Sasheer Zamata was’t the first black woman to join the cast of Saturday Night Live, nor the first woman to film a stand-up comedy special, but that’s not really what this hour is about. Rather, Zamata wants us to rethink what we’ve been taught and how women have been socialized to think less of themselves and their bodies. Can she do that and make us laugh in the process?
The Gist: Zamata spent four years as an SNL cast member, and toward the end of her run in 2017, released her first comedy special, Pizza Mind, on Seeso (Comcast and NBCUniversal’s short-lived streaming platform geared toward comedy fans). Six years later, Zamata is a co-star on ABC’s Home Economics, voices Adria on Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, and will appear on the forthcoming WandaVision spinoff for Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha. All of that, of course, is currently up in the air due to the ongoing strikes.
But Zamata wasn’t about to take any chances with her second hour, releasing it for everyone to see on YouTube through 800 Pound Gorilla Media (a company that quietly has become the leading distributor of stand-up comedy specials). In the hour (actually 69 minutes), she mocks corporate America for trying to target feminists with separate ad campaigns, and uses her own platform to speak on behalf of women everywhere, whether they’re hospitalized and needing to be taken seriously, looking to get literally get in touch with themselves, or just trying to ward off another creepy man.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Zamata has a longstanding personal and professional friendship with Nicole Byer, so it’s always interesting to view their stand-up tales as existing in relationship with each other, whether or not they’re explicitly mentioning one another.
Memorable Jokes: It’s always interesting when a comedian gets confessional about their own experiences with COVID, and Zamata has fun with hers, recounting all of the things she did in the hours before her diagnosis, then tracing her steps back to a fateful massage and the masseuse who told her she didn’t need to wear a mask. Zamata jokes about how calling the massage parlor later felt much like speaking with an ex about an STD, perhaps even more accusatory than shameful?
Zamata doesn’t want women to feel any shame about their genitalia and sexuality, and demonstrates that in a very open and vulnerable way — not only revealing how she and her friend experimented on their bodies as young women, but also soliciting responses from the audience, as well, saying it’s important to talk about “so we’re not doing scavenger hunts in our house trying to find things that fit.” If an entire franchise can be built upon the premise of an adolescent boy having his way with an American Pie, then women shouldn’t be demonized for their own bodily explorations, Zamata says. She even makes the case for this as a historical dilemma, unearthing the real reason why women were depicted as witches with broomsticks.
And in a perhaps even more revelatory closing routine, Zamata gets us to rethink the legacy of Amelia Earhart, somehow comparing the late pilot with Kim Kardashian, and also suggesting there was another “First Woman” whose story we should all know, and yet perhaps there’s good reason why we don’t.
Our Take: But back to Zamata’s own stories, she tells one about vacationing in Costa Rica with her bestie (Byer!?) and warnings from strange men on the island about needing to learn lessons the hard way.
“Why wasn’t I scared?” Zamata wonders.
Turns out she realized her life already has been full of hard lessons learned, and she’s doesn’t even need to get into all of the case studies from show business in this hour to prove her point. She can joke simply about getting scammed by a restaurant worker with whom she thought she’d be hooking up, to more pressing health issues such as her sleep paralysis, heart palpitations or that one time a Chevy Yukon clipped her while walking in the city. It’s shocking to discover that Serena Williams almost died during her pregnancy because doctors didn’t take Williams’s claims seriously. It’s also disturbing when Zamata describes all of her encounters at the hospital after getting hit by that SUV.
In the end, though, Zamata does find the humor in all of it.
After all, if society is willing to accept and appropriate anything that black women deem to be cool, then perhaps the answer to getting us to believe their pain and their struggles is just a matter of coolness, too. In that department, Zamata remains ever cool.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The residuals for Zamata’s streaming projects might be in dispute, but there’s no doubting that your clicks on YouTube will eventually benefit her. And she’s worth your clicks.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.