Comedy Now!: Elvira Kurt - Big Girl Now

Elvira Kurt anchors her act in her “fellagirly” persona, a self-coined term for a blend of butch and femme sensibilities. She relies on cultural complaints and self-deprecation to offer an outsider’s perspective on late-nineties life.

The hour was filmed for the second season of CTV’s Comedy Now! series. By 1998, Kurt was a standard fixture in the Canadian scene, having become the country’s first openly gay comic to perform on national television five years earlier. Big Girl Now captures her during a busy year that also saw her starring in the queer sketch show In Thru the Out Door. The broadcast went on to earn a Gemini Award nomination for Best Comedy Program.