Pulp Comics: Laura Kightlinger

Comedy Central’s Pulp Comics was a short-lived experimental series that took a comedian’s standard club set and intercut it with stylized, pre-recorded short films acting out their premises. The hybrid format suits Laura Kightlinger’s deadpan storytelling perfectly. Her quiet, cynical delivery translates seamlessly into the narrative cutaways. When she mentions on stage that she wants to be famous enough to eventually have drag queens impersonate her, the show cuts to a scene of two drag queens aggressively criticizing Kightlinger’s real-life wig and her lack of a proper tucking job.

Airing in May 1997, the half-hour catches a working comic in transition. Kightlinger had recently survived a famously miserable season as a featured player on Saturday Night Live and was wrapping up a writing stint on Roseanne. The performance feels like a reset. A contemporary newspaper review described her set as “unplugged,” capturing a casual intimacy as she drops bleak one-liners about the unpredictability of razors. The relaxed environment gives her space to operate away from the constraints of network television.