On her first Netflix special, a Jewish comedian’s breathless display of timing, charisma and self-regard
The Twist? She’s Watchable: Catherine Cohen on her first Netflix special. By Netflix
By Dan Friedman April 7, 2022
At the end of the new Catherine Cohen Netflix special I was so breathless I wasn’t quite sure what I’d seen. It’s not that Cohen isn’t funny — she is — but the experience of an hour of “The Twist? She’s Gorgeous” is both exhilarating and exhausting.
As Cohen might say, with a flick of her white boots and indeterminate layers of irony, “foot-pop, j’adore!”
Cohen is an entertainer and the show is one answer to her professedly insatiable need for attention. The refrain of her first song, which is about how she turned to comedy because boys didn’t want to kiss her, is “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.” Whether she’s talking, wisecracking, singing, chatting to the pianist or the audience — or all of the above — she simply does not want to let you look away.
Everything is grist to the mill of attention. One rhetorical method she uses — or perhaps she’s telling us the reason for her attention-hunger — is to describe herself as “unwell.”
“I do suffer from depression or, as I like to call it, ‘crying because outside smells like the past,’” she tells us. From that starting point – the show, however couched in irony, is her therapy – “look at me doing the work!”
The show’s title, “She’s Gorgeous,” is meant to be ironic given that Cohen says she has been traumatized by the way that girls who aren’t the “skinny, sexy” ones are treated by society.
“By the way, if my face was symmetrical, I would not be up here doing this shit,” she says. But, Cohen’s charisma and watchability suggests that she has successfully transformed that pain. As she puts it, “If we harbor enough resentment in our teens, we can write a catchy song.”
The only thing that takes us away from Cohen in the present is when we see her younger self. In the opening sequence, toddler Catherine, filmed in1994 and 1995, tells the camera “No pictures, no pictures,” even though she is clearly happy to be filmed. “I’m just going to walk into the TV,” she says, and with this show, she does.
The show itself begins as we segue from Cohen as a little kid doing shmutzy-faced voice exercises into the mirror to her in the present doing deliberately similar voice exercises into the dressing room mirror while fully made up and wearing a glamorous fluffy pink overcoat that she leaves on the floor before she steps to the stage. While Cohen circa 2022 isn’t wearing the same ballerina outfit, she’s wearing white knee boots and a bright pink “rhinestone romper” that she revels in.
The way Cohen manipulates this childhood reference is illustrative of one of her main strategies. Avow, disavow, ironize. She’ll set up something provocative (my clothes show I’m harking back to childish innocence!) then she’ll undercut it (my jokes contain a plethora of adult material) then she’ll revisit the first assertion (but aren’t we just damaged children underneath, trying to recover?).
This joke-just-kidding-no-really structure leaves the audience struggling to find Cohen or themselves in an issue. Louis CK — if we can mention his name — used to do a similar thing with his abortion bit. He’d say that we need to give women rights over their bodies, leave a beat, then make the point to the gasp of his then-adoring, left-leaning audiences that, really, we need to stop killing babies, another beat, then say that actually abortion should probably be legal. We knew where we were on the issue and we knew where CK was, but the jokes had stirred up the issue. Wherever you stood, it was uncomfortable.
Cohen, though, always makes herself the issue, vibrantly vamping and moving on with the show, so there’s no real room or need for discomfort. On the other hand, though, the three viewpoints — “I believe,” “I don’t believe,” “I can’t be bothered with rationalizing these contradictory beliefs” — are all delivered so quickly that it becomes impossible to decide where she or we stand on them.
The flux of perspective and speed of delivery allows Cohen to get through stories and attitudes at a breakneck speed and with bewildering irony. In her songs she establishes a chorus and then vamps them, as if she can’t be bothered to fully perform them or as if she’s singing along to an imagined version of herself.
That’s not to say that she’s relentlessly breakneck. There is a succession of jokes and spots but Cohen has her crescendos and pianissimos. And, of course, she waits for material to land. But, along with the jokes and lyrics, she adds layers and words. She uses a number of affected accents and tones, and also narrates her own choreography, which adds even more words to the performance and implicit instructions to the audience – “Social media is perfect because you can watch people you don’t know unravel in real time. Which I absolutely [watch my] foot-pop j’adore.”
But her material is tight — “Just because I don’t love to read, write, argue or be alone doesn’t mean I’m not an intellectual.” And she’s vamping and posing and singing like that friend of yours who can really sing. And her songs are bitingly funny, like “What Are You Running From” about young, skinny girls born in 1997 who are running marathons — “But when you tell me that you’re running 26.2 it makes me think that you’re burying years of inherited trauma…. What are you running from?”
If the key to a performer’s comedy is truth or laughs or puncturing the bubbles of the rich, then they are likely to be disappointed by the slipperiness of truth, the arbitrariness of audiences or the power of money. If, however, like Cohen, you are explicitly only interested in holding the audience’s attention, then your songs, your poems, your jokes, your costumes, your sexual confessions are all designed to have a direct effect. Because even laughter is a secondary characteristic of attention. So, as long she keeps the audience watching, there’s absolutely no need to ever resolve the simultaneous contradictions she embodies.
Cohen is a diva, craving attention as she oscillates between the self-aggrandizing and the self-deprecating (“my work is sooo groundbreaking.”). She wants us to look at her, and the twist? She’s watchable!
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