‘Oh, your queen died,” says Michelle Wolf, faux-absent-mindedly. “I’m sorry if that’s news.” If anyone here arrived in doubt that Wolf is a comic who makes a beeline for the jugular, her opening swiftly disabuses them. The Pennsylvanian is best known for her scorched-earth set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, from which Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Sanders, may never have recovered. But tonight’s show, like its 2019 predecessor at the same venue, is light on current affairs and abundant on sexual politics, carnality and – its only new direction – Wolf’s newfound domesticity.
It finds the 37-year-old in fine spiky form, with off-colour jokes to spare and all the infectious self-satisfaction of a comic who, beaming from ear to ear, knows how good she is. The laugh you get used to hearing in the audience is two parts delighted amusement to one part splutter of dismay that anyone could say something so impolite. Whether comparing the queue for the Queen’s lying in state to the storming of the Capitol, conjuring with ways to improvise an abortion in post-Roe v Wade America, or thought-experimenting with bestiality, the corkscrew-haired comic brings tight joke-writing and taboos together and revels in the fallout.
The apotheosis tonight is with a devious gag about her friend’s “fake boobs”, which pitches us so skilfully into one particularly vexed debate that we’re still marvelling at how she’s done it three wisecracks later. A later mini-masterpiece of joke construction contrasts Wolf and her new black boyfriend’s respective definitions of a bad day. The substantial central section, meanwhile, anatomises gay male, lesbian and straight female cultures, casting the light of one upon the other to expose the frailties, betrayals and the ridiculousness of them all.
All of the above is fearless in respect to taboos – and less so when it comes to Wolf’s personal life, which is only coyly revealed behind all the lurid gags. All the more off-brand, then, when the later stages find her loved-up and hymning the virtues of fabric softener, of all things. But if her clothes are no longer crusty, the edges of Wolf’s comedy remain, happily, as hard as ever.
