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It is commonplace among poets and musicians and painters to express a fear of the audience — its ability to corrupt with praise, to transform art into parody — but this is not the case among stand-up comedians, who are given to cast the ticket holder as the arbiter of authenticity itself. “The audience doesn’t let you be delusional,” Whitney Cummings once said. “They just call bullshit on you. You have to learn not to lie.” Cummings is five-foot-ten, a coiled spring of a comedian, a woman who speaks with her expansive hands, her elbows, her pelvis, her shoulders down and back arched as if bearing against waves. At the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, it’s 30 minutes before showtime. She’s calling around trying to find a replacement for her sick nanny. She’s defending Meghan Markle, who, after all, “did exactly what we programmed her to do — marry a prince.” She’s dabbing large amounts of foundation onto her cheeks and forehead with an applicator, pausing, considering her face, and laughing. “I just tried to do it different because she’s here,” she says, referring to me; usually she smears it on with her hands. “That looks like a manic episode,” says her opening act, Kevin Christy. “This is the end of a movie about an actress who snapped.” “This is a literal scene from Mommie Dearest,” says Cummings.
Her hair is pulled into a high ponytail; she wears it this way, she says, because stand-up is a sport, specifically the sport of “mutual verbal assault,” in which case it is evident that more people than ever are willing to pay to be verbally assaulted by Whitney Cummings, who tonight will threaten, moments after she goes onstage, to “Luigi” an audience member employed at Apple should the company “put out a new fucking charger.” She was already an A-list comedian pre-pandemic, the force behind network shows like Whitney and 2 Broke Girls and the star of four full-length specials, but recently she has discovered something, unearthed some formula, found a groove. She’s entering her second straight year of touring, scheduled out to December; the host of a game show on Max; a guest wherever one guests (Hollywood Squares, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Joe Rogan); a generally ubiquitous presence in a sea of ubiquitous content.
Landing a joke is difficult in a world where we have lost the shared context on which to build a punch line. A few months back, Cummings tried out some jokes about Kamala Harris looking drunk; no one had seen the videos to which she was referring. Onstage in this San Francisco suburb, she feels out the audience’s tolerance for mocking their own kind. A “hot lesbian chick” in the front, she discovers, works at Tesla. “You do?” says Cummings. “Really? And he hasn’t asked you to have …” She gestures toward the hot lesbian, pauses for laughter. “Is that hurtful? Are all the girls kind of like … ‘Did you get asked?’” The crowd is rolling. Oh, she thinks. They’re okay with this. “What would you do if he was like, ‘Hey, you want this …?’ He’d be like, ‘Here’s my sperm.’ Does he throw it this way?” she asks, throwing up a Nazi salute.
“So I did this thing on CNN at New Year’s Eve,” she tells the audience. They cheer; they had seen it. It was perhaps what brought them to the Fox Theatre on a Thursday night. “Where are you toasting New Year’s?” Andy Cohen asked Cummings in the rain. They were live two hours before the ball would drop. Cummings and Anderson Cooper were holding translucent umbrellas in the purple light of the party. “After what I’m about to do, I think I’ll be in a huddle with a bunch of lawyers,” she said, “so I don’t have big plans for after this.”
Cummings is known as a roast comic, an artist of invective. Her assignment: “Roast 2024.” “Let’s hear it,” said Cohen. Cummings launched into a nervous litany of uneven jokes. “The Democrats couldn’t hold a primary,” she said, “because they were too busy holding a body upright.” Cooper just looked at her. Cohen went vaudevillian; his mouth was an O. “Are we still rolling?” she asked. “Go for it,” said Cohen. “Kamala was forced on us so hard you’d think she was patented by Pfizer … Oh God, Andy just gave me a very scary look. Since I only have a minute left live on Establishment media, why don’t we just say a bunch of things that we know that they’ll never cover.” She crouched a bit, bouncing, as if ready for a sprint. She had been preparing for this moment for weeks. “Trump shooter didn’t have any silverware in his house,” she said, pointing at Cooper. “No one thought that was weird?” Cooper had the grim face of a man trying to read print a touch too small. “Can I get — are we still rolling? This is wild. Okay.” Her energy turned manic, her words more pressured; she had thought they would have cut to commercial by now. She was scared. “Why have so many presidents’ chefs died? Weird! I can’t believe you guys are still letting me go. This is amazing. I love CNN.”
The New York Post: “Whitney Cummings goes viral for roasting CNN live on-air — and torching Dems.” Vanity Fair: “What was Whitney Cummings Even Talking About in Her Red-Pilled Roast of 2024?” Among other things, she was talking about sous-chef Tafari Campbell, who had worked for the Obamas, and Walter Scheib, head White House chef during the Clinton administration, men who had drowned eight years apart. She was talking about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the man who attempted to murder Donald Trump, and a rumor that his home was oddly pristine, as if it were all a setup to mask something else. It was news to many people that Cummings was doing her own research, but it was not news to the kind of people who track such things, people following what one critic called her “public descent into conspiracism.”
In 2018, Cummings described herself as the progressive in the writing room for the Roseanne reboot. She noticed that if she posted something critical about the administration, she got no social-media pushback; she had the politics one might expect as well as the audience. In 2020, she was earnestly discussing the concept of “white fragility” on her podcast and joking that “the vaccine can’t come soon enough.” Under a picture of an anti-mask Trump supporter with a sign that read MY BODY MY CHOICE she wrote, “But your body can infect other people’s bodies … Help me understand.”
