What do you do when you’re in the middle of a smear test and the doctor pops up from the business end with his little ET head and tells you he voted for Trump? In 2 Dope Queens (Sky Comedy) Michelle Buteau has the right answer: “I farted a little bit. Even my fart sounded like a cry for help. Like: ‘Why? Why?’ I’m like: ‘Sorry doc, but this is what democracy smells like.’”
For the uninitiated, 2 Dope Queens is the creation of the US comics Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson, who brought their hit podcast of the same name to the stage of the Kings theatre in Brooklyn for the first of four HBO specials. As well as showcasing their double act, they feature standup routines from the likes of Buteau, who is a comedian and the host of the US reality series The Circle.
You may know Williams not just from the podcast but from her work as Daily Show correspondent with Jon Stewart and for her role in Lena Dunham’s Girls, if not for her tame 2017 romcom The Incredible Jessica James. As for Robinson, she made the superb podcast Sooo Many White Guys, premised on having people of colour as guests.
As for the TV series, not all the gags are gynaecological but most are bracing – especially if, as I am, you’re pale, male and increasingly stale. 2 Dope Queens resembles Live at the Apollo, if Michael McIntyre were replaced by two clever, foul-mouthed blerds. Foul-mouthed what now? “Blerds” means black nerds, which is how Williams and Robinson self-identify. They call themselves Coco Khaleesis, in homage to the dragon queen from Game of Thrones.
They’re like Eric and Ernie, daffy and adorable, but with the kind of material that would make Morecambe and Wise’s writers reach for the smelling salts and Urban Dictionary.
“You know what really burns my toast?” Robinson asks Williams. The dope queens are listing things white men need to apologise for. “Your avocado toast,” clarifies Jessica (the pair tease each other endlessly about which one is the more bourgeois). What burns Phoebe’s toast is drunk guys on 2am subway trains. They look like they’re sleeping but are actually masturbating. “This has happened to you multiple times?” says Jessica, working her mock incredulity.
White women need to apologise, too. “White girls, they’re like: ‘Wish I could say to someone ‘Kiss my black ass’,” complains Robinson. ‘But that’s like 0.00001% of black experience.”
Both are knowing about the fact that they are performing their banter for an overwhelmingly white audience. When Williams complains about living in a West Village apartment big enough only for a queen-sized bed, Robinson calls her out for privileged whining. “How dare yo’ ass drag me in front of a majority white people situation,” Williams retorts.
That disjunction between audience and performers reminded me of Lenny Henry’s show at the Birmingham Hippodrome, in which the comedian flattered his white audience’s embrace of diversity before diving into more difficult material. He did a bit about how racists pasted human excrement on his door knocker when he was married to a white woman (Dawn French) and managed brilliantly to transmute his outrage into comedy.
The dope queens don’t get down like that. There is a moment when they might. Phoebe suggests Thomas Jefferson should apologise. “Sally was not his lover,” agrees Jessica. But this was slightly too gnomic to make much sense. (The slave-owning president was known for taking one of his plantation slaves, Sally Hemings, as his mistress. But that didn’t make her a lover, rather a sexually violated slave.)
Each of the four episodes of 2 Dope Queens is constructed around a theme. The first is called New York, which is why Jon Stewart was given a blind tasting of cold pizza from Queens and Brooklyn. Of upcoming episodes, my favourite is called Hair and includes a strangely likable Sarah Jessica Parker asking questions about black hair, and Black Panther star Lupita Nyong’o showing the hosts how to do box braids. Not since the salon sequences in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah have I learned so much.
It has taken this show three years to hit British screens, which is a shame. But it’s worth catching up with, especially at the moments when funny, clever women such as Michelle Buteau stick it to The Man. The right to fart in Trump voters’ faces isn’t protected speech under the first amendment, but it should be.
