I presented comedian Chris Fleming with a theory. When he answered the phone for our interview ahead of his performances in Seattle, I proposed that his comedy is all about discussing gender in an absurd way. He has a bit about the snacks at Trader Joe’s that only women can see, and another about his sixth sense for when a restaurant is owned by brothers. Fleming broke through on YouTube with his character Gayle Waters-Waters, a high-strung, WASPy suburbanite from the fictional Northbread, Massachusetts, who is crushed, daily, by the weight of expectation in her life.
Most gendered comedy is essentially: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, our differences are irreconcilable, so why try? Fleming, who uses any pronouns, pokes fun at the absurdity of gender. He identifies the odd things about men and women, but doesn’t chastise them for those qualities, because they’re not entirely responsible for them.
Fleming lives for absurdity. In his stand-up, he bounds across the stage like a deer on the highway. He writes songs about being trapped in conversation with “wildly unlikeable guys” and his relationship with a gray-haired tax preparer he’s nicknamed Sick Jan because she always has a cold. He has a skit about a strange creature named DePiglio that’s friends with everyone, but seems to be hunting him. It’s bizarre. It’s the kind of joke you want to explain to your friends, but look like a fool when you try.
But when Fleming delivers these hyper-specific jokes, they kill, because they somehow make absolute, perfect sense. We’re all caught up in a web of expectation, all acting. It’s so integral to our existence that absurdity is a fantastic tool to examine it.
By the end of our conversation, I still wasn’t sure if my theory was right, exactly, but he was amused.
Am I projecting?
Oh, man. It’s so great when eloquent people like yourself attach really favorable things to ultimately what are just very manic gut impulses that I feel and blurt out. I really appreciate that read on it, because there’s a part of me that thinks a lot of what I do is: If you say things with the right conviction, you can get laughs in several ways, right? Some of it’s like, “Why is this person saying this?” Another is like, “Well, if a person is saying it into a mic, then that must be true.” And then there’s also this, “Oh, there’s this really eccentric traveling person decreeing something before getting carted off to the bin.” Whatever lands on any of those three levels, I’m thrilled with. But I think what you’re giving it is incredibly favorable. And please, please give a eulogy at my wake.
Well, you’ll never die. When you talk about those three levels, is that by design or just how you think your jokes work?
I’m totally riffing. I mean, so much of comedy is survival. It’s like putting anything in the cannon. Was it World War I when they had to turn tires into bullets or something? That’s how I view it. We’re only given so many tools, and whatever gets us through onstage we gotta use and just hope for the best. I think that I have the fortune of a connection with my audience, who have engaged with the work for so long, who understand me. But then there’s also the times where I have to perform for people who don’t see me and don’t have the interest or nuance or curiosity. That is when the other levels come into play. I luckily feel a soul connection and deep, deep sense of being held by my audiences. It’s like the best feeling in the world.
When you’re performing for people who don’t know what you’re about, how differently do the jokes land?
Oh, oh, oh, it can be such a bloodbath. I mean, you wouldn’t believe the extremes. It can be literally like burn the witch. I mean, I had to perform, or I got to perform, for big crowds that weren’t my own quite recently, and they wanted to kill me. They absolutely wanted to kill me. It makes being seen by crowds that do see you so much better. I mean, trust me, it can be hell to completely shit up there, but then it clarifies what you want to do. Tourist audiences and whatever can, I think, navigate a lot of performance artists to the middle to survive. I think that it’s way better to gamble on what you truly want to do and to occasionally completely bomb, than it is to self-correct to appease people you would just see at the airport.
Did it take a long time to develop a thick skin?
Oh, I don’t have a thick skin.
So it’s devastating every time?
It stays in my spine. It is literally posture changing. I have a theory that after a terrible show, dogs bark at me, like Damien the Omen.
This is like epigenetic damage.
Yeah, my grandkids are gonna wake up and feel how horribly I bombed in San Diego, the San Diego Civic Center. They’re gonna feel that and not know what it is.
How quickly does an audience turn?
In my twilight years, I have no interest in winning a crowd over. At this particular show, before I even grabbed the mic, someone yelled, “Let’s go Weird Al!” And I was like, “You know what? Fuck this. Fuck this.” I’m going to do two songs that you’re gonna hate, and so I don’t have to hear you, we’re gonna make the music so loud, and I’m just gonna kind of stare at the lights so I don’t have to engage. You know immediately, you know immediately.
