want to “jiggle.”

So much of her comedy reflects on where she’s at now. She wonders how her single friend can date when all the men she knows have CPAP machines. She jokingly warns women in their 30s about the sweaty effects of perimenopause, because she claims nobody else wants to talk about it. And she’s proud to have named her stand-up tour “The Big Panty Tour,” because “big panties say to me: Freedom! Comfort.”

Where she is now, is also a lot more successful: She used to give her husband khakis as gifts, but now can afford to buy him pilot lessons. The only drawback is he now wants to fly her to gigs. “I didn’t think that through,” she says, before recalling previous family excursions on airplanes so small they ask you how much you weigh before boarding.

Our Take: We’ve seen rural TV families who make nice like The Waltons, and hillbillies who make mayhem like Mama’s Family. The Morgans seem like they might be somewhere in the middle, all thanks to their mama as the central figure and creator of disruption.

She might not be to blame for that, though. As she recalls, she and her mom and other relatives all took Dexatrim dietary supplements, when Leanne was only 17. “It was speed. We took speed, as a family.” So what if she slacked off a bit on nutrition and discipline between raising their oldest son and youngest daughter, to the point where the third child got to eat McDonald’s and got away with using abbreviated curse words? They’re still growing up to be stable, caring young adults, which is miles away from where Morgan was, smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster and dating way too many boys in school.

Because the kids still wanted mom along for all of their field trips. Why? “Because I’m fun. And not a butthole.”

Our Call: If you’re looking for funny family-friendly stories about having to put up with a spouse and children, or if you’re a woman seeking some inspiration about how to age with grace and humor, then definitely STREAM IT.

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.