\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.<\/p>\n Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, \u201cI just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: \u2018What do you joke about?\u2019 Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: \u2018Everything other than airport security!\u2019 He didn\u2019t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: \u2018What do you joke about?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. \u201cI just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn\u2019t know what to say. Then he said: \u2018Do you joke about politicians?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement \u201cdetaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way\u201d put her on high alert. \u201cIt was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale. I\u2019m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican\u2019s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said \u2018Yes?\u2019 Don\u2019t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Don\u2019t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians?\u2019 \u2026 Jena Friedman.<\/span> Photograph: Peacock\/Heidi Gutman\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Friedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she\u2019s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She\u2019s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. \u201cIt\u2019s about grief, but it\u2019s also political,\u201d she says. \u201cThe vibe in certain circles does feel like we\u2019re grieving. So there\u2019s something about my show that\u2019s connecting to the larger moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year\u2019s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.<\/p>\n Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents\u2019 Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She\u2019s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: \u201cI\u2019m keeping an eye on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Comedians Rosie O\u2019Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country \u2013 O\u2019Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O\u2019Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because \u201cthe audiences are great\u201d and there\u2019s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won\u2019t happen until there\u2019s \u201can impetus to go, something I don\u2019t think is far off, like: you can\u2019t talk about this any more, you can\u2019t talk about that any more\u201d.<\/p>\n Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: \u201cThere are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.\u201d<\/p>\n Friedman\u2019s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration \u2013 and agrees there\u2019s a \u201cchill\u201d. \u201cThe industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, \u201cseeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Michelle Wolf\u2019s standup explores society through the \u2018lens of being a mom\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: Stephen Keable\/Alamy<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Michelle Wolf\u2019s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf\u2019s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she\u2019s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society \u201cthrough the lens of being a mom now\u201d. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. \u201cWe\u2019re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that\u2019s very refreshing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Still, political comedy isn\u2019t absent. \u201cI feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing \u2026 people expect me to say something about it.\u201d She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day\u2019s news but, \u201cI don\u2019t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There\u2019s always something crazy happening, but it\u2019s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed \u2013 she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: \u201cHow are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?\u201d<\/p>\n Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America \u2013 looking back to the \u201cunconfident whites\u201d who founded the nation. She describes the show as \u201ca fun, risky little ride\u201d as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. \u201cIt\u2019s this broader conversation I\u2019ve been having about America and race,\u201d Jay says.<\/p>\n The whole world feels unsettled right now and there\u2019s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. \u201cHow did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we\u2019re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump came up plenty during Jay\u2019s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a \u201cbraggadocious\u201d fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America\u2019s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: \u201cHe\u2019s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong \u2026 it\u2019s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n Friedman agrees: \u201cI started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.\u201d This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. \u201cThey\u2019re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,\u201d Friedman says. \u201cAs a political comic, I\u2019ve always done better in the UK than the US. It\u2019s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell\u2019s going on over there?\u201d says Friedman.<\/p>\n The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, \u201cthe mood in America \u2026 chaos. There\u2019s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.\u201d<\/p>\n All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. \u201cEven if it\u2019s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,\u201d Friedman says. \u201cI support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it\u2019s to get people to see things slightly differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. \u201cI look at it as a conversation. It can<\/em> serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we\u2019re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense \u2013 existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.\u201d<\/p>\n What does the future hold for US comedians? \u201cIt\u2019s too soon to tell,\u201d says Friedman. \u201cBut I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that\u2019s funny and disarming is really important right now.\u201d<\/p>\n Jay says: \u201cOnce I\u2019m on stage, I\u2019m gonna say what I\u2019m gonna say. If I can\u2019t come back as a result, I\u2019ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.\u201d<\/p>\n Jena Friedman: Motherf*cker<\/em> is at <\/em>Hive 1<\/em> at <\/em>Monkey Barrel Comedy until 24 August<\/em>. <\/em>Michelle Wolf<\/em> is at various venues until 1<\/em>7 August. <\/em>Sam Jay: We the People<\/em> is at <\/em>Pleasance Courtyard until 24 August<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit. Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, \u201cI just said I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[8938,1950,5642,3735,1540,8937,1913,2425,2664,6188],"class_list":{"0":"post-15374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-comics","9":"tag-dangers","10":"tag-edinburgh","11":"tag-felt","12":"tag-festival","13":"tag-handmaids","14":"tag-political","15":"tag-satire","16":"tag-scene","17":"tag-tale"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15374\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}