IN CONVERSATION
Why Michelle Wolf Escaped America
The comedian talks her new Netflix special It’s Great to Be Here, Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, and that White House Correspondents’ Dinner
During the pandemic, Michelle Wolf had a revelation: I need to get the fuck out of America. She was tired of the New York City grindset, working to live and living to work, and asked herself, “What do I have other than work?” She wanted a family, community, genuine connection. So, Wolf decided to move to Barcelona and found herself in a far more agreeable situation (with a loving boyfriend to boot). The change of scenery forms the basis for the first part of her new stand-up special It’s Great to Be Here, which is now streaming on Netflix.
This is Wolf’s second Netflix stand-up special — or third, if you count her appearance in last year’s Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill — and her funniest yet. In it, she homes in on the cultural differences in Barcelona (including nude beaches), the importance of lesbians, white women victimhood, and the #MeToo movement. “Lesbians are like bees,” she says. “If you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. And if they all die, the world ends.” It’s more a collection of rapid-fire jokes versus a traditional stand-up special, with its hour divided into three parts.
And Wolf, who hails from Hershey, Pennsylvania, has had quite the comedy ride. After stints at Bear Stearns and JPMorgan Chase around the time of the financial crisis, she started improv classes at Upright Citizens Brigade and performing stand-up around New York City. She made a handful of appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, hosted a Comedy Central web series, and became a Daily Show contributor. Her debut stand-up special, HBO’s Michelle Wolf: Nice Lady, was a smash hit, and she hosted the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which prompted Trump to call her “filthy” and members of the media to attack her, twisting her jokes in the process. Then came a weekly talk show on Netflix, The Break with Michelle Wolf, followed by more stand-up. She was supposed to guest-host The Daily Show in June — essentially auditioning to be its new host — but that was derailed by the ongoing writers’ strike. Oh, and she spent the first part of the pandemic living with Dave Chappelle in his Ohio home.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Wolf spoke with Rolling Stone about her new special, moving out of America, Louis C.K.’s allegations, why Dave Chappelle is “a hero,” and so much more.
What made you decide to play with the form a bit and release your most recent special, It’s Great to Be Here, in three parts? Was it inspired at all by I Think You Should Leave?
First of all, excellent show. But yeah, I wanted to see if I could change up the way we’re consuming these based off our decreased attention span. I think there’s a great place for an hour-long special, and there are a lot of great hour-long specials, but I also think there are a lot of hour-long collections of jokes. This is more a collection of jokes rather than something that felt like a special. I thought, “There are fifteen minutes that work really well together, so do I really need to find a segue to get into the next chunk that works well together, or could I just break it up? And then if they like it, they’ll want to watch another one.”
I originally made eight episodes that varied in length — I think the longest was twenty-three minutes, the shortest one was nine minutes, and most were around fifteen minutes. Even though I didn’t end up selling it as those eight episodes, I stand by what I was trying to do, and I hope that they see that this is a way that comedy can be consumed. And then say, in six months, I have another three episodes that I could just throw up there rather than waiting another year or two to get a full special. I can be like, “You know, I have a really interesting twenty-minute set and a really interesting seven-minute set. Let’s add two more episodes to this.” It would also give us an opportunity to be a bit timelier with it.
This new special leans into more observational humor than your previous ones and mostly steers away from politics.
I think this special was a bit more personal than my last ones. I don’t really ever talk about relationships in any of my other sets, and I think a part of that is because I have been living more and having more of a life that’s not just working and touring. And I got to tell ya, it’s been lovely to get to do that! I kind of mistakenly get put in the “political comedian” barrel. I talk about social issues…
But you’re not Bill Maher.
