Mom Jokes

Hillary and Chelsea Clinton self-identify as “Gutsy”

Dad sneakers, the sartorial equivalent of the Clintons?

This is the latest post by our guest blogger, Phoebe Malz Bovy. If you are a subscriber to Compact, you can check out my latest piece on Elon Musk.

I have watched the first episode of “Gutsy,” Hillary—and Chelsea, don’t forget Chelsea—Clinton’s new Apple + television series. The two women travel the world to interview women whose metaphorical intestines make the grade. (It’s not like they’d have called it ballsy.) Women who lean in. Girlbosses, if you will.

Without saying anything more about it, you have doubtless already formed your opinion of it. If you’re a diehard Clinton fan (?) then you’re yaassing with the best of them. So too if you’re a normie Facebook Democrat. “Gutsy” is based on Chelsea and Hillary’s apparently bestselling 2019 publication, The Book of Gutsy Women, so there’s surely an audience for it.

But if you have any concept of cringe, or if you think Bernie should have won (or that it’s a good thing Trump did), it’s not for you. And if you’re put off by the very idea of a high-production-value multipart dive into the navel of bland beneficiaries of nepotism, but one that sells itself as progressive (look, all these gutsy women of *different races and sexual orientations*), then… maybe it kind of is for you, if only to figure out where the Democratic party can fix itself moving forward.

As someone whose infinitely complex identity includes basic bitch and Bernie Bro elements, I arrived at the show skeptical but not outright condemnatory. My interest in it came from a sense I have that something happened to feminism between 2017’s anti-Trump backlash and 2020’s white lady self-flagellations.

A widespread progressive conviction that women—even incredibly privileged ones like Hillary Clinton—were society’s great victims gave way to a rather different understanding. What if actually, Black people, including Black women, had it worse? But wait! What if men don’t have it so great, either? Uniting a myriad backlash to late-Obama-early-Trump-era feminism was a shared conviction that the world’s actual worst people, the true oppressors, were liberal white women. The hypocritical Karens, convinced of their own supreme victimhood, all the while benefitting from affirmative action and white supremacy and benevolent sexism and and and.

It's difficult to talk about zeitgeist shifts because the old is never outright replaced. Instead, it coexists with the new, proceeding in oblivious parallel to it. This is how, despite a broader cultural turn away from so-called white feminism, away from calling it emotional labor every time someone who happens to be a woman happens to bring a child to a doctor’s appointment, the tragedy of middle-class husbands who leave dirty socks lying around for their wives to pick up remains a potent topic online.

And you know what, maybe it should! Even privileged women do experience sexism. And it does matter, symbolically, that the US has never had a woman president. No, Hillary should not be treated as the only possibility, but there’s definitely some relationship between anti-Hillary-ism and misogyny. So it seemed within the realm of possibility that “Gutsy” would offer up something of use. Now, onto whether it did.

The episode, called “Gutsy Women Have the Last Laugh,” is, as the title suggests, about comedy. It is also intensely, aggressively unfunny. Its narrative arc is that Chelsea learns to get over her distaste for comedy, an aversion that, she explains, stems from her childhood as First Daughter, when comedians mocked her on television. And her wariness is understandable. It truly was awful. If I’m more of a comedy fan than she is, it might be because I spent my own days as frizzy-haired 13-year-old watching SNL, not being impersonated on it.

“Gutsy” takes a different tack than “Nanette,” which dismissed comedy as inherently problematic and basically demanded an end to laughter because social justice, but winds up in the same place. The episode is full of dorky humor, but with a feminist twist. That in and of itself isn’t a problem (I urge everyone to put the name Victoria Wood into YouTube), but here, well… They make dad jokes for women. Mom jokes, I suppose, but I’m a mom and I’d take “Inside No. 9” over this any day.

Hillary and Chelsea reminisce about the latter’s childhood love of knock-knock jokes, an anecdote from the purer time, before an adolescent Chelsea became fodder for SNL. See, she has the potential to laugh!

