Emily Wilson on cringing at your past self, reality TV, and her new show ‘Fixed’
Like a lot of her generation, Emily Wilson was a “YouTube kid.” In high school, Wilson had a self-described “cringey” YouTube channel with her best friend, Austin, where the two would post videos of themselves covering famous songs.
It was always Wilson’s dream to be a famous singer, so when she heard the TV singing competition show “The X Factor” was holding auditions in her New Jersey hometown, she was ecstatic.
She and Austin “skipped school, woke up at 3 in the morning,” and “waited in line with thousands of other people” to audition. The two of them ended up making it to the show’s top 12 competitors.
But Wilson, 26, has rarely talked about her time as a competitor — until now. Years after her reality TV days, when her “biggest dream . . . became my biggest nightmare,” she’s written an entire comedy show about competing on “The X Factor” as a 15-year-old.
“Fixed,” Wilson’s “multimedia musical comedy hour,” comes to Somerville Theatre’s Crystal Ballroom Wednesday.
Wilson will be the first to tell you that her show is no “woe-is-me” story, even though she had far from an easy time. “I was in love with Austin, he was in the closet. The judges loved Austin and they hated me,” she said.
The judges “set me up for the public to dislike me,” Wilson explained — as a 15-year-old “in front of 10,000 people,” no less. “I never talked about it because I was so mortified and humiliated.”
To deal with the experience, Wilson, learned to laugh at herself. “I credit ‘X Factor,’ and my friendship with Austin, in my development of my sense of humor,” she said. In college at NYU, she found a different home for her performing arts dreams in standup comedy, and has been working as a comic in New York for several years.
Wilson met Arlington-raised comedian Sam Blumenfeld in the NYU comedy scene, and the two soon began collaborating on filming skits and music videos. Blumenfeld was Wilson’s “DJ sidekick” for her weekly “The Emily Wilson Show” show at The Red Room in New York’s East Village, and when Wilson decided to turn her time on “The X Factor” into an hour-long set, she approached Blumenfeld and asked him to co-write the show with her.
The two have a “sibling-y relationship,” according to Blumenfeld, and bonded over both being on TV shows as kids. Blumenfeld was “bullied” by his peers for being on the PBS kids’ game show “Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman” as a middle-schooler, and learned to “develop thick skin.”
He and Wilson both “have shared experiences of sort of cringing at your past self,” he said. Their show embraces that self-deprecating sense of humor; Wilson even projects real videos of her 15-year-old self on “The X Factor” on a screen behind her throughout to joke about them.
But there’s a point to the self-deprecation of “Fixed.” “I’m constantly still cringing at myself, but there’s something about comedy where you can get ahead of it — like, I’ll beat you to the punchline,” Wilson explained. Finally talking about her “ridiculous experience” and sharing it with others has taken some of the embarrassment out of it and helped her “heal,” she said.
It’s also been a huge step for Wilson’s stand-up comedy career. Wilson and Blumenfeld did a full run of “Fixed” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, and Wilson was nominated for the festival’s Best Newcomer Award. The show also earned a fourstar review in The Guardian, and landed in The Telegraph’s list of the best comedy shows of 2022.
Much as they love to poke fun at themselves, Wilson and Blumenfeld hope that if audiences get anything out of their show, it’s to “walk away from this looking at their past selves with kinder eyes,” Blumenfeld said. “That’s ultimately what it’s about.”