by In April the comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter at Vancouver Airport. She had just held a Ted discussion about the future of comedy and went home to the USA when someone from whom she worked for the security of the airport asked her because of her visit.
I thought he thought about visa injuries: “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked:” What are you joking about? “I was stupid flirting with him and said:” Anything but airport safety! “He didn’t react at all.
Friedman is a veteran of the Daily Show and the Late Show, and her standup comedy often offers supreme routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I only frozen because I am a political comedian and didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Work about politicians?'”
She made it home, but the incident remained with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the latest actions by the US immigration and customs authority, which “hold on everyone and everyone who looks in a certain way”, has put them on a high willingness to alert. “It was so quick, kind of interaction on the face,” she says. “But it felt like a scene from the history of the Handmaid. I am a blonde, white woman who like the wife of a Republican and I have an American passport. But what if I had said” yes “? Do we not want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians where we can joke about anything?”
Friedman included this moment in her new stand -up show Motherf*cker, which she appears at the Edinburgh Fringe. The show is a change. In general, she has resisted to become personal on stage, and refused that women had to be connected to be successful in the comedy, but this time it felt inevitable because she was the life -changing experience of becoming parenthood while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The mood in certain circles feels when we mourn. So there is something about my show that connects with the bigger moment.”
Friedman belongs to a harvest of US comedians with roots in the topical comedy that occur at this year’s fringe. Another part of the political comedy of US, Michelle Wolf, is also back, while Standup and the former live writer give her festival debut on Saturday evening, Sam Jay.
Wolf deserves her stripes in the Daily Show and in the late night with Seth Myers and with her 2018 set of the correspondent of the White House, in which she roasted Trump and his employees. Nowadays she lives in Barcelona, although she regularly returns to the USA for comedy work. She has not yet encountered border problems, but with reports from people with green cards and citizens who are detained, she says: “I keep an eye on it.”
The comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen Degeneres both said that the state of US policy forced them from the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and degener to England. O’Donnell wrote exactly a show that she appeared for the first week of the edge. Wolf is satisfied with her move to Barcelona and is of the opinion that her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the USA because “the audience is great” and a lot of work. While other US comedians have also talked about the idea of moving to Europe, she believes that it will not happen if there will be “an impulse to go, something that I do not think about how: You can no longer talk about it, you can no longer talk about it”.
Last month, Satirist Stephen Colbert announced that Network CBS had canceled the late show after 33 years. Many thought, the time, three days after Colbert, who criticized the CBS mother company Paramount for the settlement of a lawsuit with Donald Trump. Jon Stewart, moderator of talk show colleagues, criticized the step in his podcast and pointed out a broader fear in the industry. “There are many things that will never be done that you will never know about being killed in bed before you ever have a chance because you will ever have a chilling out.”
Friedmans glad to see that Colbert and Stewart speak against Trump and his government – and agrees that there is a “cold”. “The industry has already supported the political comedy less than among bidges and Obama. [Trump] to the task of how matt [Stone] and trey [Parker] From South Park, Colbert and Stewart that gives me hope ”.
In the meantime, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolfs Thought Box, the current affairs. Her new show, which she plays in the eighth month pregnant, is researching life and society “through the lens to be a mother now”. The social pressure for working mothers, the birth at home, momfluencer, gender -specific inequalities and much more. “We are now at a time when people talk realistically about motherhood, and that is very refreshing,” she says.
Nevertheless, the political comedy is not missing. “I have the feeling that I have to address the whole of America and the Trump matter … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to split up current jokes to the news of the day, but “I don’t like doing it to a large part of my set because it is bored. It always happens something crazy, but it is difficult to imagine other creative perspectives than: can you believe that?”
It has been nine years ago since she started writing jokes about Trump, and during this time her life has changed – she hit her partner, moved abroad and is about to get her second child. Her main feeling is now: “How do we still talk about him? How are we still in the same place?”
Jay reflects this slow structure in her show, We The People, in which she explores the state of America – review of the “uncertain white” that the nation founded. She describes the show as “a funny, risky little ride” when she tries to get to the root, why the United States feels so split and what we can do to understand each other better. “It is a broader conversation that I have had about America and races,” says Jay.
The whole world feels unsettled at the moment and there is the inability to take other perspectives into account, says Jay. “How did we come here as an American? Of course I think that breeds play a big role. And how did these racial relationships come to their way, how they are? Not only the guilt of white, but also the kind of white people with whom we have to do, why they may be as they are, their roots in England.”
Trump came up a lot on SNL for Jay’s time and appears in her Fringe show as a “Braggadokter” fool, which is unable to keep state secrets, but the frustrations of the poor white communities in America wise. But the conditions that Trump have created and increased are more interesting for Jay: “He is the symptom for this, not the cause. This is the result of years and years in which we have done it wrong … It builds up for a long time and for many different reasons.”
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Friedman agrees: “I worked at the Daily Show in 2012, before that I was at Letterman, so I started looking at politics every day since 2010, and this is a long time.” This also means that the audience does not want every political comedy among us. “You are always looking for escapism. In the first term there was clearly Trump fatigue,” says Friedman. “As a political comic, I have always done better in Great Britain than in the USA. It is the British audience who say: What the hell is going on over there?” says Friedman.
The mood in the US comedy is, says Jay:
All three agree that Comedy can help share different worldviews. “Even if they are people with whom we do not agree, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can stand on stage safely and say what we want, ideally in good faith,” says Friedman. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I would like to see more. I want people to see more openly for people with whom they do not agree. Whenever I make political comedy, the goal of not preaching the choir is to get people to see things a little differently.”
Jay said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I consider it a conversation. It may Fulfill a purpose of the actual understanding and understand that we try to find out something that doesn’t make much sense. Everyone is composed of these things in their own way. “
What does the future think for us Comedians? “It is too early to tell it,” says Friedman. “But I think everyone who exerts the US first packaging in a way that is funny and disarming is really important at the moment.”
Jay says: “As soon as I’m on stage, I will say what I will say. If I can’t come back as a result, I just have to have my girlfriend meet in Scotland.”
• Jena Friedman: Motherf*cker Is at Beehive 1 at Monkeys -barrel comedy until August 24th. Michelle Wolf Is up to 1 in different locationsAugust 7th. Sam Jay: We the people Is at Pleasance Courtyard until August 24th
