E37 | Ms Pat - Y'all wanna hear something crazy (stand-up comedy)

<p>Ms. Pat is actively registering that some of the crowd isn’t responding the way she wants them to, and in several sections of the hour, it’s not hard to blame them. Some of the jokes are either overfamiliar premises or executions that don’t quite work the way she wants them to. She does a section on why there are so many white parents with adopted Black children, and so few Black parents with adopted white children, and while the observation is promising, the payoff is underwhelming. The reverse is true for her joke about Black school shooters, which has an effective punchline but otherwise feels underbaked. At one point, she throws out a Larry Bird reference, appears to believe some in the audience don’t understand her point, then corrects, “Larry Bird, the white Michael Jordan. C’mon, goddamnit, we ain’t that young!”</p><p>Some of these lines feel deliberate, like practiced retorts for when the audience protests too much. It makes sense when so much of the material toys with what the audience views as appropriate material to laugh about. “Open your mind; this shit is funny!” she says after a joke about being pregnant at 13 and confronted with her 21-year-old boyfriend’s wife, who’s asking her to get an abortion. But there are enough interjections like this, and they’re specific enough, that they begin to look like honest frustration. When she eventually arrives at a line about what she imagines lesbian Black sex to sound like (“I assume when two Black vaginas get together, it sounds like you’re stepping on a bag of Doritos”), there’s one particularly notable laugh from the warmer side of the room. “Can you spread some of that shit over here, sir?” she says, gesturing as though she can distribute the laughs more evenly around the room.</p><p>It’s rare for a special to acknowledge when jokes don’t land, and even though there are several Ms. Pat jokes that would probably have done better with more revisions, there’s something thrilling about feeling the range of responses. It feels right, especially in