‘Oh, your queen died,” says Michelle Wolf, faux-absent-mindedly. “I’m sorry if that’s news.” If anyone here arrived in doubt that Wolf is a comic who makes a beeline for the jugular, her opening swiftly disabuses them. The Pennsylvanian is best known for her scorched-earth set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2018, from which Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Sanders, may never have recovered. But tonight’s show, like its 2019 predecessor at the same venue, is light on current affairs and abundant on sexual politics, carnality and – its only new direction – Wolf’s newfound domesticity.
It finds the 37-year-old in fine spiky form, with off-colour jokes to spare and all the infectious self-satisfaction of a comic who, beaming from ear to ear, knows how good she is. The laugh you get used to hearing in the audience is two parts delighted amusement to one part splutter of dismay that anyone could say something so impolite. Whether comparing the queue for the Queen’s lying in state to the storming of the Capitol, conjuring with ways to improvise an abortion in post-Roe v Wade America, or thought-experimenting with bestiality, the corkscrew-haired comic brings tight joke-writing and taboos together and revels in the fallout.
