Cameron Esposito has been a stand-up, an actor, and a TV show-runner (on Take My Wife, a semi-autobiographical sitcom saved by Starz after the collapse of streaming-service Seeso)—but once upon a time, what she wanted more than anything was to be a priest. Onstage, she sort of gets to live that dream: she modulates her voice as she shouts and murmurs jokes about her upbringing, her life as a gay woman, and—in her headline-grabbing latest set, which shes calling “Rape Jokes”—her own college #MeToo experience.
She begins by disarming the crowd with hilarious stories about an awkward medical emergency—dont worry, everything works out fine—and a few sharp beats on Donald Trump. Then Esposito eases the room into the story of her own trauma, which, like so many stories of sexual assault, involved a late night, drinking, and a familiar face. Its an unapologetically hard-hitting, bracingly timely hour that finds humor in tough topics—and its also something of a first for a professional comic in our brave new post-Times Up world. (The Daily Beast has gone so far as to call it the first great stand-up set of the #MeToo era.)
Though shes quieter in person than her lively Twitter presence or onstage persona would lead you to believe, Esposito is comfortable pushing boundaries no matter where she is. I recently met with her in a popular Los Feliz bistro, where we sat in a “nook-y” booth that theoretically would afford us privacy to dive into sensitive subjects like sexual assault and gay identity in 2018. After loudly bringing up the topic of “womens bodies and fuckability,“ I apologized—only for Esposito to reply, “No, you should say it louder. Just make these people feel very strange.”
With her latest hour, Esposito is encouraging everyone else to speak louder, too. And though she said shes “much more nervous about this than I've ever been about a stand-up thing,“ you wouldnt know it from her confident air. Over the course of our chat, we touched on everything from how scary it is to be, in her words, “a small woman with a fucked-up haircut” to writing rape jokes that work—and we didnt do it quietly.
Vanity Fair: Workshopping this material dozens of times is either a genius comedy move or the most self-punishing form of therapy.
Cameron Esposito: For me, when I do something risky, it usually comes from a place of frustration with everyone else. I waited a long time. When did the #MeToo movement start, a year ago?
But this is something you had already started to tackle in Season 1 of Take My Wife. There was that arresting “I am too” montage, in which both your character and your wifes said matter-of-factly that they had been victims of sexual assault—then several other people, men, and women, turned to the camera and said the same thing.
In 2016, we released an episode about rape jokes. But in 2014, I wrote a whole column about [rape jokes] in the A.V. Club. This is something Ive been talking about my whole career. An audience wants good jokes on every topic. Talk about every topic—but be good at it if youre dealing with something that's super taboo and painful. A comic hearing that and being like, “Oh, am I too real for you?” Its like, no, you actually just didnt pull it off. You didnt pull off the joke.
A comedian friend of mine talks about certain kinds of jokes as the pill in the peanut butter—like, how you get dogs to take their medicine. Theyre a way to get audiences to swallow something they otherwise might not.
Thats a very good way of looking at it. Isnt that what all humor is? A lot of people who have an overdeveloped sense of humor are people whove felt unsafe, because its a way of disarming your victimizer. A lot of adult comics are kids who, you name it—were larger-than-average size, gay, black and lived in a white neighborhood, whatever it is. I think thats what we use [humor] for, to take pain out of our own lives so everything doesnt feel so harsh.
I wanted to talk about the structure of the set a little, and when you decide the audience is ready for you to transition from telling jokes to sharing your own experience with sexual assault.
The “this is what really happened” [part] comes about 50 minutes in and is a very weird experience for me. You dont think it should be funny, but as a comic, even 10 seconds of silence, 30 seconds of silence, 2 minutes of silence—Im trying to build that out. Im just very laid bare there, and its usually a place Im so in change. Im working on it because I dont think people should be laughing there, and I think thats actually kind of cool if they arent.
You do this kind of modulated, friendly yelling . . .
