Kathleen Madigan Stares Down the Abyss of Indulgence

Kathleen Madigan has received every accolade the comedy industry can bestow, but more impressive than any Just for Laughs gala or Late Show booking is that she fills theaters nightly without ever having a breakout role on a television series or in the movies. She has booked nearly every program that has ever pointed a camera at a comedian, but she’s almost always there to perform her act rather than host, answer questions, or play a character. It makes sense from a producer’s point of view: If you have a comedian this good, why have her do anything else? Over dozens of these late-night sets and cable specials, Madigan has gradually amassed a loyal audience, and now she regularly packs 1,200-seat theaters across North America. She sells her tickets for the almost quaint reason that she has delivered consistently excellent stand-up for three decades. She is very good at her job. “Lewis Black’s Cruise,” from her 2013 special, Kathleen Madigan: Madigan Again, is proof. Watch it here now.

Onstage, Madigan presents herself as an incorrigible life-of the-party type. Both her stated point of view and her casual, amused delivery style declare that she is out for a good time, despite or because of the possibility that things might devolve into boozy chaos. Here she recounts her first cruise, which she shared with longtime friend and fellow elite comic Lewis Black. She gets a big laugh only 20 seconds in from her initial premise that, if you’re not healthy but want to feel like you are, you should go on a cruise, because there are “drinkers and eaters on those ships who will drink and eat you into feeling great.”

After describing the ship’s launch as feeling like the Bellagio sailed away with her on the casino floor, Madigan reenacts the safety drill she is required to complete after drinking seven glasses of something called “Monkey Ass Rum Punch.” Her reverie is soon interrupted by a PA announcement. Madigan artfully switches voices between her drunk, disoriented self and a soulless authority droning on about something called a “muster station, which is located on the back of your key card. It will not match your deck or room, so please pay —.” Madigan cuts him off mid-sentence to switch back to her increasingly panicky self, who has not grasped any of this, and her word choice here is outstanding. The announcement sounds plausibly real, but it pushes just far enough into Kafkaesque absurdity to create the same sense of heightened, distorted reality one feels trying to pay attention to something important after seven rum punches.

For someone with such punchy writing, vocal command, and expressive faces, Madigan comes off almost deceptively natural. Even in fully dialed-in “special-taping mode,” after doing all the work necessary to generate five laughs per minute on the same topic for eight and a half minutes, she seems completely conversational. She never hits any word with so much emphasis that it sounds rehearsed, and she chuckles during her own setups without it ever feeling braggy or artificial. Any comic will tell you that this is very difficult to pull off. Despite the spotlight, stool, and microphone, Madigan somehow registers less like a professional entertainer than someone you meet at a big family function in the buffet line that you slowly grow to realize is one of the funniest people you’ve ever met in your life.

At 1:41, we meet some of the “eaters and drinkers” Madigan describes at the bit’s outset. A fellow passenger explains his technique of marking his door with balloons because “we just get so hammered on these ships, and these rooms all look alike!” Madigan stops and drinks her water as the audience explodes into an eye-popping 11-second applause break. She has so perfectly nailed the cadence of Wisconsin small talk that the joke feels almost like a field recording made by an anthropologist of the quintessential midwestern drunk, and this is before her flawless delivery of “Mr. Milwaukee’s” parting dad joke. “Who says alcoholics have no energy?” she says to big laughs at 2:17 in a defense of her shipmate’s pluck and ingenuity.

As she continues, Madigan’s story becomes less about feeling better about her own health in contrast to the Roman Empire–worthy exploits of her fellow passengers and more about how being a “sleeper-inner and drinker-later” prevents her from participating in most of the scheduled excursions. Defending her decision not to join her friends for an early jungle zip line, Madigan earns another applause break at 4:14 describing the nightmares that await them. By contrast, at 4:20, she tells a story of a noon trip on a “rickety-ass Partridge Family bus going to Christ knows where,” and for the first time since 28 seconds into the bit, she reminds the audience that Lewis Black is on this trip with her too. She doesn’t attempt a full impression, but she makes sure his brief appearance contains enough of his signature finger gestures and explosive temper to bring him to life, including giving him the otherwise clean bit’s only F-bomb. 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. But that’s where “Lewis Black’s Cruise” distinguishes itself. Back on the ship, Madigan’s in-room TV displays the previous night’s bar bill every morning. It’s a real buzzkill, but instead of using it to fuel another rallying cry, she takes a sharp and surprising turn into self-reflection at 7:00, pushing the bit into greatness.

Some comics place a particular vice front and center in their work. Whether it’s cannabis, alcohol, or unhealthy food, the act plays like an ad for its consumption, and anyone who says it’s problematic is worthy of scorn. These comics reveal no doubts about their own level of indulgence, and their performance takes on the feel of a revival meeting, existing to excuse and reinforce the audience’s appetites. These kinds of bits can be hilarious, but they always seem to have one foot outside reality; even people who are generally satisfied with their lifestyle choices have some doubts. 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. Here, Madigan confounds expectations again. 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.”

Referencing an online alcoholism quiz, she protests, “You’ve never done well on ‘true or false’” to big laughs at 7:34, but her audience is notably more subdued here, perhaps less comfortable with this subject than earlier beats. Madigan’s performance as her squirming inner drinker is masterful, especially the quick, subtle flare of contempt she allows to flash across her eyes at 7:57 at the gall of the internet questionnaire asking, “Do you drink at home alone?” With this unexpected, honest, and impeccably performed ending, “Lewis Black’s Cruise” sails forth into the messy, conflicted reality of the human experience. We immediately recognize it when we see it onstage. It’s what elevates the best stand-up from entertaining speeches to works of performance art.

The truth about cruise ships turns out to be what their inexhaustible supply of indulgences reveal about the passenger. Madigan uses all the skills that have enabled her to sell out theaters from stand-up alone to illustrate that all of us — even those most committed to their life choices — have doubts plaguing them like anybody else, and that is the truth about human beings.