Michelle Buteau’s Caring Comedy

Kindness is comedy’s boring first cousin, the very thing that most standup comedians and their rampant ids want to get away from, in order to be their worst and thus their funniest selves. Kindness suggests that there’s a moral universe out there, in which we’re all connected to one another, whereas standup is a willed isolation: a solo performer on a stage taking on the world. Standup artists like to stick pins in the voodoo dolls of convention and sentiment: “My kids are so ugly,” “I hate my dog,” “My marriage sucks,” and so on. And yet sentiment—even a little sentimentality—provides the framework for the actress and comedian Michelle Buteau’s new, eighty-minute show, “Full Heart, Tight Jeans.” (The show is touring through December, with a stop at New York’s Beacon Theatre on October 4th.)

When I saw “Full Heart, Tight Jeans” at City Winery in Chicago in early September, Buteau, who is forty-six and the mother of four-year-old twins, made a point, two-thirds of the way into her act, of criticizing Dave Chappelle for his notorious comments about trans people, including Caitlyn Jenner. (In his 2021 Netflix special, “The Closer,” Chappelle said, “Caitlyn Jenner was voted Woman of the Year. Her first year as a woman. Ain’t that something? Beat every bitch in Detroit; she’s better than all of you. Never even had a period.”) Buteau’s usually bright face fell a bit as she called Chappelle out. “You can make jokes and not disparage people,” she said, and paused before going on. “So he’s making millions off that. I want to make millions of dollars making people feel safe and seen and happy.”

It’s a risky proposition, the making-people-happy part. Buteau’s joyfulness—her freckle-faced charm and her robust desire to be out there, feeling and giving love—is not really in vogue. More common is the dystopian comedy, filled with crankiness and hopelessness, of such artists as the talented John Early and Jerrod Carmichael, two slightly younger, queer performers who affect disaffection as they call out family and friends or put them down. (At the start of this year’s HBO special “John Early: Now More Than Ever,” Early introduces his “stupid fucking parents.”) In their routines, there’s little love for their bodies, or for anyone who might want to get close to them: we’re all jerks. Buteau, on the other hand, treats herself—and us—like a snack.

On the night I saw her, she was wearing a black faille skirt, faux alligator ankle boots, and a white T-shirt with the words “Wild Feminist” printed on the front, knotted at the waist. Taking the mike on the small stage, she began by saying how pleased she was to be with us. Then she had the stage manager turn up the house lights so that she could “see who I’m fucking with. Make some noise if you’re over forty.” A big cheer. Buteau smiled. “That’s the extra-income shit right there. Like, I use all the good expensive candles.” The audience was fairly mixed demographically, but Buteau was especially happy about all the Black women in the room. “I love the brown titties around me,” she said. “I feel safe.” Thus emboldened, she took a sip from her drink before focussing on a white guy sitting near the stage: “Your name is Tad? That’s the whitest shit I ever heard.” The house lights went down, and Buteau told us, with a not at all smug laugh, “I’m trying to be funny—that’s how I get through the pain.”

But what pain? As Buteau sometimes rambled, seeing what would stick, I thought of her peer Tiffany Haddish—they’re about the same age—and how Haddish’s standup is a display of a sensibility, how she wears her loneliness like foundation under her rouge. Watching Haddish perform, you have the sense that you’re seeing a little girl who’s been broken by love time and again but knows there’s some good stuff on the other side of that heartbreak. By contrast, Buteau kicks life’s broken pieces to the curb, and encourages folks—especially women—not to settle. At one point during her set, she asked female audience members if they were in relationships, and then if they were in unsatisfactory relationships. When a woman told her that she was seeing a guy who was dating without “intention,” Buteau went silent, then—just the kind of sister-woman you want to talk to in moments like that—she told the woman to get out of there. Fuck that. “Open your heart and legs to love,” she counselled. “You never know what’s going to happen.” When Buteau met her husband, she said, it was supposed to be a one-night stand. But then “he put that shit in me and it was like an avatar—oh, yes, I see you.”

Buteau, who was born in New Jersey to Caribbean parents, is a luscious wisecracker. She makes proud reference, frequently, to her big body and big hair, and her voice, a little tri-state nasal, is slyly incredulous, captivating in its familiarity. (She’s her generation’s Judy Holliday and would make a terrific Billie Dawn in “Born Yesterday,” Holliday’s signature role.) Buteau has a great capacity for physical comedy, too. In her superb 2020 Netflix special, “Welcome to Buteaupia,” she talks to the audience about finding love. “You guys have a type, right?” she says. “But you don’t even realize that you are somebody else’s type. . . . I realized way too late in life that I am an achievable Beyoncé for government workers.” Here she pauses, and does a few Beyoncé moves, shaking her mane from side to side. “And if they’re, like, old Black government workers named Lawrence, Dennis, Curtis, Otis—anything ending in ‘is’—they love me. I can’t go to a Veterans Day parade—my booty ain’t safe. She is not safe. They looking at me like they want me to motorboat the P.T.S.D. off their face, and I’ll do it, ’cause I am a patriot. . . . Thoughts and prayers. Thank you for your service.”

But in “Full Heart, Tight Jeans” sexiness, or the job of sex, is replaced, by talk about Buteau’s kids, her “two emotional rotisserie chickens.” What makes her stories about mothering the best part of the show is that she balances the love with the reality of what goes into caring—and how that caring can sometimes not be its own reward. “Baby girl gives the energy of a fifty-two-year-old Black woman who works at the D.M.V.,” Buteau said of her daughter, Hazel. Once, when the family was travelling, someone in the airport “looked at her passport and said, ‘Is she looking through my soul?’ Probably.” Pause. “And then Hazel said, ‘Mama, why do your elbows look old?’ She’s right. They look haunted.” Buteau’s son, Otis, on the other hand, has “the energy of a tired man holding his wife’s purse at Macy’s,” she said. “His first sentence was ‘Everybody calm down.’ ” Buteau is glad that her kids are cute, she added, because there are some parents who have two jobs: “to take care of their kids and pretend they’re not ugly.” But, even as she jokes about ugly kids and overworked parents, you know how much she feels for all of them, parents and children held captive by their love for one another, as she is by hers—even when Otis says, the way he did one day in SoHo, while waiting to cross the street, “It’s O.K., Mama. The white man says we can cross now.” Buteau, looking around at the largely white crowd on the sidewalk, said, “We just saw ‘12 Years a Slave.’ We’re big Brad Pitt fans. Big.”

Buteau’s more caustic bits did a lot to balance out her sweetness, but nothing could diminish her essential kindness, which I hope audiences won’t confuse with Hannah Gadsby-like piety. What interests Buteau is how you build a community not out of sameness but out of difference (even if the different ones are your kids). In Chicago, she demanded that we “stand up for people who don’t have a voice.” In “Survival of the Thickest,” a new, scripted half-hour sitcom on Netflix (loosely inspired by her 2020 essay collection of the same title), she does just that. The TV show gives Buteau a fictional character—Mavis Beaumont, a body-positive stylist with a cracked roommate, good friends, and a queer community she calls her own—whom she can endow with her interiority and her born-to-do-this comedic skills, free from the constraints of standup, which can limit artists, even as they push against those limitations. As Mavis, Buteau can indulge in the transformative energy that narrative and metaphor give her, and she gifts us, in turn, ideas that are too complex for standup, feelings that can be conveyed only in a closeup, in a gesture, or through interactions with others. Onscreen, Buteau doesn’t have to ask who we are or why we’re there; we tune in for her extraordinary presence, and all the make-believe, joy, and tenderness that come with it. ♦