On the way to meet Michelle Wolf at a deeply hip tea shop in the heart of Greenwich Village, I find it hard not to notice that New York seems unusually quiet. The pre-Christmas build-up usually resembles a romcom backdrop — busy shoppers, cheerful Santas and buzzing restaurants — but the pavements are almost empty, early evening, and bar staff are polishing a lot of glasses.
“It’s Trump. People are saying it’s like the days after 9/11, when people didn’t know what to do,” Wolf explains when she arrives and plonks herself cheerfully down in a big, vintage-looking chair. “We’re in a new world and New York is not coping terribly well. I think we were doing a pretty good job of pretending we had it together. We were like the woman who just got divorced — ‘Everything’s fine, I’ve got my chardonnay.’ And now we’re like, ‘This is not OK, I miss him, I can’t do this alone.’”
Wolf ought to be well placed to capitalise on this. As the surprise hit of this year’s Fringe, the Daily Show writer and stand-up had some sharp lines on the election. “I’m superexcited Hillary Clinton is running for president,” she said back in August. “That would show women everywhere you can do anything you want to do — as long as your husband did it first.”
Her show, So Brave, is no liberal lament. It mocks the bland tropes of snowflake culture where everyone is So Brave and So Beautiful. It’s an hour of old-school classic stand-up, mixing satire and personal confession, laced with belly-laugh punchlines. She weaves effortlessly between news commentary and riffs on her messy bachelorette existence. Although she’s still slightly dazed at being a UK hit, she’s bringing the show to London for Christmas.
“I knew a couple of comedians who had done Edinburgh before — Trevor Noah, Michael Che, Hannibal Buress — and they all had nervous breakdowns,” she says. “Everyone said, ‘You’re going to have a terrible time. It’s going to be too long, you’re going to have a breakdown at some point.’ So I went in super-pessimistic, then every day it wasn’t terrible. I got really lucky — there were 10 days when it didn’t rain, and I hiked every day, and I was, like, ‘Scotland is beautiful. Who knew?’ I mean, I guess people, but I didn’t.”
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She’s prepping an updated version for the Soho Theatre. “I have some new jokes based on Trump, but... I don’t know.” Why so down? Satire flourishes under unpopular minority governments, no? Wolf gives a sigh.
“I was so ready to stop making Trump jokes,” she shrugs. “People say he’s great for comedy — he’s not. He is a parody of himself. Just before that day, I remember saying out loud, ‘We’re almost done. We’re not going to have to write about him any more.’” She shakes her head. “I don’t really like talking about him on stage. I don’t want him in my life any more than he needs to be.”
“People say Trump’s great for comedy — he’s not
She follows this with a little sparkling laugh — one that she laces her show with, and that makes even her cruellest barbs seem like naive charm. Bouncing on stage at the start of So Brave, she gives a cutesy grin and says: “You guys seem like you’re doing well...” Pause. Little bit of flirting. “Not to one-up you, but I’m doing amazing.” And the hardened Edinburgh crowd was in her hand right away.
It’s an impressively assured performance from a relatively inexperienced comic — Wolf has only been performing for five years. Before that, she was an analyst for Bear Sterns. “I studied kinesiology — essentially like exercise science — and I was either going to go to medical school or get my PhD in exercise physiology,” she says. “But my friends had jobs on Wall Street, and they love athletes because we will do anything to win. I got hired in July 2007 and they crashed in March 2008.”
She switched to JP Morgan. “But everyone yells at each other all of the time, and everyone was mean and getting mad for no reason,” she says. “I felt like I was turning into a bad person, so I started taking improv classes.”
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She began doing stand-up in 2011, and got a less stressful job as a corporate recruiter — which she got fired from after she stopped coming to work. Coming out of the “accept and build” improv culture, her early material was less barbed and more kooky character stuff. “When I started, I used to have this long bit about cats wearing pants. It wasn’t good. It was long, which is more important.”
She was not sure she was a gag writer. “Every joke I write, I’m convinced it’s the last joke I’ll ever write. It’s like a constant level of fear that makes life very uncomfortable,” she says. “In the end, it was Twitter that taught me. I tried to read as much news as possible, then write as many jokes as I could with only 140 characters. It’s an economy of words and taught me punchlines. One of my friends said, ‘You used to tweet all the time and we all thought it was annoying. Then we realised, oh, she’s just practising. And that was also annoying.’” She grins and shrugs. “So, yeah.”
In 2014, she was hired as a writer for Late Night with Seth Myers, then moved to The Daily Show this spring. “I’ve always been interested in politics, but I only started talking about it on stage when I began writing for Seth and The Daily Show,” she says. “So it’s almost accidental — you know, they were hiring...”
She found her meanest gags sounded better coming from her: the “Bill Clinton did it first” gag, she wrote for Myers. “It sounds sexist from a man, but it’s just a point of view from a woman,” she says. Doesn’t she get online hate, especially for her Daily Show skits? “I don’t engage on Twitter,” she shrugs. “Some of the stuff I get from the Daily Show viewers is really mean. I don’t mind hearing negative things — people are, like, ‘That sucked’, I’m, like, ‘OK, that’s fair.’ But when people are, like, ‘You f****** bitch c***’, I’m, like, ‘Well, that’s not very constructive.’”
You’d have to try pretty hard to hate her. There’s a playfulness to her material — appearing on Frankie Boyle’s American Autopsy after the election, she told him that if she got elected, she’d have sex in the Oval Office. “I think that’s been done to death,” he sniffed. “Well, not to me.” And her final set piece in So Brave sees her re-enacting the increasingly nonsensical texts she sent to a guy she was trying to shake after a disastrous date. Given the persistence of the pro-Trump Twitter caucus, however, you suspect she’ll be blocking an awful lot of people. She sighs.
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“I would love to be wrong, and maybe he’s going to be a great president.” She spreads out her hands on the table. “I mean, I don’t think he will, but maybe... The thing that’s really sad is that Bill Clinton won’t get to be first gentleman. Because first ladies sometimes give tours of the White House, and he’d have to say, ‘These are our drapes. As you can see, they’re navy. But if you shine a black light on them, boy, do they glow.’”
So Brave, Soho Theatre, London W1, until Dec 30