You have this particular way of talking about social situations where you feel out of place to the point that it surpasses discomfort and almost becomes fun.
Divine. It’s divine.
I am a generally outgoing person who tends to stick my foot in my mouth. Are you an uncomfortable person who deals with your discomfort through comedy, or are you the kind of person who takes an awkward situation and hams it up because, at that point, why not?
I’m highly, highly sensitive to uncomfortable situations. I have this police scanner. I’m very seldom in my own experience. I’m kind of in the experience of everyone else in the room. When I’m talking about something that is very uncomfortable, that’s me trying to process something and turn it into a victory so that I can just be rid of it. Be rid of the haunting of it. But in terms of comfort, I am definitely a really anxious person. And I think the way that I try to approach comedy in general, and did at a young age, is that I’m very keen to try to soothe people socially.
Why do you think you do that?
Well, I think it’s how I grew up. I think it’s the environment in which I grew up was needing to regulate people in my community [laughs]. I was taken in by the jocks, all the soccer players, as a really young child. I think they found me comforting. I think that was my role for a long time, and still is, if that makes sense.
It does. I’m a trans woman, and growing up, a lot of guys like that also took me in. I think they found the energy almost … confusing or perplexing. But it’s a huge breath of fresh air for them because they know you’re not going to dunk on them if they say something a little vulnerable. They feel so happy that somebody is listening to them, you know.
Exactly, exactly. I grew up with women, so the way I was raised, masculinity was something to be embarrassed about, so I never had a dog in that fight. That’s why you get a lot of one-on-one time with those guys, because they can let their hair down.
Totally.
Everybody has that. Everyone’s got the masculine and the feminine in them.
You have that whole story about going to Dane Cook’s Super Bowl party where you tell jokes about his house looking like a Crate & Barrel that don’t land, where you’re sitting on Bill Burr’s armrest like a dog. It’s funny because, by the time there is a football and you’re going to throw it around, the audience is shrieking. Just because they see this not-so-masculine person in this typically masculine situation. It looks like a car crash to them.
That is a situation where I fully panicked when I saw that ball come out, and then when my friend Gary put me out of my misery and said, “Chrissy, you better get out of here.”
Was it a sweet release?
Such a sweet release.
Has Dane Cook heard that bit?
Yes, and he thinks it’s funny. And I’m so relieved because—Dane Cook. A lot of people say a lot of stuff about Dane Cook. Dane Cook was like a theater artist when he was starting out. He brought a theatricality to the stage that hadn’t been done. I have the utmost respect for his stage work.
His work came out when I was pretty young. I think my cousins showed it to me in elementary school. I remember sitting in the car with them and listening to that joke about swimming in a pool and how trying to come up for air under a kid on a raft is like “drowning in the abyss.” The way he screams, the voices he does, the way he jumps around, is incredibly endearing and very, very funny.
That’s like, that is a guy who bled out for his work, and I find that to be so inspiring.
What I like about that story, and a lot of stories you tell, is that you’re never criticizing men for enjoying a masculine activity, or like you’re not making fun of women for certain peculiarities. You’re pointing them out and finding this fun absurdity. Everyone’s in on the joke. Nobody is “bad.” I think a lot of “gendered” comedy ultimately ends with judgment. Are you consciously avoiding that? Is this just who you are and how you see things?
If you’re commenting and observing, you have to be accepting as well. I can get so bitchy and petty, but I think that that’s also sometimes part of the bit. But I do think at the base level, I really do believe, especially if you’re doing an impersonation, there has to be a love for the subject.
Gayle is a character that, obviously, people identify with you. The first time I saw that, I was like: That is my mother. It was so close to how she behaved when we had guests coming. But Gayle is not the joke. The joke is the expectations on Gayle. The weight of the world on a mother who has to prepare for company. And I never saw my mom acting that way as an overreaction ever again. I understood her better. And I mean that sincerely.
