This year, the All Jane Comedy Fest had some big-name headliners for the first time, and it was a delight to see Maria Bamford and Jackie Kashian on the same bill with local stand-ups and improvisers. Sunday night's closing show at Revolution Hall was the perfect antidote to the shitshow of that night's presidential debate, with All Jane Artistic Director Stacey Hallal making some off-the-cuff quips about the Man Who Would Be Pussy-Grabber in Chief as she hauled a giant portrait of Bamford onstage before the festival's final sets.
I have a hard time describing what makes Jackie Kashian so fun to watch, but it could honestly be that in a sea of comics who espouse a kind of affected instability marked by "lol I'm so crazy I'm single and have a cat!" jokes, Kashian is quite simply a pro. She goes onstage, she makes fun of people with service animals, and suddenly you, a person who lives in Portland, are laughing about service animals and the fact that Jackie Kashian wants a service animal to help her get over her jealousy of other people's service animals. So we're clear, this is a joke that should not work in Portland—the only riskier material I can think of would be to openly criticize Bernie Sanders or revive the fluoride debate—but it worked. I was surprised to hear Kashian say, almost in passing, that it was a new joke, so convincing was her delivery.
In person, Bamford is frenetic and winsome, a darker version of her Lady Dynamite alter-ego, who slips in and out of her signature Judgmental Rich Lady voice with ease. At the beginning of her set, she warned everyone in the audience that they might not like her show, especially if they'd been invited by a friend. She compared the experience to being dragged to see Warhorse with her parents, and encouraged leaving if you discovered that Bamford was "your Warhorse." A few people in the row in front of me came and went during her set, but I won't hold it against them because Maria Bamford said it was okay. One of the hallmarks of her material is the head-on way she addresses the surreal experience of living with anxiety and depression. She injects her set with endlessly weird physical comedy—at one point, she walked on and off the stage in a "full-body peek-a-boo" bit, and she devoted many minutes to just kind of skipping around the stage—but then she'd take a turn and start talking about her time in the psych with a matter-of-fact delivery that read as jarringly honest coming from a comic. It was amazing to watch her oscillate between the two.
I saw Kashian and Bamford's sets after a bout of presidential debate-induced anxiety, and I could practically feel my cortisol levels dropping as they killed in front of a packed audience. Watching solid sets from two women comedians I had long dreamed of seeing in real life almost scrubbed my memory of the image of Donald Trump looming behind Hillary Clinton like a gaslighting monster, and if that's not an argument in and of itself for the high art of comedy—and for comedy by women—I don't know what is.