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Beth Stelling’s first hour special, Girl Daddy, was one of the best stand-up releases of 2020. That was back when we still said HBO before we said Max. A lot has changed, and now Stelling is back on Netflix, where she debuted her half-hour on season one of The Standups in 2017. Her new hour is also a bit of a homecoming. Can you go home again? Of course!
BETH STELLING: IF YOU DIDN’T WANT ME THEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Beth Stelling returned to her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to film a special that’s very much invested in revisiting her childhood, raised by a single mom who taught piano and led the high school choir, which proved a sharp contrast when visiting her dad, an aspiring actor-turned-sign-spinner in Orlando. How much worse could it have gone for her? You may be surprised when you find out. How much did her childhood inform her decision to prolong marriage and motherhood herself? Well, that might not come as much of a surprise once you’ve heard her stories.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Stelling’s wit may remind you of Michelle Wolf, who just dropped her own new Netflix stand-up special in the past month, although Stelling’s personable demeanor and delivery allows her daggers to sneak up on you a bit more.
Memorable Jokes: Stelling’s new hour follows down three paths: One joking about growing up with her mom and sisters in Ohio, a second about visiting her father in Florida, and the third about how she navigates life today as a single woman and why she’s not a mother or wife herself.
Beth’s mom taught piano and directed the high school choir. The former role allowed Beth to witness a second-grader have the gumption to offer his own obscene lyrics to “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” and lead her to imagine how he might’ve learned to talk like that. The latter led to her mom mistakenly letting one of the high-school boys baby-sit Beth, perhaps not knowing that she had a crush on all the older boys back then.
For reasons unexplained, Beth and her sisters kept guinea pigs in the garage?
On the other hand, her dad in Orlando had definite reasons for feeding an increasing number of raccoons in his yard at night with dog food and Hershey’s kisses. Then again, he’s also an aspiring actor who drives a Chevy Geo, wears Morphsuits and spins signs outside local venues like Irish pubs. “I don’t know if I’ve painted a good picture of my father so far,” Beth acknowledges.
As an adult now herself, Stelling reveals the different types of birth control she has utilized over the years, from IUDs to newer variations on the pill such as Yaz, to low estrogen formula Larin Fe, and asks for women in the crowd to offer up their own testimonials and reasons for why they switched from one to the other, before eventually reading out the lengthy list of side effects from the medication she’s taking now. “I guess we’re starting to see why nobody wanted to yell anything out!”
Our Take: Stelling has joked about her parents and her relationship with Ohio in the past, but filming this hour in her hometown allows her to make this performance more personal and piercing. The hour opens with a montage of photos of Beth as a child, and ends with outtakes of her speaking to and about specific audience members with whom she grew up.
With the comedy community currently debating the importance of honesty in comedy, we see here not only how she turned one hometown interaction into a “bit of a pedophila joke” that informs the title of her special, but also that she made it up for comedy’s sake. Turns out Tim’s one of the good guys?!?
Not sure what stage of feminism we’re officially living in now, but Stelling’s comedy is both great and sneaky great in forcing us to confront attitudes we may have normalized in the past. She’s most explicit in this when she discloses that as an eighth-grader, she and her friends would get drunk and sneak into frat houses at the University of Dayton to hook up with college guys. As eighth-graders. And Stelling makes it seem as though the only reason she wasn’t prey for the frat boys was because she hadn’t developed breasts yet.
She later makes a joke suggesting you can best avoid being raped by telling strange men that you’re already a rape victim. Why? “Men hate being second.” At the same time, Stelling also recognizes that she’s even abusive to herself when she creates an imaginary conversation in her tent to mislead outsiders into thinking she’s not alone.
When propping up Dayton pride by talking about hometown heroes Wilbur and Orville Wright, Stelling notes that “our whole motto is based on two men who wanted to fly away,” while also suggested that men might lay claim to a lot of humanity’s first only my might. “Were you first? Or were you the only one allowed to do it?”
And even in a more lighthearted moment early in the hour, Stelling expresses her newfound appreciation for the elderly women who taught in her schools when she was a kid, vowing she’s going to age gracefully without plastic surgery herself, just because “we need a control group in Los Angeles” to know what older women actually look like.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You don’t have to be Beth Stelling’s mom to become a big enough fan of her to tell her “if it were an Olympic event, you would win gold in women’s stand-up comedy.” But why even bring gender into it? Stelling would out-medal most men, too.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
