Janelle James 在首部单口喜剧特辑中看透黑暗

In Janelle James: How Romantic, the Emmy-nominated actor and comedian gets right into it.

The hour opens with James’s take on American politics, from the physical attractiveness (or the lack thereof, as the case may be) of the GOP’s key operators to more pointed, cross-party digs at, say, Hunter Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell. (“He died four times. He died so much, it just became a thing.”) There isn’t much about Washington that she doesn’t find “weird.” (The special may have gone a little differently had she taped it after this month’s midterm elections.)

“The show is written in four chunks,” James explains over a Zoom call from Los Angeles on November 2. “My political segment, my fame segment, my dating segment, and a segment on violence—and I can switch them around at will. A day before taping, I thought, I’m going to open on politics and get that out of the way. On the road, actually, I was ending with it.”

James says she developed How Romantic over about 70 sets, with a break last year to film Season 6 of the hit television series Abbott Elementary, in which James plays the endlessly chaotic school principal Ava Coleman. “I built the hour somewhat in that first stretch,” she says. “It marinated in my brain when we went back to shooting. Then when we were on hiatus again, I went on a little mini tour, multiple weekends, Thursday to Sunday, often with double shows.”

James stresses that How Romantic is no “Abbott revue.” “This special is an introduction for a lot of people to me as a stand-up,” she says. A stand-up and, well, a real, raw person behind the outsized television personality. “I start the show out sitting down on purpose, so people get a sense of what the vibe is going to be. I’m not really loud. I’m not really doing act-outs. I don’t really have props. This is me performing as myself, and this is how it’s going to go,” she says. “Those who’ve been following me as a comedian since I started are like, ‘People have no idea how dark you are.’”

Asked whether Janelle and Ava have blended together as Abbott has gone on, James says: “There’s definitely more overlap now. I think that’s true for all of us [in the cast]. Some of the people in the writers’ room I’ve known for years. They know me as a comedian, to the point where I’m like, ‘I’m going to stop talking to y’all,’ because I’ll say something and it ends up in the show. A lot of my colloquialisms—Ava says ‘hot’ all the time. That’s something I say! And that messes with my brain sometimes.”

James’s own brand of humor leans sarcastic and cynical—even a little melancholy (“Everything is funny and nothing is funny,” she says early in the hour). It’s also more explicit than anything an ABC mockumentary sitcom would allow. Just take the sex act James simulates with a microphone. “That part didn’t come until one of my final shows [before the taping]. I just did it one night, offhand, with the club mic,” James says, grimacing. “We went the next day and got me my own, because I thought, I’m going to keep doing that.”

The divide between the version of herself that exists in the popular imagination and the one who shows up onstage in How Romantic feels to James related to the ongoing debate in Hollywood about how comedic performances are received and judged in comparison with dramatic ones.

“What people don’t think about, and the reason comedy is just as important as drama—and harder in certain instances—is that we are performing joy when our real lives can be falling apart,” James says. “I won a comedy contest the night my dad died. I’ve done many stand-up shows straight out of a break-up. That’s very hard to do. Because we make it look easy, people don’t rate it the same as crying on command. I can cry right now! I’m a world of sadness. But it’s about performing joy.”