In We the People, Sam Jay talks politics and culture rather than talking about herself – and it’s a sign of the standup times, perhaps, that that feels transgressive. The show, nominated for an Edinburgh comedy award, takes the temperature of a divided America, and – even less fashionable, this – proposes how it might be healed.
It’s not a perfect set: Jay has a diffident manner at the microphone, so there are punchlines that aren’t audible, far less impactful. But the range, ambition – and sometimes quality – of her thinking makes something distinctive, certainly at this year’s fringe, of this cool diagnosis of America’s ills.
A marker of Jay’s intention to do things differently is put down early with a routine questioning “non-binary” as a gender category. Are we in the realms of Dave Chappelle-alike transphobic comedy? We are not. But looking at her country, Jay – herself black and gay – argues that the pace of change is alienating potential sympathisers, that people need to step out of their silos and meet halfway, that culture wars are “people fighting for what they understand”. She goes to a rodeo, and apprehends the gulf between red-state America and her world of veganism and trans bathrooms. She brings Jeffrey Dahmer in from the cold. She interrogates black people’s culpability for the state of her nation. (“We celebrated OJ too hard.”)
Sometimes, these are useful as well as funny ideas. Sometimes, they’re arresting but glib – as with her argument for a return to a state of nature, or the arrogance v insecurity she identifies in colonialism v chattel slavery. But how thrilling to be, as that reference implies, at a show bandying big concepts around. And making them so provocatively funny, as with Jay’s extended riff on “fucked farmers” and alien abduction, or her visit to the UK to encounter whiteness at its zenith.
The pleasure, at the performance I saw, was undermined by a bewilderingly abrupt ending. But We the People remains an eye-catching set from a comic who’s found lots to say, and lots to laugh about, in the not-ostensibly-amusing condition of modern America.