I’m not Bill Maher, and I’m not doing jokes about a sandwich order. I do talk about things that affect me socially that I observe as being things that are affecting society right now, but I think I mistakenly get put in the “political comedian” category as someone who’s going to do a bunch of Trump jokes. I worked on The Daily Show, so that put me in that corner, and of course people associate me with being a political comedian because of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but I’ve always felt my stand-up has been separate from that. I did the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because I thought it would be fun to tell those jokes to people’s faces, and as much as people like to say that I was going after the right, I think I pretty fairly went after the right and the left.
And the media.
Yeah. My main goal of the whole thing was first to be funny, and then to go after the media, because I think they’re doing a huge disservice to us. They’re not providing us news. They’re providing us a form of news entertainment and trying to get us riled up on whatever side we’re on.
I do think the way the Trump administration was covered was a media failure. There was a lot of palace intrigue-type coverage where it was covered like a reality show with daily recaps of what new, crazy thing went on inside the White House, or what new, crazy thing Trump tweeted.
Yeah. Talking about a tweet for three days. And the reality is, there are newsworthy things going on. It just might not be as interesting, but it’ll be more impactful for your life. Like, policies that are being made. Those are more cerebral, and almost like homework to figure out, but much more impactful to your daily life than a tweet or offhand comment.
One of the people who has covered Trump in this way is The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and she was also one of the people who expressed poor comedy literacy when it came to your White House Correspondents’ Dinner set. She was one of several high-profile members of the media, along with a number of Trump officials, who were disingenuous and twisted your words.
I think they wanted to take the heat off themselves, so they put it on me. And it only reconfirmed how I was feeling and what I had already seen. At the end of the day, Maggie wanted to keep her access and, just as I’d suspected, put out a book. Everyone’s gotta make money, but it’s on you if you’re comfortable making money at the expense of bad journalism. I think there are people who do good journalism out there. I just think they’re a lot harder to find, and they’re unfortunately not at many of the major news networks and papers.
Even Bob Woodward, of Woodward and Bernstein, sat on news of Trump saying he thought Covid was real in February of 2020 for his book release. To sell more books.
There were a couple of books that came out. Comey had a book that came out and there was information in it where you were like, “This was important!” It says a lot about what they value, which is making a buck.
What impact do you feel the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had on your career and its trajectory? It should have been this triumphant moment for you because you delivered a great set, and then all of the noise and bullshit after made it so you didn’t get your flowers.
I think it’s aging very well, and I am still very happy that I did it and that I got to do it. I think there are a lot of people who didn’t even watch the set and just listened to what the media said I did and then have this vitriolic hate for me without actually knowing what I said. To be honest, they maybe never would have been fans anyway, and I don’t necessarily want them as fans, but I do think they’re missing out on some good comedy. Both liberals and conservatives do this: They hear someone saying something on television, and they think they’re being accurate because they’re saying it on television. But they’re not. They’re lying to you. And then it opens the floodgates for people on social media to be like, “I have the real information!” And people are like, “Well, I’m gonna go with that!” Can we go back to our third grade research papers and cite a source? At least one source?
I interviewed you years ago in New York City when you were grinding away, working on The Daily Show and doing multiple stand-up sets a night. Make me jealous for a second: How does living in Barcelona compare to the New York City grind?
I still do have a place in the city, but it’s really nice. Even just aside from work, there’s a tension in America right now that is very palpable when you leave and then you come back. There’s a tension here that I don’t feel when I’m in Europe. And they want to have a good life there. They really value their free time, their family, and their community. Spain is like, you guys can make all the money you want but we’re going to take these two hours off in the afternoon, get a coffee, and then we’re gonna come back and work like a half-hour more, and then we’re gonna enjoy a glass of wine and a snack, and then we’re gonna take off a month in August to really wind down. I think that’s nice. I don’t know what we’re grinding for here. Part of the reason people grind so hard here is because they need money to pay for all the things we have to pay for: healthcare, student debts, childcare, any number of things. You don’t feel that in Europe, and that’s nice. It’s one of the things the pandemic pointed out to me when I wasn’t working. I was like, “What do I have other than work?” I wanted to have a life and a family — and by “family” I mean a collection of actual family and friends whose company I can enjoy. I made an effort to make my life look like that.
