 | | Sam Jay. Photo: Rick Kern/WireImage | | |
For someone who went to bed at 5 a.m. the night before, comedian and Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay seems rested and ready to perform three sets. She got a little sleep after getting home from the post-SNL dinner before driving four hours from New York to Rhode Island’s Rogue Island Comedy Festival in Newport, where she’s set to headline the 7, 8, and 9 p.m. shows. By the time she wraps up at 11, she has to drive back to make the Monday writers’ meeting. “I love New England. I mean, I grew up here and I have fond memories. It’s pretty. And it always feels like home,” says Jay, who came up in Boston’s comedy scene before moving to L.A. and then New York. She knows these crowds well. “White women in culottes with exposed clavicles,” she jokes. “My material is in this weird place, where I’ve expunged so much of it,” Jay says before the first show. “The album, my half-hour and the 15 were all done within a year. So I’m really starting over from zero.” It’s true that in the last year, in addition to starting at SNL, Jay released a Comedy Central half-hour, a 15-minute set for Netflix’s The Comedy Lineup, and her debut album Donna’s Daughter. Now, as a new season of SNL has just started, she’s working on all-new material to get ready for an eventual hour special. Tonight’s jokes are mostly in line with what’s been in the news: how Brett Kavanaugh’s going to “Handmaid’s Tale us all,” how every woman has a “rape contingency plan,” and why women should learn to pee standing up, for safety. At the first show, she notices a couple people get up after she tries out a bit about how white women can be better allies by sleeping with “incels.” It goes over well enough, but she’s quick to let the audience know it’s a work in progress. “Some of you liked it, some of you didn’t,” she says to a laugh. “Some of you walked out – I see you.” At the 8 p.m. show, she tries the bit again, looking into her cup onstage while she works it out for a crowd that’s a little rowdier. “Do it!” one woman screams when she says she’s going to talk about Kavanaugh. By the 9 p.m. show, you can see the results of the first two, with small tweaks made in timing and punch lines. It’s like watching a workout get results in real time. While Jay’s stand-up isn’t always political, she gets to thoroughly work that muscle on SNL. On the September 29 season premiere, she and Bryan Tucker co-wrote the sketch where neo-conservatives realize Vermont is their dream state. With today’s rapid-fire news cycle, she doesn’t feel pressure to always have the poignant “hot take” right away, priding herself on only talking about subjects on which she actually has an opinion. She laments how the internet makes comics feel like they have to have content on every topic and somehow always be on the righteous side of the debate, lest they want to face some career-ending backlash. “I think that’s part of the problem. Everyone feels like they gotta be politically correct, but they also have to make some grand point. It’s like, just be funny. And everybody has a different type of funny. Look at Katt Williams — when he does political shit he just does it like Katt. If you look at that first special — the insurgents bit — it’s so smart, it’s poignant, it’s political, but it’s a purely Katt Williams bit. So you just do it your way.” You could classify a lot of Jay’s jokes as progressive-meets-contrarian, like the one on her album (which centers around her same-sex divorce) about how gays shouldn’t want to get married just because straight people can. She’d rather not have audiences just blindly agree with her. She sees “clapter” as a signal that you’re not really doing stand-up. “It’s always the clapter. The clapter is real. And there are a lot of comics who’re becoming big off of clapter. And as a stand-up who loves the art of stand-up for real, it sucks to even say I’m a purist, because there shouldn’t be such a thing,” she says. “In comedy, I’ve always felt like this: Nobody’s right — in fact, everybody’s wrong in different ways, and that’s just the human condition. We can be mean, we can be ignorant, we can be prejudiced. That’s why I have such a problem with righteous comedy. Comedy’s supposed to be the essence of being human. And the self-righteous stance some of these comics are taking, as if they’ve never done anything wrong ever or thought anything wrong or racist or prejudiced — it’s crazy. And it’s not true.” Jay sees the role of a stand-up comic as an inquisitor — someone who asks questions the audience is afraid to ask, takes them to the edge of thought, and tries to get them to challenge what they think is logical. She hopes that audiences leave having laughed, but also looking at the world a little differently. For example, a lot of her jokes pull back the curtain on lesbian relationships. After watching her half-hour special and hearing her bit about buying a new sex toy for every new relationship, one of the older male crew members at SNL told her it inspired him to do the same. “I was like, ‘Yeah, bruh!’ Even that, such a little thing. He wasn’t thinking about it before. That’s what comedy’s supposed to do. It’s a mind orgy. It’s supposed to spark thought.” Jay now has her sights set on an hour-long special that will exceed the expectations that follow a year full of career milestones. She gives props to Netflix for their 15-minute specials, which she says opened her up to new fans (“If you know what you’re doing up there and you can lead a crowd to a point, 15 minutes is ample amount of time to just crush, and still give them a complete picture,” she says). But she still has HBO dreams: “HBO used to be the standard of specials. And to some degree, in our hearts, it still is. You still want to hear that bonnggg.” Her approach to the hour will be similar to how she approached Donna’s Daughter. She wanted to make it a wholly original work, with musical interludes and a contextual flow that forces you to listen to it from beginning to end. Something that’s more than just someone talking for an hour. She’s also not afraid to keep getting more and more personal, as the album goes to dark places like her mother dying when she was a teen, or her marriage ending with her partner getting arrested. “Because it was my first album, I wanted people to leave with a whole picture of me. At the end of the day, I’m trying to attract lifelong fans who are gonna grow with me through this process. I just wanted to be brutally naked and honest so that anybody who gravitates to this for real is gonna fuck with me for a long time.” Jay repeatedly stresses the humanity of stand-up, how comics should own the fact that their career is going to have ups and downs, and that they’ll undoubtedly make mistakes. Keeping that vulnerability alive is a concern as she gets more successful. “As my life gets better, and I’m getting happier, I’m like, ‘Am I going to be unfunny? Does the funny part of it thrive on my bitterness and my anger?’ And a little bit of it does. Some of it is sparked by my cynical, angry side that gets pissed off. I would hope I’ll always be angry, a little bit, about something. ’Cause I’m alive.” | 
