Laurie Kilmartin knew that naming her new stand-up special Cis Woke Grief Slut might be a little provocative. “I’m open to hate watches!” the comedian and longtime Conan writer jokes in this episode of The Last Laugh podcast.
No stranger to controversy, Kilmartin also breaks down why she decided to tweet an incredibly dark series of jokes as her mother was dying of COVID in 2020; opens up about the experience of receiving death threats from right-wingers after making an abortion joke on MSNBC; and explains why she prefers reluctant, involuntary laughter to the type of agenda-affirming applause that currently dominates late-night television.
“I see what works in comedy now, and it’s not that you like a comedian,” Kilmartin says. “The only comedians that trend on Twitter are trending because people hate them. And then people defend them and it just becomes an argument. So yeah, please argue over me.”
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Kilmartin opens her new special (available to rent or buy now on all major platforms) with a 9/11 joke. It’s her way of helping prepare viewers for just how dark the special is going to get—especially once she starts finding humor in the experience of watching her elderly mother die of COVID-19 through an iPad screen in the fall of 2020.
“This country has tried as much as possible to forget the pandemic happened, and I like to annoyingly remind people that it did,” she tells me. “And it took my mom. And some of you people out in the audience probably never masked. And you took—maybe not my mom, but you helped take somebody else’s mom.” That’s what explains the “anger” boiling under the surface of her otherwise sunny onstage persona: “It happened. It was real.”
After more than three decades in comedy, Kilmartin explains that she developed “a separate part of the brain that just takes the notebook out immediately when something happens, even if it’s bad to you or to your family.” That was the part of her brain that took over when her mother was suffering through her final days.
As she put it on Twitter and then again on stage, “My mother was a Trump supporter who died of COVID, so the coroner ruled her death a suicide.”
Kilmartin learned early on that there was a trick she could use to get audiences to laugh at a joke like that. “If I say something dark and I smile afterwards, it really helps,” she acknowledges reluctantly. “And I kind of forget that sometimes. It’s almost annoying. Do I have to show you my teeth? That’s what it feels like. ‘All right, here’s my teeth, you feel better? Good. Can I tell the next joke?’”
But even a smile probably would not have prevented the backlash to the joke she told about a woman’s right to choose during an appearance on MSNBC. It was Mother’s Day weekend 2022, just a few days after the bombshell Supreme Court leak that spelled the end of Roe v. Wade, and Kilmartin was invited to Zoom into Ayman Mohyeldin’s show.
“I would like to find out who the leaker is so I can make sweet love to that person,” she said that night. “Because that person is a hero to me. And if I get pregnant during our love-making, I will joyfully abort our fetus and let them know.”
That “dumb little abortion joke,” as she describes it, “got clipped out by Steven Crowder and that entire insane, viral, right-wing Facebook clan. And by the next morning, someone had posted my address on Facebook.” She became the focus of an especially enraged Hannity segment on Fox News that also featured former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Lara Trump (or “Of Eric,” as she calls her in the special): “Just these three absolutely pointless people discussing me was unbelievable.”
“It was really kind of overwhelming,” Kilmartin continues. “And for a while I felt like someone’s going to come kill me. Somebody sent me pictures of my house, which was weird. And then after like three days, it just sort of dissipated and went away. I think that’s what happens, is they’re just this swarm of bees and they’re directed by their dumb Facebook leaders to go after this person. And that can only last for so long, and then they move on to another thing to be enraged about. But it was pretty intense.”
Kilmartin certainly doesn’t regret her joke, but she does recognize that it was never going to have any real effect on the issue about which she clearly cares deeply. “I don’t think comedy and dunking on people fixes things at all. It just keeps people where they are, angry,” she says. “So even just being part of that back-and-forth ecosystem is not good for a comic or comedy.”
“I enjoy a joke that makes me laugh, not one that makes me cheer,” she explains. “And it’s really hard. It’s hard to write a joke that gets a good laugh. A laugh is involuntary, and makes you feel giggly and good all inside. Those are hard to manufacture.”
There are many times during Kilmartin’s new special where you can hear the audience laughing in spite of themselves, or “against their will,” as she puts it, at something they perhaps don’t think they should be laughing at.
“Yeah, that’s what I like,” she says with a smile. “I like folded arms slowly unfolding and then just going, ‘All right, you got me.’”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
