Poster for Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020.
Jibz Cameron’s “Weirdo Night” has always had a look. It’s hard to pin down. Something neon but dirty. The perfume of sweaty nervousness meeting the generosity of the audience. And hairspray. I’ve been blessed to perform at Jibz’s live show in Los Angeles several times, both at Zebulon and back when it was at El Cid. It is, hands down, one of the better, cooler, funner, more purple stages of the tri-county area. Whether you’re a conventional stand-up performer, avant clown, queer poet, unskilled musician, punk icon, or simply a vessel of unclassifiable charisma, it’s hard to find a crowd more ready to see some shit than those who come out to celebrate Cameron’s alter ego Dynasty Handbag and extend their belovedness to her eclectic guests.
But when the pandemic hit last year, the audience peaced out. Many of us raced to figure out some kind of COVID-safe comedy schtick. Meanwhile, Jibz and her partner and collaborator, director Mariah Garnett, popped out of summer 2020 with a whole new special. (It screened at Sundance in 2021.) The taping of a special is the one place where an audience can glimpse the constructed nature of comedy. During a taping, you can always go back; you can redo a flubbed line or rerun an entire bit that lacked energy. A producer comes out to tell the audience to laugh again as if they’re hearing it for the first time, and they play along. They’re happy to perform with you: it’s our little secret. A comedy taping with no audience? That’s… something else. For a performer, it kind of sucks. But for Jibz Cameron, the suck is where the magic happens.
Filmed at Zebulon for a gathering of empty orange chairs, Weirdo Night manages to capture the live show’s tone by not pretending it can capture its energy. In performance, the paradox of successfully embracing failure takes an uncanny amount of technical finesse—something Garnett and Cameron have in spades when it comes to film and performance, respectively. Their sensibilities go together like Mentos and Coca Cola. Featuring short films and filmed performances by Patti Harrison, Bibi (FKA Blasia) Discoteca, Sarah Squirm, Smiling Beth, Hedia Maron, and Morgan Bassichis, Weirdo Night is a little bleak and a lot good. And it’s more complex in its construction than it looks.
I watched the “Weirdo Night” movie for the first time with Jibz and Mariah via screen share over Zoom, pausing whenever anyone wanted to comment on the action or explain the origin of a bit, or just complain in general.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron). Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
Christina Catherine Martinez: What made you envision Weirdo Night as a movie as opposed to a livestream, which is what most comedians and performers pivoted to?
Jibz Cameron: It was a couple things. Zebulon had a crew and cameras in place already, and they were shooting artists and musicians who wanted to come in and do a “session.” They weren’t interested in trying to figure out how to do a live four-camera shoot because it involves a lot of technology that they didn’t know about and didn’t care to know about. Plus there’s like zero Wi-Fi in the club.
Mariah Garnett: The movie was also their first ticketed event. Their pandemic music series was free on YouTube. This acted like a livestream because we made it and then it was… livestreamed?
JC: It was live streamed when it came out, in the sense that you could only watch it while it was being played.
CCM: Everything seemed to come together organically, and then—Sundance! Did it just chug along like, okay now we have a movie, now submissions are open, here we go?
JC: No, not at all. It was quite extraordinary, Christina, because we got invited to Sundance, which apparently never happens. So try not to gag on your burger.
Christina, who has been eating throughout the interview, gags on her burger.
CCM: Mama, I am gagged right now.
JC: Gooped, gagged, and shooketh!
CCM: And now look at you!
JC: That’s right! We’ve had no offers. No one wants to buy it.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Sarah Squirm. Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
CCM: We’re both dealing with this issue—how ideas develop for performance or for what we do as artists, versus how things develop for TV or film. It takes forever and you never know what happens next. Right now, are you taking this Weirdo Night movie and adapting it into something that could be more… how do I say this? Saleable.
JC: You know how it is. You have an idea and then you have to write it out and then you have to talk to a bunch of people about it—
MG: —and you have to make it stupider.