They go to Paris to learn about “clown,” which is the insiders’ name for performing as a clown. This is a tamer alternative to farce, maybe, although it leads in a roundabout way to Chelsea getting consensually groped on-screen. They go bowling in Philadelphia with celebrity comedian Wanda Sykes, and act chummily A-list with one another. They have tea on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with Amy Schumer, who bonds with Hillary over being a problematic white lady, but is also celebrated for her groundbreakingly (?) frank discussion of the female body in her comedy.

They visit a New York City comedy club where they’re the only masked ones in the audience, and have a roundtable discussion with three lesser-known women stand-up comics. This is where Chelsea suddenly realizes the whole thing has been “an intervention” to get her over her comedy-phobia.

One of the comics is a disabled Muslim Palestinian. Another is Black. They have identities and this is copiously explored/exploited. A third is a standard-issue middle-aged blonde white lady but one whose Trump-supporting (if I’m remembering it right, sorry this show was excruciating) mother died of Covid.

Wanda Sykes tells Hillary that she thinks comedians should punch up, and Hillary is all, wow, brilliant, in response, as if this was the first time the idea was presented to her.

The idea that there’s a wholesome form of comedy that never offends holds a certain appeal, but doesn’t quite work in practice. Once that’s the metric—and for what it’s worth I don’t think it should be—you immediately notice when ‘good’ comedy falls short. One of the stand-ups, the one whose obstacles overcome are being Black and a woman, tells a peanut allergy joke, to the delight of the listeners. If you’ve been to the ER for a child with life-threatening food allergies, it’s not the joke for you. Indeed, it’s unclear to me why the joke wouldn’t count as mocking a disability. If the show is about comedy as a safe space, what’s the deal?

I found myself getting annoyed—at the comic, at the Clintons, at society for deciding some obstacles count while others don’t. Annoyed, but also relieved to live in Canada, where the ER is at least free, and an eventual Chelsea Clinton (more on that in a moment) is not my problem.

The 2016 election is never far from view. Seems Hillary lost that election to a confirmed sexist named Donald Trump. In one particularly exhausting scene, Wanda Sykes recalls a stand-up event where the “straight white men” making Trump jokes got applause, while she, a Black lesbian doing the same, bombed. Everything is about Trump. Hillary’s personal and professional disappointment in the election result becomes interchangeable with feminism.

The topic then swings over to Hillary, who’s telling Sykes about the bind she was in when debating Trump, where he was being a “creep” onstage, with his body language. Sykes suggests that Hillary ought to have used humor to diffuse the situation. If I were there I’d have suggested something more like onward and upward which is to say let us please talk about anything else.

Also remember how Bill philandered? A preview clip from a later episode reveals that Hillary’s gutsiest ever decision was to stay married to Bill.

Presumably there’s a point to “Gutsy,” but what? If it’s to sell another Hillary candidacy then she’s even more shielded from criticism than I’d thought. It keeps her in the public eye, but but she comes across, even more than usual, as a robot pretending to be human.

Is it about setting up Chelsea as a successor, ala Justin Trudeau or good ol’ George W. Bush? Ambition by proxy?

Maybe one day Chelsea will grow up to be a politician, but that day hasn’t come. Chelsea, a woman in her early 40s, a married mother of 3, who co-created this show, is, on-screen, firmly in child mode. She stands meekly by her mother’s side, getting the occasional word in, but this is plainly about mom.

There’s something essentially 1990s about the Clintons, since it was then that they began closing themselves off to the cruel, critical outside world. (There are YouTube clips of “Gutsy,” where comments are, of course, closed.) But being frozen in time, and specifically at that time, is not necessarily a drawback politically. They have nostalgia on their side. Pleated pants, dad sneakers, “Frasier,” it’s all back, so maybe a defiantly humorless President Chelsea Clinton as well.