Kate Berlant stumbled into her first stand-up routine during her ninth-grade play. Having forgotten the lyrics to a song—which, she admits, she had never memorized—she came up with a solution: improvise a series of gestures through the entire song instead of singing a word. “It was improvised, and it killed,” Berlant tells me from her home studio in Los Angeles. “That was my first time doing something that felt like stand-up, but I’ve been the class clown forever.”
The routine could have come straight out of one of her zany stand-up specials or on-screen performances. Berlant, 39, brings a natural theatricality to her comedy, often spiraling into improvisational digressions and dispensing with the traditional punch line. Her absurdist style gained a following at comedy clubs in the 2010s, leading to her first special, Cinnamon in the Wind, an almost entirely off-the-cuff performance filmed in 2019 and released in 2022. That same year, Berlant teamed up with her longtime friend John Early to produce the sketch-comedy hour Would It Kill You to Laugh?, where the two comedians play fictionalized, famous versions of themselves. In 2022, she staged a one-woman, meta-fictional, absurd comedy show, KATE, at the Connelly Theater. This year, she starred in Early’s campy full-length melodrama film Maddie’s Secret. Her second stand-up special, Parmesan, out October 19, takes a more deliberate approach. Filmed at Los Angeles’s Plaza Nightclub, the almost entirely scripted monologue reflects on stand-up comedy itself, the end of the world, coming out to her father, and her overwhelming (and relatable) addiction to her phone.
“You are humiliated [to join in on] the structure of social media,” she jokes. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, this is just what the world is now.’ ” Berlant gives her screen time a lot of thought in her special because, like the rest of us, she can’t stop scrolling through the endless reels. Only recently, she says, has she allowed herself to post clips of her stand-up, despite how vulnerable it makes her feel. On my call with Berlant this month, she tells me she just ended a six-week social-media cleanse, an attempt to find some peace of mind away from the feed. When asked what she’d been doing instead, she says: “I’m on the RealReal!” More earnestly, she adds, “You look out a window, you stare at the wall, and it’s incredible.” Like any of us, Berlant is grappling with screen time and its horrors.
“There is no balance,” Berlant insists. “Carl Jung talked about how balance is not achievable and not a goal to strive for. It’s not possible! I go on these social-media cleanses, as I call them. I think, ‘I’m not returning again. I’m done!’ I really believe it. Now, I’ve relapsed so hard. I thought, when the special comes out, I’m not going to read the comments, and I’m not going to engage. How embarrassing! I’m going to be, as I say in the special, tied off on my couch, [mainlining social media] just directly into the veins!”
