Melinda Hill
Inappropriate
Comedy Dynamics, A Nacelle Company
Melinda Hill’s latest comedy album (and it’s available to watch on Apple TV) is bold and funny and deep – and speaks to her development as a joke-writer and deliverer, but also arrives at exactly the right time.
Hill had a series of viral tweets recently when she challenged Louis CK’s return to the stage. Her hashtag, MeTooSoon, went batshit-crazy overnight and the media swooped in to catch up and cash in on social media. So that is explored in the start of the show – but it leads to unpacking of trauma, her own, and the idea of trauma as the basis for everything from male comedians (still) using bar stools as a big-dick prop in badly timed and underwritten jokes to the general weariness in tone that is creeping in over so many of our conversations online and in the real world.
Inappropriate, is a tough and hilarious comedy hour that is jam-packed with laughs but really changes the things that are funny in this world. Hill does not shy from being self-effacing. She doesn’t flinch in exposing the toxic and frankly stupid things men say – nor from presenting herself as the butt of some of the jokes.
It’s a masterclass in fact.
“Being called a cunt can only sustain a relationship for so long” – is my favourite context-less one-liner from this – and the only spoiler I intend to offer.
You should watch, or listen to this special for the full context and for the full laughs. It’s a great show from a comic that’s been doing the work across the last decade and showing steady and regular progression with each and every appearance. This is the best set she’s done to date. It’s a wonderful and brutal examination of how we are so often so horrible to people and how it all comes from hating ourselves first and foremost, from having difficulties that are deep-seated, and even if they seem dormant they forever haunt.
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