Mrs. Claus, Mariah Carey, BenDeLaCreme, and Jinkx Monsoon. To a certain branch of pop culture enthusiasts (as in: me), these are the faces on the Mount Rushmore of Christmas content. The first two should be no surprise—though I’ve always wondered what Mrs. Claus might think of Mimi being crowned the Queen of Christmas. Drag queens BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon, two of the biggest stars to come out of RuPaul’s Drag Race, may be the newest additions to the monument. But for some holiday lovers (again: me), they are quickly becoming one of the most favorite seasonal traditions.
The duo star in The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show, a musical comedy tour that they launched in 2018 and have produced a retooled and updated version of each year since. This year, they’ll hit 30 cities across the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Based on my experience at the show in years past, that means that Jinkx and DeLa are about to incite an international laugh riot.
They’ve perfected the balance of playing the daffy, ditzy clowns, always ready to pull faces and toss off dick jokes, but also the smartest people in the room. You have to be the latter, after all, to pull off something as unbelievably silly as this show. Still, silly undersells this. There is something unexpectedly profound about the proceedings, which both implicitly and explicitly embrace the power of the queer community and their allies turning a theater into a safe space to celebrate unabashedly—with their chosen family at a time of year that can be fraught for so many people.
Last year’s Holiday Show took place as the act of drag itself became a political lightning rod. Amidst their cheeky showtunes and lewd jokes, Jinkx and DeLa addressed the crowd with an earnest, poignant speech about the invigorating, activating bravery of a crowd simply showing up and existing together at yet another time when certain vocal conservative contingents want the community to be silent and disappear. As a piece of theater, it’s cathartic and distracting when that’s sorely needed, but without ever dismissing the reality of a LGBT community under attack in a world filled with hate.
The premise of this year’s show is that “Jinkx and DeLa decided to take the year off, exhausted from their investment in Christmas after many, many years,” DeLa told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed in a Zoom interview alongside Jinkx. “But we find that the show itself does not allow us to escape. So we are now trapped in the tradition that we have created in sort of a Faustian, Looney Tunes-influenced Poltergeist-White Christmas mash-up.”
“Imagine the sisters from White Christmas check into the lodge and then it becomes Poltergeist,” Jinkx added, laughing. “The only difference being our show will actually be about Christmas and the holidays ,whereas the movie White Christmas is barely about Christmas.”
Now that the tour is officially underway, we spoke with Jinkx and DeLa about this year’s show and the power of drag at volatile times.
I know you’ve done this several times before, but it must feel odd to have spent the most of the fall being fully immersed in Christmas vibes.
Jinkx: We are used to it but it never stops being a little funny when we’re going through a Halloween Horror maze at Universal Studios and I’m thinking about, “How can I make a sexy song about Krampus?” Which, actually, the two are not mutually exclusive.
DeLa: Now, if anything, it seems like Halloween is starting to creep into our writing process. I think we’ve gotten so accustomed to starting to think about Christmas in July that mostly I’m thrown off when other people are bringing up other holidays. I’m like, “Wait, let's focus on the task at hand.”
With the tour becoming more successful each year, I imagine it’s a challenge to try to top the previous year’s show.
Ben: Yes and no. We definitely are always figuring out how to respond to the world around us and what’s happening that year, and continue to find new ways to address our general feelings about the holidays and how we want to gather community. But I also think the more we do this, the more we trust ourselves and each other. Jinkx and I just more and more have let go of what we think we're supposed to be making, and really just try to make ourselves and each other laugh. I think that authenticity is what our audiences respond to— just running as far off the rails as we need to in order to talk about the content that really interests us.
Jinkx: Yeah. Last year, we went full throttle with a very silly and weird idea, that had kind of a sci-fi bend. It was A Christmas Carol meets Back to the Future. We joked the whole time that this was our weirdest show yet, and then the audiences were just totally there for it. And so I think whereas in the past, it might have been anxiety inducing to be like, “Okay, we’ve got to come up with all new ideas,” this year, we were like, “This idea is weird. Let's go with it.” Also, like DeLa mentioned, our shows are always current. Give me a year that's not a complete train wreck and then I’ll be worried about what we’re going to talk about on stage. (Laughs)
Ben: I know. As soon as things get good again, that's when we’re going to start to have trouble.