And this is why I get so pissed when people … people make that video all the time now. You know, guys in the South are putting on, like, a wig and doing it in the most tacky way. They redo “COMPANY IS COMING,” specifically that scene in Gayle. If you’re going to do that, you have to realize there’s a vulnerability to what Gayle is going through. She’s terrified. What’s funny about that is the fear that she’s having. It’s not anger, it’s fear she’s trying to route. That scream is agony, it’s terror, and I had to tap into my anxieties for that. And it’s like, you see where someone’s coming from, you don’t ridicule it. You try to do it to show them why it’s funny that they’re going through that, to maybe lighten the experience, you know, because a lot of those direct quotes were just from my mom.
Did it feel good to tap into that anxiety?
Oh my God. Oh my god. Gayle is therapy, completely. Gayle is such therapy, especially because my mom and I were doing it together. She played the antagonist in Gayle. For her to be able to laugh at these things, we really grew together and got over a lot of shit. It felt incredible to tap into that. To give a character to your emotions that you don’t feel comfortable expressing—highly recommend.
You do a lot of things. Skits. Stand-up. I like your songs, which I think are great in a real way. Is it a serious pursuit for you?
“Sick Jan” and “Boba Manifesto,” those I made with my friend Brian Heveron-Smith, who was a classically trained musician, who’s incredible. And lately, I’ve been doing my own instrumentals where I play synths and I have a drum machine that I use. It’s really sloppy and really impulsive, what I do, but oh, God, I love doing it so much. I’m so disorganized that [the instrumentals] just kind of live on my desktop, and I just forget about them. But it’s the same type of thing as using a character to tap into emotions that you’re not comfortable expressing. Language and movement can be limiting. Being able to put something in a song and then have the song run counter to the melody, I think, is always really nice. I
started doing instrumentals around the end of Gayle, because Brian and I did all the music for Gayle together. This was back when I was still drinking, but we were drinking some Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and then maybe [we’d do some] instrumentals. That was the one area of creativity where we allowed a little bit of alcohol. We would never write words with the booze, but the instrumentals and Mike’s Hard, I think, went really beautifully together.
Your song “W.U.G.” (which stands for Wildly Unlikeable Guy) released me from a certain kind of anxiety. And when I am stuck talking to some horrible person, I think of it.
I’m so happy to hear that, I think of that concept too. A lot.
Is it based on one particular guy?
Oh yeah, oh yeah, you bet it was.
I scanned your social media for all the times you performed in Seattle over the years. In 2014, you posted a picture with a goat. The next time, you went on local television.
Did we get a goat in Seattle? Holy shit, that must have been a Gayle show. We got local animals like horses and stuff for Gayle because that was like a stage play.
What do you think about this place? Like you, I lived east of here most of my life and find West Coast cities kind of perplexing. The people do not act in ways that I understand.
I would recommend people experience both coasts at some point in their lives, because, you know, the East Coast is all about inhaling, and the West Coast is all about exhaling. I love Seattle. Oh, my God. A lot of people that I’ve been worried about end up in Seattle, and I go, “Okay, good, they’re in Seattle now.”
The tender arms of the city, we will enfold them.
You see the most recent season of The Last of Us?
I haven’t seen it yet, but I know things are not particularly right in the world of The Last of Us and assume it’s pretty much the same in its Seattle.
There’s a great quote where someone yells, like, “What the fuck is going on in Seattle?”
I’ve actually noticed a lot of people in my life saying that, and now I know where it came from. So thank you for unlocking something for me.
I seldom love TV writing, but that … did they really just set the show in Seattle just for that one line? I love that pettiness.
I feel like any zombie show is interesting for a couple episodes, because you’re sort of introduced to the mechanisms of the zombies. Do these guys run? I guess the more infected they are, like, their heads split open—that’s pretty cool. But then after a while, it sort of becomes a little bit video-game-y. And then there’s always a flip where it’s like, are people just as bad as the zombies? And the answer is always yes.
It’s funny when it gets to a point where you get bored by seeing zombies. I feel so bad for the special effects people who put so much work into these, like [Chris zombie moans] and by, like, the 15th zombie scene, you’re like, “Yeahhhhh. Well, there they are.”
After a while, you get confident that you could probably deal with this.
My answer to any type of thing is to dig a hole and then hide in the hole. That’s where my head goes anytime there’s a catastrophe.
That’s pretty good. If people don’t know you’re in the hole, then you’re good. If people find the hole, you are in a lot of trouble.
Oh, you’re so fucked.
Chris Fleming performs two shows at The Moore Theater July 27.
