Emmy Blotnick Is Charmingly Awkward in Her Comedy Central Stand-up Special

It’s not inherently a problem that comedians tend to talk about the same subjects. Most people think about relationships, politics and pop culture on a daily basis, so if your job is writing jokes about your life you’re naturally going to wind up writing jokes about the stuff that basically everybody has to deal with. The trick is to frame and deliver it in a way that nobody else can, with your own unique outlook and voice. Emmy Blotnick pulls that off in her half-hour Comedy Central special, which is as genially awkward as she is.

There are no overt politics here, even though Blotnick writes for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Those other two topics dominate Blotnick’s 20 minutes and change, though. The first half is mostly about pop culture, from Wheel of Fortune to pop music, which Blotnick uses as a lens into her own awkwardness and the culture of selling insecurity to women. When she mentions the infamous “self-potato” clip from Wheel, it’s not a lazy pop culture reference but a riff on her own depression. Her jokes about Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter who’s worked with almost every major woman pop star of the last 20 or so years, start with the standard bemused observations about a foreign man writing from the viewpoint of American teenage girls, but wind up as an indictment of how magazines like Cosmopolitan prey on women’s anxiety. Blotnick routinely starts from a general, familiar place before moving into something more pointed and personal, all without ever changing her quiet, self-deprecating tone.

Her relationship material feels a bit more anonymous. She does a similar trick with Bumble and pick-up lines as she does with Max Martin using Cosmo to get into women’s heads, turning an obvious bit about women not being used to starting a conversation with random guys into a critique of negging pick-up artist goons. Like the Martin bit, she drops that final punchline in almost like an aside, which makes it more surprising and more powerful. Mostly, though, her jokes about men on dating apps all being DJs, or about the way modern technology makes long distance dating both easier and more frustrating, lack the spark of the special’s first half, no matter how funny they still are.