Caveat 1: Let me start off by saying that as a female-identified queer comedian I am psyched when a new comedy special drops by any woman (OK there are some exceptions, we don’t need to go into that now), and especially queer women, and even more queer women of color, so underrepresented in the comedy scene. Sam Jay is a trailblazer, a role model, someone worthy of much admiration.
Caveat 2: Women are held to a much higher standard than men, in all spheres including comedy. If women turned up on stages or Zoom shows as unprepared and woefully unfunny as some of our male-identified peers, we would possibly actually deserve the utter lack of respect we are often afforded. If the things I am about to talk about had happened in the set of a white male comedian I would not be writing about them, a. because I likely wouldn’t have seen it and b. because I would not feel so utterly disappointed. Nevertheless, we have got to call out injustice when we see it, and we saw way too much of it in Sam Jay’s new Netflix comedy special.
It started off great. Just amazing. Her ponderings on coming out as a dyke, the complicated process of knowing something is up yet wanting to fit in and not seeing representation had me snap my fingers and woot at every turn. Things go awry as soon as she starts talking about her fear of flying. “I ain’t scared of dying”, she says, “I’m scared of surviving”, the premise being that it is ultimately better to be dead than disabled. She imagines what that might be like: “You all heard about me. I am the no-legs comic. Fuck that”. The flying narrative lands us in London and an acerbic and very funny analysis of white colonizing culture, and it feels that we are back in safe waters. Sadly, not for long. Her relatable musings about having doubts about possibly becoming a parent someday take us into a gas-lighting morass: she starts off compassionately, explaining that it’s OK for people to be confused or defensive when confronted with people’s otherness such as being queer or trans. “It’s OK to be uncomfortable, it’s OK to be confused”, she says. “There’s a bunch of gray, and we don’t have all the answers yet”. Much as I don’t actually agree with this statement, I appreciated what seemed to be a compassionate and inclusive stance, giving her potential distractors a space to feel they were allowed to feel apprehensive about this in-your-face Black dyke comedian. At least that’s where I thought we were going. Turns out we were in fact nosediving into one of the most trans-antagonistic* rants I had heard in a while. She tries to save herself by inserting, “I’m not saying trans women aren’t women. … Trans women are women, shut the fuck up”. One wonders if an editor suggested this line as a way of redemption against accusations such as leveled in this very article: “She is not transphobic! She said so herself!!” Her whole premise now is that transwomen are essentially men, and you’d better have one of them on your team when you get into a bar fight or a women’s sports team: “We need these super bitches. These are our X-men.” Possibly even more disturbing than the set itself is the audience’s reaction, hollering louder with each bigoted statement. I debated if I should keep watching, and in the spirit of fairness and curiosity, I did.
Jay next takes on the #MeToo movement and essentially blames women for not being able to defend themselves. Couching this revelation as empowerment, she says “In all those situations, women had a choice.” She turns the sexual assault allegation against Aziz Ansari into her case in point, landing on the trope so beloved of all defenders of alleged rapists: “I wasn’t there. I’m not saying he did or didn’t.” Right. Because believing women would be disempowering? That’s actually a real choice right there. The punchline of this premise is that Ansari is so weak that surely any woman accosted by him would just have punched him in the face and got out of there, a scenario that completely erases the complexity and illogicality of so many sexual assault situations. Remember when Eric Trump said that Ivanka was too “strong and powerful” to be sexually harassed by anyone? That premise somehow made it into Sam Jay’s comedy special, based around the idea that surely anyone could take on a short South Asian man.
The special ends with a funny and spot-on dissection of white feminism, followed by a really powerful honoring of her mother’s enquiry into her physical safety when she was a child: “My mother showed me, I got your back, no matter fucking what”. I loved this bit and felt that right there at the end of this 1-hour set we had returned to where we had started an hour earlier: powerful, strong, empowering, feminist, queer comedy. More of this please in future, and leave the ableist, transantagonistic, and rape apologist jokes to the many people who have built their whole careers on them. We are better than that. Don’t be goofy.
* I do not like the term transphobia as a phobia suggests an unreasonable and uncontrollable fear of something. Trans- and homophobia are not illnesses, they are evidence of bigotry. Call it what it is.
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