JC: —and you have to make it stupider. The main difference between TV and performance art is the amount of people it has to go through. And the amount of time it takes. And the amount of grip that you simply cannot have on anything.
Jibz and Christina go on a tangent together about TV stuff that was cut off by the pandemic. They talk about building “heat” from one project in order to get other projects off the ground. Everyone makes barfing noises.
CCM: Dynasty Handbag is so spontaneous and silly and immediate. What’s it like making her into a character for TV, where everything has to be workshopped and outlined—to death—in advance?
JC: Mariah has said that it’s never translated with the same energy and ferocity because I’m not improvising.
MG: I feel like the movie comes kind of close.
JC: The movie comes very close, but I’m also on a stage.
CCM: Is your opening bit in the movie improvised, or was it pretty planned out?
JC: This is funny, you’ll like this. I wrote jokes for the movie the same way I write jokes for the live show, which is: I jot down a bunch of shit, and I don’t really rehearse it, or even fully remember it. I just go through the list of the things I want to talk about.
CCM: You really do write like a stand-up comic. You write on stage.
JC: Yeah, it’s not a script. Some people write everything out, like detail by detail, every nuance. But I did my opening bit my way, and we shot it first, at nine in the morning. And it was dead. Crickets. Literally, because—
CCM: —there was no one there.
JC: It had no energy and it was not funny at all. And I realized that I really did have to memorize it, because I wasn’t getting anything back.
CCM: There was nothing to get back!
JC: Exactly. It had no flow, and I had no energy. Mariah would say, “Okay, let’s try it again,” or, “What about that one joke you wrote down? Weren’t you going to say that?” All these things mattered that don’t normally matter when you can just play with an audience, because the crowd is basically directing you. If you don’t have that, you just have to follow a script. Otherwise, you have nothing.
Christina tries to set up screen sharing so they can all watch the “Weirdo Night” movie together. It’s frozen on a shot of Dynasty Handbag sitting on the floor holding an oversized pencil the size of a salami.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron). Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
CCM: I love that big pencil.
JC: Is there going to be a lag?
CCM: Maybe. We can roll with it. My celebration of failure is part of my practice not only as a clown but also as a journalist.
JC: Maybe you should get a big pencil.
CCM: I do have a big pencil. It’s right over there.
Christina shifts her screen to show Jibz and Mariah her big pencil sitting on a nearby bookshelf. The movie begins to play, starting with a beautiful establishing shot of empty rows of orange chairs inside Zebulon. The intro music fades into the theme from Democracy Now!
JC: I feel like this song is very triggering.
CCM: What is it?
JC: Democracy Now! is a harrowing leftwing news program. They have amazing guests like Cornel West and Angela Davis and activists from everywhere. They’re into immigration rights, and native rights, and Black Lives Matter. They tackle climate change in a nightmarish way. The politics are on point but it’s very doomsday vibes. You listen to it and think, I’m going to suicide. You just know the world is going to end soon when you hear that song. So it’s also the intro to the movie.
CCM: How did you put the lineup together?
JC: Normally we don’t plan the lineup so much for “Weirdo Night,” but for the filming I knew we needed all pros. I couldn’t have anyone on stage who didn’t know what they were doing. I knew that I couldn’t have any comedians that did straight stand-up, or that they’d have to do something else. It didn’t feel right to ask someone to do a show like that with no audience.
CCM: Hm. When did you film it?
JC: July of 2020. So still pretty early in the COVID performance game.
CCM: Oh, that’s interesting, yes. By the end of 2020 a lot of comedians ended up figuring out some kind of COVID-safe stand-up thing. One comic did a whole Zoom album, someone recorded a stand-up album in his courtyard for his neighbors, I did my special inside the empty Human Resources gallery and I was shocked by how hard it was to fill that void with energy, how much I rely on the audience to help me fill in everything that I didn’t write beforehand. It took most of us a while to get there. In July maybe not everyone would have been chomping at the bit to do something like this. Painful.