I think thats one of my strengths as a comic. Im tiny and smiley. I think a lot of it comes from creating safety for myself because as a queer person, I was just very unsafe. Then as a survivor, I feel really unsafe all the time. I think something that I did without knowing it was about introducing myself to people, to be like, “Please dont kill me.”
A lot of folks, I suppose, dont hear very often how scary it is to be gay. How scary it is to be a small woman with a fucked-up haircut. How scary it is to just be out in the world and not know what you have to offer, and if you are protected.
One great thing you do in this set is joke about your own incomplete sexual education growing up in the Catholic school system. Its one of many moments you seem to take your audience by the hand and say, “I get it. I also had to learn so much about this on my own.”
Nobody in this country gets good sex ed, and the Trump administration wants to go back to abstinence-only education—which by the way, is what I got. I can relate to the cis straight dude in the audience, not just because I had no good information, but also because Ive slept with a lot of cis women, so we have this in common.
I cant totally put what happened to me on one man, because I dont think he had better information. I dont think he was a good person, the way that he was treating me long-term . . . but last nights the first time on the stage I really used the word “rape” to apply to myself. I feel weird even using that word, because I was raised in the same culture, too. So this happened to me. I was barely conscious; I have had a very hard time understanding what that was. I used to tell that story at parties, as a funny story about my life. “One time I was completely passed out and I woke up in the morning and I was nude, and my door was open, and my roommates saw . . .” I know that it came from a place of vulnerability, and I know that it did a lot of damage.
So youve taken on this job of educating people about why certain rape jokes dont land, and the nature of consent in a really divisive time when people are retreating to their ideological corners.
Im not saying this to be an ass to other people in my field—[but] I dont see someone else saying this. Its like when gay marriage was the topic that every comic was talking about, but many comics were straight folks being like, “Heres my view on gay marriage.” And I was just on the bill being like, “I guess I have to go talk about marriage equity.” Otherwise, the audience is never hearing from somebody who was actually affected.
So, whats the eventual plan for this show?
Im going to go and, I think, do it as a full tour in larger venues. . . . Do I put it out as an album? Ideally, it would be a special because it has the largest number of people seeing it. Theres a timeliness that I find stressful, because—youve been seeing the news just like I have—were at the beginning the redemption tour for some folks. . . . I see survivors being left out of that conversation.
I guess I thought we were trying to expand the platform of who got to talk and who got to be taken seriously. Think about that Uma Thurman story, her coming out and saying what she said about her experience . . . So, are we just done with that? I just cant tell.
You talk in your set about how being a lesbian automatically puts you in a sphere outside the “standard” way of talking about sex. But I almost wonder if being a lesbian means its actually easier for you to be heard on this particular subject. Or conversely, if you feel like men will have reason to shut your point of view out.
It is actually harder to stand on stage and tell a joke about rape when youre a woman whos being judged on her body. The audience is thinking about where you fall on the fuckability scale, because for some reason, we apply that to sexual assault. If Im a lesbian, I am outside of the scale of male protection. . . . You and I are not even sure that men are capable of having a reason to see a show if they dont want to fuck the performer? God, we have a terrible opinion of dudes. God, we are cultured to have a terrible opinion of dudes. Thats what I feel would be a thing that it would be positive to work on, is our collective opinion of men.
How to be good humans in this regard, around sexuality, is just something we are so ashamed about, so isolated about, literally dont talk to our best friends about, literally dont talk to our siblings about, get no medical information about. We talk about Planned Parenthood as if its a terrorist organization, like the government does. Meanwhile, the government doesnt do the work Planned Parenthood does, so Planned Parenthood has to exist—because otherwise, there is no option. I just mean, theres so much pressure. Its such a pressure. Could we just laugh, so that we can release some of that pressure?
Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Joanna RobinsonJoanna Robinson is a Hollywood writer covering TV and film for VanityFair.com.
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