I just got back from the Edinburgh Fringe where I saw, among a mountain of others, the inimitable comedian, actress, and millennial-scream-masquerading-as-a-cabaret-singer that is Catherine Cohen. This was the second time I’ve seen her now and it was just as thrilling and piercing of an experience as the first. She deserves the world’s attention, but honestly I’m not sure the world even just barely deserves to have her.
Her schtick (if we’re squeezing her into the phonebook of Fringe acts) is simple: she dresses up millennial rage, sexy confessions, and “Why am I like this?” woes into a sequinned, come-hither cabaret act. The songs—which are, by the way, properly addicting pop songs—are gruesomely honest, with lyrics that make you guffaw and laugh but then wince at how accurately such a foundational, human truth you assumed would be kept burrowed deep inside of your own selfish, bashful self could be so easily excavated by Cohen, tossed around, and kicked aside with one of her white patent boots.
She doesn’t stop. There’s a tendency for comedians to present their kernel of truth about the world or human nature and dance around it, spend minutes on the dissection of the thing, and come at it from every angle, filling an hour, milking their One Keen Observation for everything it’s got, but Cohen doesn’t. Nothing is precious. She moves at a rapid pace, stomping through her routine with no time to spare, ploughing ahead to her next song or her next joke with ad-libs and on-the-fly crowd work stuffed in between without fear or trepidation or losing the thread or alienating a crowd because it’s 2019 for hellsake and there’s just not enough time. She doesn’t second guess herself for a second. She doesn’t flinch.
This was the Fringe and so the crowd was a mix of everything. There were tourists and students and locals and young people and old people and people wandering in with no idea what they were in for and people like me who had seen the light of Catherine Cohen and were desperate for more. Like all Fringe shows there was a slight tension in the air. At one point a row of very bro-y university-age men were sniggering amongst themselves over some aside and Catherine paused. She turned her eyes to them and cooed into the mic. “What are you boys talking about over there?” The guys jostled each other the way they do and laughed uneasily, but their response wasn’t required, Cohen already had her set of props. The boys were already in the volcano. She danced around them, cutting into them—the idea of them, the essence of a row of rowdy straight boys—with her signature wit and seduction that honestly fails all description and has to be seen in person to be believed. She segued effortlessly into her next song about needing a man who, “Doesn’t care if I live or die.”
There’s a push-pull relationship in comedy right now of the expectation to be self-effacing, but not too clever; to be aware and political, but not too self-righteous, not too cloying; to be smart and self-regulating and to really “get it” but not to come off as too cool, too alienating, too satisfied with how much you’ve figured out your own neuroses. Those rules don’t exist at a Catherine Cohen show. She’s burned the whole thing to the ground. She wants to be famous, she wants to be thin and pretty and loved, she wants you to be obsessed with her and she will tell you these things outright, with no dressage, with no set up, with no punchline, even, with zero self-doubt or even the slightest hint of parody. These are the things she wants and you will worship her, you will agree with her when she says “Wow, I have an amazing voice,” you will believe her when she drinks from her water bottle and says “This is just a light little snack” and you’ll be so entranced by her at this point that you’ll believe anything she tells you about the world and how it works because it’s hers.
You walk away from a Catherine Cohen show worried. Is there a place for this kind of thing in the world? Is there an audience outside of comedy clubs and tastemaker websites and five-minute late night sets where Cohen can actually be a superstar—the kind of superstar she kitschily says she wants to be but also because she flat-out deserves to be one?
There’s a sizeable population that will cast her off as too crass, too inappropriate, too selfish, too gross. And in the waning days of meet-me-in-the-middle diplomacy, can the kind of people that are instantly allergic to this sort of thing become Cohen converts?
It’s a hard question to ask because it requires a certain amount of staring into the abyss of America—what we value and how we value it; what our relationship is to intimate truths and how we honor them or avoid them or if we even recognize them at all. But the magical thing about Catherine Cohen is that that is where her comedy genius lies. No, not in dancing on the edge of the abyss, not towing the line—that would be all too easy for her. No, you can find her very much deep down in the abyss itself. Stare hard enough into it and you’ll see her dancing down at the bottom, preaching to whoever’s there to listen.