JC: It was painful. We initially planned on shooting it straight through. But Mariah pointed out that it actually needs to be shot like a film in order for it to look and feel like a live show. If you think about it, when you’re watching something live, your perspective is all over the place, so it actually feels more live if you have different perspectives.
MG: Hence the four-camera set up.
JC: And some people who were on my list straight up said no. Some people said I don’t want to do it live but I’ll make you a video. Sarah Squirm made this incredible short out in the desert with Sandy Honig. Some people had more concessions. Patti was just down.
On screen, Jibz greets the first guest, Patti Harrison, with a stuffed rubber glove at the end of a long stick.
CCM: This is like the inverse of “Showtime at the Apollo,” when Sandman Sims pulls people off stage with a long hook.
JC: It’s the opposite of the hook. Oh! I should have a hook that makes people stay. They try to leave but I’m like, no, you have to stay.
Patti wears a candy-striped Leigh Bowery getup and a shitty blonde wig, her face totally obscured by two medical masks with holes poked for her eyes and mouth. Backed by a band, she screams an avant noise anthem as the lyrics appear on screen: “I’m so straight it hurts! I am not gay I have never been gay! My favorite food is prepackaged Black Forest ham!”
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Patti Harrison. Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
JC: Also Patti wanted subtitles on her part of the show. Which was brilliant. Because reading the lyrics is so funny.
CCM: This is the kind of thing that a visiting artist would screen at ArtCenter and say, “We did this in the seventies, back when I was in New York and things were weird and it was about me creating my special space that you don’t know how to create.” But these lyrics are, like, repressed hypernormative evangelical.
JC: You know it’s modern because she references jorts.
CCM: Tell me about Bibi Discoteca [known as Blasia Discoteca at the time of filming].
JC: I met her through Rudy Bleu from Club Scum, but I’d never had a conversation with her. I just really liked her fashion and I knew that she was an incredible dancer. I thought dance would be good for the film. I said we need a drag queen, but she has to be a fierce mover and someone who looks extraordinary. She didn’t know what “Weirdo Night” was at all.
CCM: But drag queens are used to performing in spaces where they don’t know what to expect. I’ve seen drag queens perform in alleys.
JC: Exactly. She has her thing and she’s doing it. She wanted a smoke machine. She wanted a fan, a big, giant fan. She sent me a shot list. She was giving direction like, when the song hits here, I want you to push in. And I want this shot, and this shot. But we just said yes, yes. You can have everything you want. You’re amazing. Yes.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Bibi (FKA Blasia) Discoteca. Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
MG: We only did one take because Zebulon said they’d have to turn off the fire alarms, and they had to get permission from the fire department to do that. And they couldn’t get permission. So if the fire alarms caught the smoke machine the power would automatically shut off for forty-five minutes. We scheduled it right before lunch, in case that happened.
CCM: What was the most surprising part of putting the movie together?
JC: At some point we realized our main writing task was going to be the transitions between the acts. It’s so easy to razz or ad-lib when we’re doing it live, if there’s a long shift.
MG: We tried doing a take like that and it was boring as hell—people picking up a drum and moving stuff around and then the sound guy comes out and sets up. We had to cut all of that and write content.
CCM: Isn’t that weird? The ancillary stuff is actually the fun part of seeing a live performance.
JC: It didn’t translate.
On screen, Dynasty Handbag takes off her pants as she’s about to perform a song.
CCM: I feel like the bodysuit with the unsnapped crotch is a Dynasty signature.
JC: Oh yes, for sure.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Morgan Bassichis. Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron). Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
CCM: I love what’s happening to us right now. This is the experience of watching it at home. The audience is watching this video and feeling something like the pain of knowing that you’re belting out this song to no one. It doesn’t quite replace the pain of seeing Dynasty live. It’s like methadone for live performance. And right now, of course, there’s the added element of you watching me on Zoom watching the movie.
JC: Exactly. There’s many layers.
CCM: I feel like the word “cringe” skyrocketed over the past year.
JC: Oh yes.
MG: For sure.
