Janelle James sold her first hour-long stand-up special as a special about dating. It is about women being killed by the men they love.
“I’m not actually talking about dating. I’m talking about domestic violence,” James said of How Romantic, which is streaming on Netflix. “It’s a big old switcheroo.”
James, who plays Ava Coleman on Abbott Elementary, has fifteen years of stand-up behind her, and this is the first time she has put dating into the act at all. She had kept romance out of her comedy for privacy and to push against what was expected of her, and she said she would have felt like a fraud taking it up for its own sake. “How can I say this in a new way for me? I think that’s the challenge,” she said.
The way in was the thing underneath it. James has family and friends who were killed by intimate partners. She keeps her own life private and will not turn it into a punchline, so the special comes at the subject sideways, through body counts, bank accounts, and why women should wrestle men. “If I gotta use dating or do a little sleight of hand to get into it, then all the more pleasure for me,” she said.
The title is sarcastic. She had planned to call it I’ve Said Worse, decided that was too antagonistic, and then said “how romantic” by accident at the end of a show instead of “how hilarious.” “So I always take that as a sign, so I changed the title at the last minute,” she said. “Romantic and romance is something that is sold to us.”
The special also arrives weeks after a public argument about how few women work in stand-up, and James is blunt about why. She calls comedy “a boys club by design.” She has deepened her voice to get men to listen to her. “Any female comedian you see, just know they’ve been through the gauntlet,” she said. “They don’t want us in the space.”
Her fix is not complicated. “One way to remedy this is to go check out female comedians,” she said. “Allow women to suck the same way men suck. Every male comic isn’t hilarious.”
