laff 2012
Skinny Bitchin' with Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting: Sketch duo brings dark comedyand poop jokes to the Ladies Are Funny Festival
In one sketch performed by comedy duo Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting at a past Ladies Are Funny Festival, a bearded mountain man named Salty Doug discovered that his faithful cat Cougar was actually his brother, disguised as his pet in order to kill him.
While it’s hard to explain what made this sketch unbelievably funny, it exemplifies the types of characters that troupe members Katie Hartman and Leah Rudick love best.
In a series of video-chat and email interviews with CultureMap, both Katie Hartman and Leah Rudick (mountain man and cat, respectively) described their comedy as “character-based” and their sensibility as “dark” and “grotesque.” The two women’s willingness to transform themselves into gross, weird, mean and yet often touching characters will be familiar for those who have been watching them perform at LAFF for the past four years. The duo first came to LAFF in 2008, the festival’s second year, mere months after they started performing together as a troupe.
Their freakish characters are grounded by their strong rapport on stage, where Hartman crackles with ferocious energy and Rudick radiates wide-eyed neurosis.
As Rudick says, “We’ve grown up with LAFF.”
Indeed, Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting’s annual helping of weird has enjoyed a warm reception in a city that, if you believe the hype, loves that sort of thing. Their freakish characters are grounded by their strong rapport on stage, where Hartman crackles with ferocious energy and Rudick radiates wide-eyed neurosis. Having met in acting classes at Sarah Lawrence College, they have had seven years to perfect this symbiosis. Separately, Hartman and Rudick are two delightfully funny, wry and charming women; together on stage, they are riveting.
On Saturday night Hartman and Rudick will show Austin their most ambitious project to date, a full-length multimedia narrative called “The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino.” The character of Deeno Domino comes from an earlier sketch based on the reality show Toddlers and Tiaras — which, if you haven’t seen it, uses feigned horror at the exploitative world of child pageantry to exploit children further by putting them on TV before they hit kindergarten.
Hartman and Rudick, fascinated by what becomes of these tragic little monsters after the season finale, follow title character "Deena Domino" down the path from poopy pull-ups to dysfunctional adulthood. As in the original sketch, Hartman plays the terrifying Deena and Rudick plays her equally loathsome stage mother, but the two have added a parade of bizarre characters to the story.
Hartman called it “a rumination on celebrity and the destruction of a person — but funny,” and Rudick describes the protagonist as “kind of horrible."
"But hopefully we strike a balance where the audience doesn’t despise her," Rudick adds. "Because it’s also a thing like, is she horrible because she’s horrible or is she horrible because society’s made her horrible?”
Perhaps the same question could be asked for all of what Hartman calls the troupe’s “shitty girl” characters, the female jerks and freaks, mothers and daughters and roommates, toward which they often gravitate.
On Saturday night Hartman and Rudick will show Austin their most ambitious project to date, a full-length multimedia narrative called “The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino.”
Hartman and Rudick both seem a little wary when asked about women in comedy. They are eloquent on the topic, but with a weariness that comes from having been forced to think about the issue more than they ever wanted to. “It’s not really something that I ever considered until I started being questioned about it a lot,” Rudick sighs.
Hartman agrees. "I’d like to say that audiences don’t care about a comedian’s gender,” she says, but both women cited instances of enthusiastic audience members approaching them after shows, only to express amazement at an all-female troupe being funny.
“Because 'women aren’t funny,'” Rudick explained. “It’s as blatant as that.” Hartman added that both men and women do this “on the reg,” saying: “It makes me want to murder humanity.”
At the end of the day, both comics agree that the most important way to engage with the exhausting conversation about women in comedy is simply to push themselves forward as writers and performers. “That in itself is a feminist act,” states Hartman, getting serious for a moment, then relaxing back into her drink with a laugh.
“The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino” has certainly pushed the performers beyond their previous limits. “It’s dark and goes to weird places and we even have a musical number that I composed,” Hartman says. “I’m scared to death to sing in front of people, but that fear helped create one of the best moments in the show.”
Rudick laughs. “I don’t want to give this away, but one of our favorite scenes from the show, something really gross happens. We were trying to figure out where the scene was going, and then we both just looked at each other and said, ‘This is going to happen!' . . . We get so excited, we're writing and it's like we're one mind." She smiles warmly at the memory.
Earlier, Hartman had described the same moment in almost exactly the same way. Clearly these bitches were meant to be together.
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Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting headline the Ladies Are Funny Festival on Saturday, May 12 at 11 p.m. at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. Tickets are available online.