Michelle Wolf: It’s Great to Be Here Review 2023 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
Wolf’s on-air career began as a writer/performer in late-night, first with Late Night with Seth Meyers and then The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Her debut stand-up hour, Nice Lady, premiered on HBO in 2017; her second, Joke Show, for Netflix two years later. In between, she starred in her own Netflix variety sketch series, The Break with Michelle Wolf, and delivered the keynote address at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner, where her remarks so upset conservative Republicans that the White House Correspondents Association hired a historian the following year instead of a comedian.
Her return to Netflix now is remarkable for multiple reasons: 1) she self-financed, produced and edited her project first before licensing it to Netflix, and 2) it’s not packaged as an hour, but rather as three episodes containing five segments in total, “New Neighborhood,” “All Struggles Matter + Me Too” and “News to Me + All Beautiful,” for a full running time of 77 minutes. An opening montage features Wolf telling comedy club audiences “It’s great to be here” in so many words at Philadelphia’s Helium Comedy Club, Denver’s Comedy Works Downtown, Salt Lake City’s Wiseguys Comedy Club, and Madison’s Comedy On State.
Let’s focus just on the first episode, “New Neighborhood,” which sets the scene for her performance in Madison by revealing to the audience that Wolf has relocated to Spain, specifically Barcelona. That allows her not only to have a new perspective on what’s happening here in America, but also provides her with easy foreign fodder to share with American audiences.
Take her first observation about Barcelona, for example: “It’s a beach city, but it’s also a bit of a gay city. I think that’s why they have the lisp.”
The city’s embrace of nude beaches affords opportunities to poke fun at public displays of penises and boobs in all shapes and sizes, and Wolf makes light not only of the older, out-of-shape men on the sand, but also her friend, who Wolf says takes offense to having her breast implants called fakes. To which she turns the audience’s reaction about fake breasts against them, quipping: “OK, good, so we’re all a bit transphobic.” Assessing the audience, she adds: “That’s a fun social experiment,” and a few moments later with: “I know, you all feel like I got you, didn’t you? Well, I did. That’s why.”
But then it’s back to the beach, where Wolf describes the difference between the heterosexual nude beach and the gay men’s nude beach akin to that “between a dog park and a dog show,” and imagines a lesbian nude beach would therefore feel more like a “dog rescue.”
It’s lesbians who fascinate Wolf most. She feels they’d make better friends to straight women than gay men, they don’t need men to thrive and survive, but most of all, because she’s “jealous of the lesbian relationship,” whose power dynamics mystify her. In her own words, she believes lesbian couples get to be both have a wife and be a wife. Whereas in her own life, where she reveals to us that she moved to Barcelona “for a boy,” which has her doing things she never enjoyed doing before even for herself, such as cooking and doing laundry. “Being in love and being happy is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Even worse, it turns out, than mockingly referring to her genitalia as garbage in a joke about their sex life. Wolf peels back the curtain, so to speak, to tell us she riffed this bit one night onstage, and loved it despite the fact that it demeans her in the process. “I’d rather keep calling my vagina a trash can, than not do that joke.”
