Whitney Cummings Finds Her People

The comedian's politics has changed. So has her audience.

- Kerry Howley

IT IS COMMONPLACE among poets and musicians and painters to express a fear of the audience—its ability to corrupt with praise, to transform art into parody—but this is not the case among stand-up comedians, who are given to cast the ticket holder as the arbiter of authenticity itself. “The audience doesn't let you be delusional,” Whitney Cummings once said. “They just call bullshit on you. You have to learn not to lie.” Cummings is five-foot-ten, a coiled spring of a comedian, a woman who speaks with her expansive hands, her elbows, her pelvis, her shoulders down and back arched as if bearing against waves. At the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, California, it’s 30 minutes before showtime. She’s calling around trying to find a replacement for her sick nanny. She's defending Meghan Markle, who, after all, “did exactly what we programmed her to do—marry a prince.” She’s dabbing large amounts of foundation onto her cheeks and forehead with an applicator, pausing, considering her face, and laughing. “I just tried to do it different because she’s here,” she says, referring to me; usually she smears it on with her hands. “That looks like a manic episode,” says her opening act, Kevin Christy. “This is the end of a movie about an actress who snapped.” “This is a literal scene from Mommie Dearest,” says Cummings.

"The biggest insult now is 'pick me.' She's such a 'pick me.' Isn't this what we're all doing? Trying to get picked?"