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Kathleen Madigan Stares Down the Abyss of Indulgence
Why her 2013 bit about a cruise with Lewis Black is such a stand-up masterwork.
As Black freaks out about their precarious situation, Madigan defends her decision to put them there, because unlike the bland packaged facsimile of excitement offered to their friends on the ship, she had provided a “real adventure,” she proudly declares at 5:48, from which “we may never come back.” This is as close as stand-up has gotten to a comprehensive thrill-seeker’s manifesto, and it’s where a lesser comic would end the bit. That’s why Madigan’s decision to morph the piece from an uncompromising defense of late cocktail-fueled nights to a Gollum-like debate with herself about her own level of dependence is so brilliant, even if, from the outset, she tells us it’s a conversation “I seem to have with myself about once a year,” so we know it will end with her trademark “manic pixie drunk aunt” outlook intact. Instead of setting her id up to destroy a series of flimsy arguments put forth by her stick-in-the-mud superego, she plays her inner drinker like a captured, cornered animal caught dead to rights and scrambling for any tactic she can find to shut down this threatening line of inquiry so she can go on being a “sleeper-inner and drinker-later.”
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