So, it was a pandemic move to Barcelona.
Toward the end of it. I spent most of it in Ohio with Dave [Chappelle], which was also a very, very good experience.
Wait… Tell me about that.
I got stuck in Ohio for the pandemic, and it was great. I was with my friends, but we got to do those cornfield shows, and to be around Dave, be able to do comedy, and see what he did for the town and comedians. He put on these shows that brought millions of dollars to the town and kept businesses open that never would have survived otherwise, while also giving us comedians a place to perform. And you know us crazyheads: We need to perform.
How long were you at Dave’s Ohio home, and what was it like being a guest at the Dave Chappelle B&B?
Donnell Rawlings was there, Mo Amer was there, and then there were a lot of comedians who would come in, do some shows, and leave — that was when things had opened up a little for travel. I was there from March [2020] and I don’t think I got back to New York until late October. I eventually got my own place there too, but I felt very fortunate and very grateful. I can’t say enough good things about [Dave’s] family, and the community, too. Dave is the kindest, most generous person I know. And he’s also great at comedy.
Is that why you came to Dave’s defense when Hannah Gadsby spoke out against him and his trans jokes?
Yeah. I think people really miss a lot of what he’s saying. He says it very clearly in his one special: “Why was it easier for Caitlyn Jenner to change her gender than it was for Cassius Clay to change his name?” I think that spells it out right there. He wants everyone to be able to live the way they want to live, including Black people. Time and time again we see that, as a country, we literally don’t want Black people to live and we don’t do anything about it. They try to act like Dave is some sort of villain when he’s not. He’s a hero. He’s fighting for his people.
But there are Black trans people.
He’s not saying those people shouldn’t exist. He’s just saying that he should get to exist too.
I’m curious why it has to be one or the other? Or why are their struggles being compared to one another? It sort of reminds me a bit of the early 20th century, when Black people and women were fighting for civil rights, and those two groups were often pitted against each other.
Well, there were a lot of white women that were being pretty racist.
Oh sure, but it became this thing where those two groups really shouldn’t be pitted against each other, because neither of them is responsible for this predicament, and should be working together against the powers that be.
I don’t think he’s saying that one can’t exist, or that it’s one or the other. I do believe he’s saying that both can exist, and there’s no reason they can’t. But I also think he’s trying to be a voice for people that are being ignored as well.
I wanted to talk with you about holding a mirror to white women in this special, which you do quite a bit. It reminded me of Bill Burr’s SNL monologue.
I had another white women bit in Joke Show about how we like to be the head victim, so I’ve been on this for a couple of years now. I make fun of white women because it’s fun and easy, and also because I am one, so I have a lot of personal experience. [Laughs] I want us to succeed, and I think one of the ways we can succeed is to look at ourselves and say, “We can do better than this.”
You talk about the #MeToo movement in this special, which is a minefield. You call it “the worst-run movement I’ve ever seen” and say you were “frustrated” by it. What frustrated you about it?
I think it was a very black-and-white approach that they took, when in fact it was an incredibly gray subject matter that required a lot of conversations that we literally weren’t allowed to have. You either fell into two groups: you supported #MeToo or you didn’t, and by didn’t support it that meant you were some incredible misogynist. I think there’s a pretty big middle ground there. There are people who think society should get better and improve, but in order to do that we can’t make it so cut and dried. Do we really want to be punitive, or do we want to make the future better? In some cases, there are legitimate legal ways to be punitive, and that’s something that should happen. But in other cases, let’s say what was wrong, why it was wrong, and how we want things to be better. If you wanted to try to have any sort of conversation about it you immediately got in trouble and people would say you “didn’t believe women,” and then those people thought, “OK, well I’m not going to say anything for or against this then because we’re not allowed to have a conversation.”
