Female TV comics brandish fantastic weapons: bravery, wit, self-deprecation

Comedian Abby McEnany only just got her own Wikipedia page this year, a month after her Work in Progress debuted last December. Given how accomplished the series is, it is astonishing that these eight episodes were the first she ever wrote and acted for television. The 51-year-old acknowledges the concept is semi autobiographical, and self-identifies her always-in-a-slight-panic character Abby as a “fat queer dyke”. McEnany and co-writer Tim Mason have on-screen Abby working through past and ongoing anguish — of the mental, physical, familial, and professional varieties — with some help from that beautiful nonsense we call love.

In McEnany's world, queer, lesbian, trans and non-binary characters are cast in important roles. Abby's new lover Chris (Theo Germaine) is a trans man, a first for her. The protagonists' struggles, which include but are not limited to gender and sexuality, are depicted in a way that embraces confusion and erases shame. This is unsurprising because producer Lily Wachowski is one half of the Wachowski siblings, who both came out as trans women and have addressed questions of identity in their oeuvre (Sense8, Bound). Although Work in Progress is streaming on Hotstar, the platform's interface hides it in the back of beyond very effectively. Imagine being a talent discovered late in life, only to have your labour of love stowed away buried by bad algorithms. 

Abby is funny, still talks to her dead therapist, has fluctuating weight, and a boring temp job — hardly tropes that have never appeared in American series before but the makers' flourishes make them special. Among their artful touches are a finite number of almonds, a great joke involving Lyft, and Abby's confrontation and, later, friendship with SNL star Julia Sweeney, whose insensitive character Pat had made teenagehood especially difficult for the protagonist. 

Abby McEnany in a still from Work in Progress

The series was born from a storytelling show McEnany had been performing in Chicago, the home of improv comedy in the US. She shares her alma mater Second City is the same as that of UNCLEAR Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, and Bill Murray. Like herself in real life, her character also deals with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. She glosses over her problems in public, discusses them earnestly with confidantes, and dissects them frenetically in private.

The brave vulnerability underlining this show reminds is reminiscent of Tig Notaro who rose to fame after performing a set about having breast cancer, and Australian Hannah Gadsby, who got her due only recently after speaking of why comedy isn't always the most truthful way to explore personal pains. In other ways, it brings to mind the work of Maria Bamford, who extracts humour equally from the cacophony and the stillness of her bipolar condition. One result was Lady Dynamite, a wild, and gentle, fever dream-like Netflix series starring Bamford and based on her life. She also found success relatively late in her career of some 20 years doing stand up and playing the minor part of a recovering addict in Arrested Development. 

She had remained mostly a comic's comic, even if her The Maria Bamford Show, a low-budget web series, and Homemade Chistmas Stand-Up, a comedy special performed and taped on the living room couch with her two pugs, pushed boundaries. A mix of body comedy and funny voices let her sneak in the heavier stuff about mental illness and violent thoughts. Lady Dynamite had on-screen Maria setting off on a doggedly upbeat search for healing and love, post-rehab. “That's not weird at all,” she says cheerfully, comforting one of her particularly awful dates. “I miss the energy of mania!” Some of that mania is glimpsed as her show travels back and forth into an energy-filled early career, the grey-and-blue depressive period in an asylum, and colourful present-day positivity. 

McEnany and Bamford, slowed by bad periods, have earned their big moments. Their Work in Progress and Lady Dynamite establish also the significance of support systems. The cast of characters including parents, siblings, friends and coworkers helps Abby and Maria along, at times gracefully and at other times ineptly. The overarching theme is balm-like: That it is okay to not have everything figured out. No one else knows what they're doing either.

ranjita.ganesan@bsmail.in