MOM GENES

Michelle Buteau's caring comedy.

- HILTON ALS

Kindness is comedy’s boring first cousin, the very thing that most standup comedians and their rampant ids want to get away from, in order to be their worst and thus their funniest selves. Kindness suggests that there’s a moral universe out there, in which we’re all connected to one another, whereas standup is a willed isolation: a solo performer on a stage taking on the world. Standup artists like to stick pins in the voodoo dolls of convention and sentiment: “My kids are so ugly,” “I hate my dog,” “My marriage sucks,” and so on. And yet sentiment—even a little sentimentality—provides the framework for the actress and comedian Michelle Buteau’s new, eighty-minute show, “Full Heart, Tight Jeans.” (The show is touring through December, with a stop at New York’s Beacon Theatre on October 4th.)

When I saw “Full Heart, Tight Jeans” at City Winery in Chicago in early September, Buteau, who is forty-six and the mother of four-year-old twins, made a point, two-thirds of the way into her act, of criticizing Dave Chappelle for his notorious comments about trans people, including Caitlyn Jenner. (In his 2021 Netflix special, “The Closer,” Chappelle said, “Caitlyn Jenner was voted Woman of the Year. Her first year as a woman. Ain’t that something? Beat every bitch in Detroit; she’s better than all of you.