I feel like Louis C.K. is the big comedy-world example of #MeToo. Using that as a case study of sorts, how do you feel that situation was handled? It’s someone who did some bad things, disappeared for a bit, and he’s now back performing stand-up in arenas.
Louis, I feel, is the only one who actually admitted to anything or apologized. And we can go back and forth about how good or bad his apology was, but I don’t think you’re ever going to have an apology that everyone is going to be happy with. He’s the only one who did that, and it seems like he got punished the most for it. A lot of people didn’t say anything or denied accusations, and it may have been a bit rocky for them for a while, but they didn’t get — and these people were accused of things that were at least the same if not worse than what he did. He apologized and wants to make things better, and instead people were like, “No, you can’t. There’s no way for you to make things better unless you do this and this.” But nobody said what “this and this” was. Nobody said what he could do because nobody agreed on what he could do.
One of the things, as a society, we could have done is that the women who weren’t given opportunities because something happened to them — the studios could have given them opportunities. People said, “Opportunities were taken from them,” but you all have the power to give them opportunities now. So, how about instead of talking about what Louis did, you give them the opportunities that were taken from them? That, to me, seems like a good way for us, as a society, to show that we actually care about women instead of making it a media circus.
I believe people took issue with Louis C.K.’s apology because he didn’t really apologize to the women in it, or even say he was sorry. And then when he came back to performing, he tried to excuse his actions away by saying it was just a sexual kink he had.
I can see that. Even if you apologize badly, if everyone piles on and says, “This is a terrible apology,” then it’s like, I don’t know what you want me to do then.
Unless it’s Mario Batali’s apology with his pizza rolls recipe. That was a terrible apology.
Right. [Laughs] But I think it paints people into a corner where they’re like, “I don’t know what to do.” But these are conversations that we should be allowed to have.
Let’s discuss the end of your Netflix series The Break. You were done pretty dirty there by a certain giant streaming service. Staffers found out the show was canceled on Twitter. What was that like, and how did Netflix make nice with you?
I literally got the call that they weren’t allowing us to do more episodes and then moments later it was on Twitter. I felt absolutely terrible for the writers and the other staff because I wasn’t able to talk to them and congratulate them on what they did rather than them being bombarded publicly like that without them knowing. I had a genuinely wonderful staff on that show — the writers, the production, everybody. I was frustrated with [the show]. I also let network notes influence the decisions I was making when I should have just stuck with what I wanted to do instead of fitting into what they wanted me to do. I should have just given them me. Because then I could have walked away saying, “I did exactly what I wanted to do.” Instead, I did part of what I wanted to do and part of what they wanted me to do, so I wish I’d stayed more firm in my decisions. I think there’s a way for a weekly show to work on Netflix, and I think they implemented those things for Hasan’s [Minhaj] show [Patriot Act] after mine.
Speaking of Hasan Minhaj, I know he’s possibly been tapped to be the next Daily Show host, and you didn’t have a chance to guest-host in June due to the writers’ strike, but is that a job that you want?
First of all, I think that whoever takes over The Daily Show is someone who needs to have a strong point of view and isn’t just giving audiences what they want to hear. I would love to host that show. I have a very good idea of how I would run the show, what I would do on the show, and how to keep the core of what The Daily Show is while also adding my own spin to it and breathing new life into it. It’s a show that was invented a couple of decades ago now, which is crazy to think about, before social media and all these things. I like to think I have a strong point of view and a very good ability to write jokes quickly, and I think that’s what the show needs. If given the opportunity I’d love to take it, but if not, I hope it goes to someone who can make it the show it really can be. I think it’s valuable. For the longest time, especially with Jon [Stewart], the show was factually accurate. And, even though it’s a comedy show, it tends to be more factually accurate than any news show. I think there’s a way to do that, make it funny, and give people the information they want and need without coddling one side or the other. I think both sides are doing a terrible job right now and a huge disservice to the people. This is the trick of nations for as long as time: You keep the two sides fighting so they’re too busy to go after the people in power.