Tesla Leases, Naked Penguins, and Stolen Setlists

Ruining Your Credit Score for the Bit

Netflix has released a new hour from Zainab Johnson, Toxically Optimistic, built around the financial inconvenience of trying to be a good person. A lot of political comedy assumes that when the culture shifts, you can update your life as fast as you update your opinions. Johnson, the Harlem-raised comic behind Hijabs Off, points out that opinions are free and car leases are legally binding.

She got a Tesla back when driving an electric vehicle was considered the responsible thing to do and carried polite social currency. Then the politics around the car shifted toward Republican buyers while she was still making payments on it. Now she is embarrassed to be seen in her own vehicle, which leaves her with a very specific modern dilemma.

Standing in front of a Washington, DC crowd, Johnson asks whether a principled person is supposed to intentionally ruin their own credit score midway through a lease or just keep driving the car in shame. There is no clause in a standard auto-finance contract for the guy who makes this car has become a problem at dinner parties. Everyone wants to be on the right side of history, right up until the finance company explains the early termination fee.

At current interest rates, the most practical moral stance is to keep your head down at red lights and wait for the paperwork to expire. Once Johnson has explained to the room why she is financially trapped in a car she no longer agrees with, she spends the final twenty minutes of the special talking about an opossum named Eugene, an animal with zero authority over her credit report.

Speed-Running the Western Canon Without Trousers

Damien Warren-Smith, an Australian physical comedian and Gaulier-trained clown, has brought his solo showGarry Starr: Classic Penguins to London’s The Other Palace with a simple excuse for taking his clothes off: he is trying to save literature. A polite theatre audience will put up with almost any kind of physical indignity if you tell them it is for the good of the Western canon. Dressed as the Penguin Books logo, Warren-Smith attempts to stage every book in the Penguin Classics catalogue in 70 minutes while wearing orange flippers, a black tailcoat, a white Elizabethan ruff, a top hat, and nothing on his bottom half.

He pulls paperbacks off a bookcase, projects their covers onto a screen via a live camera feed, and acts them out at top speed. After charging past The Communist Manifesto and 1984, he pauses to reassure the room: “It’s not a political show”—a helpful clarification from a man dressed as a half-naked bird.

The real test of the audience’s literary devotion comes when he pulls out Robert Drewe’s The Bodysurfers. Rather than acting out the book on stage, the naked penguin is lifted over the stalls and passed from row to row until he reaches the back of the theatre. The magic of framing a clown show around classic paperbacks is that a room full of London theatregoers will happily pass a bare-arsed Australian overhead like a beach ball, and walk out feeling like they supported the arts.

Building a Comedy Tour From Stage Litter

When a rock band finishes a gig and leaves their paper setlist taped to the stage floor, the normal thing to do is throw it in the bin or give it to a teenager in the front row. When the British musical comedy sisters Flo & Joan found an old setlist left behind by the indie-rock band The Feeling at O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire, they stole the song titles and wrote an entire touring show in the exact same running order.

The show, With Feeling, uses the borrowed rock tracklist as a rigid constraint. Nicola and Rosie Dempsey complain early on that the trouble with being stuck in musical comedy is that “no one takes it seriously”, then prove their point by turning The Feeling’s upbeat title ‘Fill My Little World’ into a neurotic number about disposable fashion and low-quality AI-generated material. Further down the sheet of paper, the sentimental indie anthem ‘Never Be Lonely’ becomes a song about toxic co-dependency and their own uncomfortably close sibling relationship, punctuated by a visual gag with a trumpet.

Writing a nearly 100-date tour around someone else’s abandoned stationery is a very specific kind of petty discipline. Most comedians spend months agonizing over the structure of a new hour, when apparently all you really need is for an indie-rock band to forget to clean up after themselves.