Adrienne Iapalucci: The Dark Queen

I've never heard about Adrienne Iapalucci before, but since I got a newsletter from Louis CK recommending her as one of his favorite comedians, I decided to check her special out ASAP.

The title is absolutely fitting, she does have an extremely crude, dark sense of humor as she discusses current events and controversial topics such as the war in Ukraine, Israel vs Palestine, 9/11, pedophilia, school shootings with brutal honesty, sparing no sides of the political spectrum and mocking all the hipocrisy plaguing our society.

Her unique, jaded, deadpan style delivery accentuates the already pretty dark material, and some of her observations are indeed quite smart and made me laugh, but many jokes felt unnecessarily dark for me. The small audience in front of which this was recorded kept groaning as well.

So while she's definitely talented, my problem is that I'm well aware of all these issues she's talking about and these days I feel like I don't really want to be reminded of them constantly in an exceedingly graphic way. If anything, I want to escape for a brief moment from the depressing state of affairs when I look for entertainment.

When I was younger and things were simpler, this kind of edgy, dark humor used to be really appealing to me, but lately it just feels uncomfortable and cringy. It's probably because with all the nonsense that happened in the world in the past few years I want to cling to the idea that there's hope, and this jaded world view is just not my thing.

Could be a me issue, your mileage may vary.

So I saw Adrienne on the Secret Podcast and thought that she's pretty chill and I decided to check out the special too.

I gotta be honest, I'm usually quite skeptical regarding women comedy, I try to go in without expectations, but my experience is that I'm rarely being pleasantly surprised.

I think it has something to do with comedy being dark in this case, which made it better.

And the overall chill tone.

Somehow, I do like the borderline melancholic comedy, there's beauty to it.

It's better when its dark, cause it usually extrapolates on what people really think in the back of their minds (until they apply their social, political and other filters to their thought).

I did find this stand up to be consistently funny. A bit short, but it has plenty of good jokes.

Honestly, the weakest point was probably just the last one, that Bundy joke was pretty thin threaded.

Other than that, a good, well-rounded performance, really looking forward for more.

I will watch the next one too, so requesting more!

Thanks!

Some things are just not funny-there's a line between controversial comedy that has us rolling on the floor laughing and the kind that deserves condemnation, and no comedian should cross that line. Comedians like Adrienne Lapalucci believe there are no limits as to what or whom they can joke about. She's the type that thinks if society values freedom of speech, then no topic should be taboo. But these comedians often use jokes that hurt and have a lasting and damaging impact on others.

Besides, she stole most of her material from other comedians like Louis CK, who talked about paedophilia in his opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, and right after that, he received backlash for it on Twitter.

All right, so I guess I was expecting a lot due to her connection with Louis C. K. and perhaps set myself up for disappointment.

I love dark humor and I don't believe there's a limit on what you can joke about....as long as the jokes are good. And some of hers were. I definitely literally laughed out loud multiple times. And then there were times where it felt like the material was written by a teenage edge-lord on 4chan in 2009. It's not that it was offensive, it's that some of the material was a tired and predictable.

It felt like it wasn't coming naturally through her at some points, too. I don't know how else to explain it other than it felt like she was trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy rather than being her authentic self.

I do think she shows a good deal of promise and hope she continues to develop her voice. She seems rather intelligent so I'm hoping she elevates her comedy a bit to match that and then I think there'll be something really good there.

I don't know how this show isn't rated higher, I was laughing out loud so many times along with my husband that we almost forgot we were watching a woman. I even got teary at the end just by being so happy a woman finally made me laugh for more than one joke. I say almost forgot because we could have done without the lady part jokes or at least the P word, which for some reason female comedians seem to think is good revenge for all the dick jokes male comedians supposedly make, but how about we just do without either???

I don't know. Either way the rest of it was pretty amazing and worthy of paying what I'd pay to see a male comedian. As a woman my standards are higher since obviously we just hate other women already so they have to work harder than the guys to get a laugh out of us. You can tell with Adrienne's pacing, delivery, timing and topics that she puts a lot of hard work into the craft and doesn't just rely on her looks or pandering to women. Her jokes were definitely dark and it's certainly not clean comedy, but that's clearly what the world needs right now. I can't wait to see what else she has to say.