Michelle Wolfe : This is me not giving a fuck that you don't give a fuck

I took a wait and see stance regarding comedian Michelle Wolfe in the hubbub that followed her controversial at the White House Correspondent's Dinner earlier this year, Suddenly famous, she was thrust into the spotlight for a group of jokes that impaled the reputations of President Trump and those who worked in close quarters with him. I'm hardly a Trump fan, but there was something disconcertingly sub-par about her performance; she seemed as if she'd just walked in from the bar across the street and ad-libbed a series of punchlines she thought of on her cab ride over to that imaginary tavern. Her persona was the quintessence of don't=give-a-fuck, a quality that makes hipster-ism the most repugnant quality of those under twenty-one who have a year or two of college. Maybe I was missing something, I thought. Turns out I was looking for something that wasn't there, the funny. Wolfe's Netflix show "The Break" is a dud. Her sudden fame seems more a case of a person being in exactly the right place at the right moment in history, elevating her to a pay scale far beyond what her actual talents merit. Her anti-trump, anti-racist, anti-misogynist stances don't hide her glaring problem, which is that she's not consistently funny. Little effort seems to have gone into the writing, rehearsing of the material, and that may be the point, to give the thing an air of an undergraduate box theater class project where every idea, actually funny, half-baked and dead on arrival, are tossed into a set up where flubs, awkward pauses, word slurring and cold readings from a teleprompter are supposed to add an edgy element to the proceedings. I am attracted to the idea of an anti-aesthetic, but I suspect even Brecht and Artaud would have Wolfe and her fellow fellows, of the crusted-snot nose variety, go back and learn, finally, that comedy, however pure your politics may seem, is not easy.