She reminds the audience that the show is being filmed-“big night for me”-and calls, in grand diva fashion, for a spotlight, basking in its white glare before catching herself. Don’t all performers want to be adored? Berlant certainly does, and she handles the pressure-and the embarrassment-of that urge by turning the hard fact of her ego into comic fodder. “Don’t embarrass yourself.” It’s a power play, funny and destabilizing. “O.K., yeah, sure,” she tells the crowd, snuffing out its enthusiasm with deadpan ennui. They aren’t, of course, and that strange symbiotic relationship between performer and audience, the mutual craving for recognition, is Berlant’s stealth theme in “Cinnamon.” Shot in black-and-white (the sober art-house aesthetic is itself part of the joke), the special opens with Berlant backstage, warming up with balletic stretches and wrist twirls before she takes the mike to applause and cheers. Listening to them chat is a little like snooping on a private phone call between friends-friends you wish were your friends. Novak, whose one-woman show, “ Get on Your Knees,” remains, for me, a high bar of brainy comedic bravura, is the resident theorizer, with tastes running to the scientific and the occult. Since the darkest days of lockdown, I have tuned in each Tuesday to listen to Novak and Berlant banter about whatever happens to be on their minds. (The hosts’ view of the subject is expansive enough to include Gibson Martinis and steak dinners alongside serums, facial sculpting, and hydration therapy.) The podcast, which luxuriates in digression, has found a devoted following of fans who identify as Hags, me among them. Then there’s “Poog,” which Novak and Berlant started during the pandemic as a cheeky foray into the world of wellness. She can be seen in juicy supporting roles as a neurotic Jewish slugger, in the television reboot of “A League of Their Own,” and as a pregnant fifties housewife, in “ Don’t Worry Darling.” This summer, she and her longtime collaborator John Early released “Would It Kill You to Laugh?,” an hour-long special on Peacock that showcased their brand of absurdist humor in sketches featuring Meredith Vieira, full-body beaver suits, and an alternate reality in which people pay for restaurant meals with ladlefuls of melted caramel rather than card or cash.
Meanwhile, after years of being an influential figure in comedy but a niche presence outside it, Berlant, who is thirty-five, has found herself having a moment. She’s not a topical comedian a bit in “Cinnamon” on the two kinds of women who stand a chance of being elected President-a cooing Betty Boop sexpot or a “fridge on one wheel with a single eye”-is the closest that she gets to politics. But the delay has worked in Berlant’s favor. Time can be unkind to comedy, and three years, in comedy, is a lot of time. Shorn of the commercials that were meant to accompany its broadcast and running to a cool forty-four minutes, “Cinnamon in the Wind” has just popped up on Hulu as a streaming treat. I mean, it really is that brutal.” But, even as the networks taketh away, so, on occasion, do the networks giveth. “You think, Here I am, my special, here we go. “Show biz is a tough town,” Berlant said, on a recent episode of “ Poog,” the weekly podcast that she hosts with her fellow-comedian Jacqueline Novak. Instead, it languished for reasons unknown.
Directed by Bo Burnham, it was filmed in 2019 and slated to be released on FX. Kate Berlant’s new standup special, “Cinnamon in the Wind,” is not actually new.
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