Morgan Bassichis is doing a half-singing half-stand-up-ish maybe jazz scat thing in their bathtub, elevating banal statements like “I love groups, I love events. I love when everyone gets together and they talk about the stuff that’s happening in their lives…” into absurd and musical incantations.
MG: That’s my favorite line.
JC: I love that you can see the Bon Ami scrub in the background. I told Morgan that they were a comedian. They didn’t know it.
The closed captioning Christina turned on in the Vimeo player can barely keep up with Morgan’s act.
CCM: I love that they said “very traditional” but the captions read “virtual additional.” The captions are now engaging in the kind of wordplay that Morgan does.
JC: They’re jazz captions.
CCM: Yes, it’s actually $125 for regular captions but you can pay $40 for JAZZ CAPTIONS and they’re done by a reject from the Iowa Writers Workshop. On meth.
Sorry.
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still, featuring Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron). Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
On screen, Dynasty Handbag is back alone on the Zebulon stage, dressed in leopard print spandex and bathed in purple light, singing what sounds like an unhinged teen ballad, which Christina recognizes halfway through as—
CCM: Is this… from The Matrix (1999)?
MG: Yeah, it’s the big speech from what’s his face, Agent Smith.
JC: He’s talking about humans, and the Earth, and how horrible we are.
CCM: No, I remember now, it’s just so wildly recontextualized I didn’t recognize the words. As a performer you could be totally bullshitting or improvising, but the fact that these lyrics really are lifted verbatim from The Matrix, and you made them sound like the rants of a teen girl… that’s hilarious. Tell me about this final bit.
JC: I feel like because I’m so damn funny, I don’t often get asked what my work is about, the actual content of it. People ask about the character and that’s it. I had actually written this piece for a thing I did with The Broad as a response to a Mike Kelley exhibition that never happened because of COVID. Mike Kelley’s stuff, to me, is all about childhood trauma. This “I Hate this Place” speech draws on my experience as a teenager trying to connect the confusion and rage that results from the trauma of a child entering adulthood, within the larger landscape of a violent society, and the escape that I discovered in art. These stories are real, they’re personal, but at the same time they’re cultural clichés. Mike Kelley understood this. He blurred the lines between what was personal and what was cultural and pretty much refused to tell us which was which. I think the reason why I was triangulating The Matrix and Mike Kelley and trauma is that at a certain young age, your reality kind of cracks. There’s two things going on. It’s just so funny to me, that moment as a kid when you realize everything is a lie.
CCM: Or that moment when you realize your parents are just people, and they’re as messed up and confused as you. They’re winging it too. Probably more so.
JC: Yeah.
MG: Yeah.
JC: My home was a disaster. My dad was a very bad alcoholic and my mother had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She died by suicide in 2010. She was always on her way out. They were definitely not bad people, but they had diseases, and came from disease. Art is often touted as the savior of lost souls, but in my experience it is more of a salve than a cure for feelings of outsiderness and effects of trauma. It would be great if maniacal death metal tap dancing could cure my major depressive disorder, but alas, she needs more. The bit is attempting to hold both truths.
Christina meant to go back and finish her thought about the word “cringe” but she forgot.
X
Jibz Cameron and Mariah Garnett, Weirdo Night, 2020. Video still. Single-channel video with sound, 46 min. Courtesy of the artists.
Jibz Cameron has performed as Dynasty Handbag for more than fifteen years at venues including the New Museum, the Broad Museum, and BAM. Praised by The New York Times and The New Yorker as funny, smart, outrageous, and innovative, she is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital grantee, and has a show in development at FX. She currently has a drawing exhibition at Maccarone Gallery. Stay tuned for fesitival screenings of Weirdo Night.
Mariah Garnett is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a 2019 Guggenheim fellow and her work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues including The New Museum, NYFF, CPH:DOX, Sundance, and the Hammer Museum. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council (July 2021) and Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2022).
Christina Catherine Martinez is a writer, actress, and comedian in Los Angeles. She’s the author of Aesthetical Relations (Hesse Press, 2019) and a recipient of a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.