Cara Howe / Netflix
Wolf is having a media moment after taking down Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Being a feminist these days requires a thick skin and a healthy sense of humor. Of course, it is necessary to root out the sexism and racism that saturates our society’s white, patriarchal status quo — and doing the work in a calm, dignified, academic manner is certainly admirable! But taking on that burden can be exhausting, and at times, completely demoralizing. And I’ve met enough wilfully ignorant jerks to know that sometimes — maybe even most times — the high road goes right over their heads.
Maybe that’s why I love Michelle Wolf — and her new Netflix show, The Break with Michelle Wolf — so much. She says all the things women are not supposed to say, and she does it without apology. Her fierce, funny, no-holds-barred feminism is a refreshing antidote to the poison pill of respectability politics and currently the best example of an entertainer speaking truth to power. Also, her jokes are extremely on point. When you’re punching up, low blows are wickedly satisfying.
The Break, which debuted May 27, is a 30-minute talk show loosely modeled after the standard late-night format. It starts with a stand-up monologue (Wolf is very good at this), a few sketches, and some amusing fake advertisements, including one for an Amazon Alexa that for some reason demands users to feed it lunch meat. There’s also a one-minute, woman-centric parody segment called “Sports Smash,” so named because, as Wolf reminds us, “no one wants to talk about feminism for more than … any amount of time.”
I wanted to applaud when she used the segment to ask the question, “Do women have to support other women?” and answer with a definitive “Absolutely not!” before calling out the likes of Camille Cosby and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, and the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. She also takes aim at new CIA chief Gina Haspel and doesn’t miss the opportunity to roast White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders (again).
Wolf’s show isn’t always explicitly political, and everything is fair game. “I’m not gonna try to teach you anything, or discuss political policy with you,” she says in the first episode. “I guess I’m like a cable news show in that way.” She poked fun at the royal wedding, Elon Musk, those stupid Geico commercials and the supermarket that refused to write “cum” on a graduation cake that was supposed to say “Summa Cum Laude.” She also ripped into accused sexual predator (and unsolicited cinnamon roll recipe provider) Mario Batali. I literally screamed when she said he “looks like what happened if the Macy’s Parade had a #MeToo float. He looks like what a tuba sounds like.” This is high art.
I’ll admit that Wolf was not on my radar before her scorched-earth takedown of the Trump administration at the April 29 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, but I watched with intrigue as she launched her own mini news cycle. There was hand-wringing and pearl-clutching as people on the right (and virtue-signalers on the left) declared Wolf’s jokes “vulgar,” “raunchy” and “downright nasty.”
I was confused. Are we living in the damn upside down? Wolf absolutely killed it at the dinner. And she kills it on her new show. And if you don’t like it? Remember what she said on that now infamous night: “It’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up — unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000.”