Since then, she has weathered a serious case of COVID, birthed a child, emerged from postpartum depression, and come to associate the left with censorship and control. “My body, my choice,” she complained in January, “but you have to take this vaccine.” She had RFK Jr. on the pod last year; this year, on The Jimmy Dore Show, she leaned into a strange rant about Tim Walz’s trips to China. Her association with fellow Comedy Store alumni such as Rogan and Tim Dillon was by no means new, but the overlap in their audiences perhaps was. Fans have recently criticized her for pushing vaccines during the pandemic; she says she never did.
“Being a comedian is a very codependent job,” Cummings once said. “Do you like me? How about now?” If there is anything Whitney Cummings has been clear about, it’s her desire to be liked. She tends to elicit strong feelings in people, and she has noticed. It’s her striver energy, she thinks, the embarrassing sincerity of a woman working hard for something she clearly wants. “I think the biggest insult now is ‘pick me,’” she told me backstage. “She’s such a ‘pick me.’ I’m like, Isn’t this what we’re all doing? Aren’t we trying to get picked? ”
In her 2017 book I’m Fine … And Other Lies, Cummings describes her past self as a people pleaser with “an extreme need for approval,” unable to tolerate the feeling of anything less. Codependence, she writes, is a “disease that tricks you into thinking that caretaking and people-pleasing is kind” when the reality is self-protective, condescending, self-victimizing. “I’d shape-shift into what you needed me to be,” she writes. This need is the source of her personal torment and also her power. “People always ask me how I got funny,” she writes. “The short answer is: I had to figure out a way to be liked.”
On her multitudinous podcast appearances, the talk often turns to therapy. Cummings on her therapeutic journey — neither narcissistic nor evangelizing nor West Coast woo — speaks with a mechanistic probity; she was searching for salutary strategies, and she found them. Aphorisms work. Twelve-step programs work. Her parents were alcoholics; she had to learn to express her needs quickly, loudly, to wheedle and entertain. Her unreliable father was also, she says, reflexively skeptical of received information. If she aced a quiz, he would ask why she trusted the textbook from which the information was drawn. “How do we know this is organic?” he would say at the grocery store, a routine she found hilarious. Who decides this stuff?
Her earliest jokes were self-deprecating, attacks on her own looks and sexual history that were, she says, expected of women comics at the time. “For a woman to even be tolerated in comedy,” she told the New York Times, “you had to hate yourself.” In her first special, she is smiling for 45 minutes, overly solicitous. “I’m sure you could feel the desperation and the neediness,” she says now. “And I send love to that person. But I think that it takes a while for you to get in your skin and to know, to be discerning about, whose approval you actually want.” Cummings found another way to be liked or a different kind of person to like her. She replaced the smile with a smirk and a shiv. “I realized,” she writes, “I had a somewhat unsettling knack for writing incredibly brutal jokes.”
“Insult comic” is an interesting career choice for someone desperate to be loved. “I guess we will start with Larry King,” she said at a roast in 2011, “because, I don’t know … ticktock!” On David Hasselhoff: “I tried to buy one of your songs on Amazon.com; it said users who bought this item also bought a shotgun.” On Pamela Anderson: “Pam, you’ve slept with Bret Michaels, Tommy Lee, and Kid Rock. Why don’t you just save yourself some time and drink a vat of Magic Johnson’s blood?” Cummings made Carmen Electra cry. She told Trump not to buy Melania diamonds because then she would know “what hard is supposed to feel like.” Offstage, he put his hand on her back and called it “great television.”
Her Redwood City set is not a dare, as CNN was, but a campaign straight down the middle. “I ride the line really tight,” Cummings tells me, and it’s true. “We’ve got to solve trans athletes,” she said, crossing the stage, “if for no other reason than I cannot have another conversation with one of my guy friends about high-school girls’ sports … That guy friend who is like, Did you hear about Connecticut? The boys are running as girls in the Connecticut high-school track. Did you hear about this? I’m like, No, I did not hear about this because I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to follow high-school girls’ sports if you don’t have a daughter that goes to the school. No, I don’t get the Connecticut High Gazette. I’m sorry. I don’t get the yearbook.”
In her Woodland Hills home, seated across from her rescued Rhodesian-ridgeback mix, I asked Cummings about New Year’s Eve. “I think New Year’s Eve was about I’m sick of pretending,” she said. I had called her statements “conspiracy theories”; it was the only time in the hours we spent together that she objected to the framing of a question. “Which ones do you think were conspiracy theories?” she asked, leaning forward. I said I hadn’t heard about the chefs, though I also had not heard about the shooter’s silverware. “So to call something a conspiracy theory when the person hasn’t researched it,” she said, “to just go, Wait, let me just see if it happened or not — it’s fine. But also, you’re wrong. Because there are two dead chefs for sure. When someone’s like, Oh, you said this conspiracy. I’m like, You don’t think I spent four months making sure two chefs were dead? You think I’m going to take that chance? ”
Nothing is more natural than a comedian questioning the ordinary, and yet some questions themselves feel received. Cummings had asked her fans for stories the media would not cover; her fans represent, increasingly, a particular worldview. “Does anyone else hit one paywall and you’re just fucking out?” she asks the crowd in Redwood City. “I’ll wait until Alex Jones tweets the truth for free like a goddamn patriot.” “Alex Jones!” shouts a large man in front, in a way that does not feel ironic. “I’ve always been a liberal person,” she says, “a libtard, but once you have a kid, the conservative thoughts creep in.” “Spot on!” shouts a man next to me. The audience doesn’t let you be delusional. The problem with reverence for one’s audience is that audiences are no more stable than selves. Who reflects truth back to the performer — the people who laughed at slut jokes in 2010 or the people laughing now? What Whitney Cummings is delivering is what is wanted. She walks the stage, crouching, jumping, giving herself over to a few hundred Californians on a Thursday night. They pull her toward them, wielding the terrifying power of their approval, ever ready to snatch it back.
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