‘Break’ for comedy
Michelle Wolf’s new show has ‘different flavor.’
NEW YORK – She was a writer and performer for Seth Meyers, contributed to The Daily Show and had her own 2017 HBO special. But until last month’s explosive performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, most people had probably never heard of Michelle Wolf, a 32-year-old stand-up comedian.
But the dinner, with barbs directed at the media, President Trump and his chief spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sitting stony-faced nearby, vaulted her to instant fame, just in time for her own Netflix series. The Break With Michelle Wolf, a 25-minute comedy blend, arrives Sunday with 10 weekly episodes.
Her running gag is that if you hated that blistering 20-minute set in D.C. — “I think I was a lot more honest than people thought I was going to be,” she says — you won’t like her new series much, either.
Trump didn’t (though he skipped the dinner), calling her a “so-called comedian” who “bombed.” (“One of my pet peeves with trolls is when their trolling is bad,” she says. “You gotta get more creative here!”) Even Margaret Talev, the correspondents group’s president who hired her, apologized for the routine, fueling backlash to the backlash.
But the redhead, known for her “shrill” voice, says that despite the attention, Trump fatigue will make her new show less political than you might expect. She’ll do a stand-up routine in the first half of each episode, taped in front of a studio audience on Thursday nights, with targets “more likely to be secondary players” like Jared Kushner than the president.
Rounding out the show: short comedy bits, and celebrity guests who will rant or riff with Wolf in topical “Breakdown” segments.
“I just want to do something in a slightly different flavor: a funny-first,
“I just want to do something in a slightly different flavor. ... You’re never going to come on my show and hear me talk about net neutrality for 20 minutes.”
joke-forward show,” she says. “Right now, a lot of people are doing very politically heavy shows, and they’re all doing it very well. But you’re never going to come on my show and hear me talk about net neutrality for 20 minutes,” as John Oliver did.
And don’t look for any Meyers-style “Closer Looks,” either. “I will not be that responsible. I’m trying to hit the topics they might not be hitting. Especially because I’m a woman, I felt like I could talk about things from a different perspective.”
Jon Stewart often argued that viewers don’t really get their news from latenight comics, because they’d need knowledge of current events to understand the jokes. “That used to be very valid,” Wolf says, when “there was actually a place you could get news” on TV. “Right now, a lot of it is fluff or fake outrage of whatever happened in the last 10 minutes.”
Wolf, who grew up in Hershey, Pa., has an eclectic background: She started her career in banking, ran a 50-mile race in Utah six days after the correspondents dinner, and describes herself as “very silly and weird.”
Her move from banking to comedy came after she sat in the Saturday Night Live audience in 2008. “I’ve always been such a big fan that I was like, ‘How did these guys start, how do you do this, how do you get here?’ And I Googled them, and almost all of them started in improv, so I just Googled improv and signed up for a class.”
But her true comic inspiration is a fellow redhead whose photo is the only one adorning her brick-walled office. “I watched a ton of Carol Burnett, and I always loved in the beginning of her show when she’d go out and talk to her audience. I always just liked how unafraid she was.”