The audience at the shows seems totally on board with the idea that there’s no such thing as being too stupid.
Jinkx: There is a little bit of that with the tradition and history of drag. Drag in its nature is an act of defiance. It is making the rules for yourself, and I think that’s the spirit we apply to our Christmas show every year.
Ben: The audience responds to this silliness, the camp, the brand of humor, the colorfulness, and the pop references. All of that is sugar that makes the medicine go down. At the end of the day, I think people love to dive fully into that ridiculousness because it’s grounded in something really real and universal. That kind of sincerity is a hard thing for us, culturally, to access if we’re not led into it with silliness and crassness, dick jokes and pop music. It allows the audience to let down that wall and be vulnerable about the fact that this is a hard time of year, and we do need to work hard to connect with each other and to support our own values with a world that is fighting actively against them. So I think it's that balance that people really keep coming back for.
The show I saw last year vigorously embraced the idea that this is a safe space for misfits to come together during what can be a hard time of year for some people. That’s something that the queer community is great at. It was also a very charged time last year, with threats of violence against the queer community and drag performers in particular. I think I walked through three metal detectors. Does that sort of ugliness add an urgency or an importance to performing for you?
Jinkx: Sadly, we’re used to it as drag performers. The bigotry and the hatred that you’re mentioning might be especially charged right now. But you’re just used to having your guard up as a, like I like to say, visibly queer person. As a drag queen, yes. But as a visibly queer person in this country, you just never let your guard down. It really sucks that we have to take so many added precautions, but I’m so happy that we are the community willing to take those added precautions to maintain that safe space.
Yeah, they really turned out.
Jinkx: We saw during the pandemic how people are just so upset if they’re mildly inconvenienced. What I really love about the queer community is we will go through the inconvenience to create that safe space. And then once we have that safe space, everyone can feel like, okay, let’s get a couple hours away from what this year has been. And let's sit in a room full of people who feel and think the same way as us for just a couple hours tonight. It’s a privilege to provide that to people, honestly. It makes all of the difficulty and all of the fear that is built into this job worth it.
Ben: Rather than being downtrodden by this specific thing, I think we get really emboldened by it. Historically, this is exactly where drag comes from. We are uniquely suited to lead in moments like this because drag comes from the necessity of being in the shadows, being oppressed, and having to create beauty and safe space in spite of it. Historically, it’s in drag’s blood to be able to flourish when times are hard.
Drag bans and threats against the community are still current issues. What other things were on your mind when you were thinking of material for this year’s tour?
Ben: Every year, we’re like, “How are we going to address things next year?” But every year, the world dumpster fire ups the ante. As we’ve been saying, as soon as things ease up, that’s when we’re going to have trouble figuring out what to do with the show. As things get progressively worse, it makes us double down on the needs that we have. Of course, we’re responding directly to the political things that are happening in the zeitgeist over the course of the last year, and we’re also coming from a place of our personal experience.
In the past, we've talked about creating your own traditions in the face of ones that aren’t working for you. This year is really about asking: How do we uphold those traditions that we've created? How do we stay vigilant enough in the face of not just the world’s darkness, but how numb we are beginning to get to the world’s darkness? The fact that things are so tough, it is easy to get used to it and to stop understanding how necessary it is to continue to push forward with the things that bring us joy and the things that bring us comfort. The world is trying actively to wear us down right now. That constant reassessment and that constant vigilance over not just fighting back, but taking care of ourselves and each other—that's a lot of what we're addressing this year.
Jinkx: When I think about what DeLa was just saying, that’s applicable beyond during the holiday season. Constantly, there are intergenerational disagreements. This causes infighting. I know that the older generation deserves what they fought for and deserves their traditions. And I know that the younger generation is building new traditions based on what the older generation built for us. Sometimes there is a disconnect there.
I hope that we can, as a community, look at those things and find where we're all going to agree to come together, because we really have to be unified right now. One thing they’ve got on us is they are all unified under one ridiculous cause. And that’s hatred. (Laughs.) It’s bigotry. We’ve got to unify under our cause of spreading love in the face of that bigotry and spreading education in the face of ignorance. That’s something that we can take from this show into the rest of the year.
