Kate Berlant is turning the rules of what’s funny upside down. Now the US standup is bringing her surreal one-woman show to the UK
Photograph: Emilio Madrid
It is first thing in the morning when Berlant Zooms from LA, and she has the smudged appearance of a person reluctant to quite wake up – her face is turned away, towards the window, and the sun lights her spectacularly. “I was forced into comedy early because of my bone structure,” she once said onstage, and in this light it is hard to argue. She turns slowly and earnestly says, “I identify as a deeply lazy person. I find it hard to do anything.
Burnham and Berlant: this was her most recent wildly creative collaborative friendship, her work with Early being her best known. With their short films and last year’s special, the comedians they seem most similar to are French and Saunders, that delicious blend of combative intimacy and performative narcissism, and joy at the absurd. They don’t hand an audience the laugh – you have to sit there with them for a little while, go on their awkward little journey to earn it.
“Standup is such a solitary thing,” she says. “You really are alone in it. It’s just a conversation with myself, and then I perform it and kind of see what happens. But collaborative, creative friendships are everything to me – they’re some of the most important relationships in my life. They’ve continued to sustain me and push me for years. Meeting John Early, a little over 10 years ago in New York, it was kind of like falling in love.
“And yet, on some level, we all know there isn’t a product that’s going to fix us or give us meaning. However, there also is a very human pleasure that comes from buying things, unfortunately. Adorning oneself with oils and such. And the quotidian engagement with these objects does kind of provide you with your life – that is sort of what life becomes, chasing these promises. They become like the modern religious rites, a ritual.