Michael Che's Daycare Business and Seinfeld's Ticket Policy

Saying Forbidden Words at Conversational Volume

Netflix has released Michael Che: Shot in Minnesota, the Saturday Night Live co-anchor’s third special for the service, filmed over four shows at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Che likes a standup room because “It’s nice and freeing to be in a space for an hour where you can just scream words that you’re not supposed to scream and get that frustration out, and I think people like that.”

He does not actually scream them. Standing on a small stage in the round, Che delivers his darkest material at the volume of a man ordering a sandwich. For someone whose day job is reading the news aloud on television, he opens by claiming he had no idea who the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was before his murder: “I thought they were talking about the dude from Star Trek .”

He then defends his refusal to retire the R-word, arguing that dropping it from the language is what let regressive politicians like Donald Trump take over. “You know what I’m talking about, ‘cause every time I turn on the news, Minnesota is fighting some group of retards,” he tells the Minneapolis crowd — a line that got cheers at First Avenue. Turning to local allegations of fraud at Twin Cities childcare centres, he announces a side hustle of his own: “I also do a lot of business in Minnesota. Y’all don’t know this, but I own like three daycares.” After pausing for cheers, he adds that it is a great no-show job. Most touring comics learn the name of the local sports team. Che learns the local white-collar indictment.

The Decider review put it well: “If Michael Che were any more laid-back, he’d be horizontal, which can be a good and a bad thing in comedy.” Later in the hour he turns to getting older, his single life and watching his Weekend Update partner Colin Jost marry Scarlett Johansson. That leads him to propose holding weddings in reverse at the end of a marriage, which is a genuinely neat piece of comic engineering. Directing himself, Che is betting that if he stays relaxed enough, the audience will let him say anything and still follow him into the clever stuff.

Keeping the Heckler’s Ticket Money in Chicago

“I’m gonna find out how much your ticket was and I’m sending it to Israel … No I won’t, I’m keeping it,” Jerry Seinfeld told a pro-Palestinian protester who interrupted his Friday show at the Chicago Theatre.

Activists from the US Palestinian Community Network and Anti-War Committee Chicago interrupted the set more than once. When a man shouted that 74,000 Palestinians had been killed and called him a racist, Seinfeld skipped the earnest debate and agreed with him, before adding the bit about the ticket refund.

Later in the set, Seinfeld was in the middle of a routine about his cell phone service, saying he “had enough” of it. A woman in the crowd stood up and used his setup as her cue: “Well, I’ve had enough of genocide! Seventy-four thousand Palestinians have been killed! Twenty-two thousand Palestinians who are children now are killed with our taxpayer money, and you’re making jokes?” As security moved in to escort her out, Seinfeld did a little mock dance on stage and repeated his earlier line: “I am a racist. It’s a genocide, I’m into it.”

There is no natural pivot from a cell phone bit to twenty-two thousand dead children, and Seinfeld did not look for one. By agreeing with the worst possible charge in a flat voice and pivoting to the box office receipts, he gave the paying crowd permission to laugh and boo the protesters out of the building. His tour keeps drawing demonstrators because of his public solidarity with Israel since October 2023, and his method for surviving them is to treat a political ambush like any other guy yelling from the stalls.

Soho Theatre’s Two Very Different Clowns

Elf Lyons topped the Edinburgh Fringe rankings on Monday, on the exact same day that fellow alternative clown Paul Currie saw his libel lawsuit against Soho Theatre threatened with being struck out over unpaid legal bills.

British Comedy Guide’s statistical analysis of more than 6,600 Fringe reviews put Elf Lyons is The Woman on the Edge in first place, with 29 five-star ratings out of 37 reviews. Lyons, an avant-garde mime and theatre-maker, built the show after her real-life engagement ended while she was touring her previous show, Horses, in Australia. The premise is that she is supposed to do a normal observational standup hour about love, cannot face turning up, and sends one of her clown characters to perform everything in her place. The stand-in collides Pagliacci and a bouncy castle with nods to Vertigo and Apollo 13, turning a standard breakup hour into a one-woman disaster movie. Sending a clown to cover your shift because you went through a split is the most honest way anyone has ever avoided writing twenty minutes on dating apps.

While Lyons prepares to bring that show to Soho Theatre Walthamstow in January 2027, Currie is at the High Court in London fighting the same organisation. At the end of a February 2024 Soho Theatre performance of his non-verbal show Shtoom, Currie, a Belfast-born physical comedian, brought out Ukrainian and Palestinian flags for applause. He demanded to know why one audience member had not stood up, and told objecting Jewish audience members to leave. The Campaign Against Antisemitism said Jewish patrons had been “hounded out”, and the venue banned him. Currie sued Soho Theatre for libel, and Judge David Cook has now given him 14 days to pay £15,922 in past costs plus £12,500 for Monday’s hearing or have the claim struck out. Wordless clowning is supposed to spare you from saying the wrong thing in public, though it turns out the silence only helps if you keep it going after the curtain call — leaving Currie two weeks to find £28,422 while Lyons gets ready for her January run.