Whitney Cummings

Comedian Whitney Cummings joins Hoda and Jenna to talk about her new Netflix special “Whitney Cummings: Jokes.“ She talks about the nostalgic memories that ...

Whitney Cummings dishes on her Netflix special, new boyfriend Cummings also sticks around for a game of “When I Was a Kid” to determine which generation of kids had it worse.July 26, 2022 Whitney Cummings dishes on her Netflix special, new boyfriend

This review of Whitney Cummings: Jokes may contain some minor spoilers. By chance, I found out I was reviewing Whitney Cummings's new Netflix special, ...

Cummings mentions her age a lot — she’s thirty-nine — in a way that makes one suspect she’s thinking about it a lot; her own insecurities, particularly those related to her self-image, have been an integral part of her comedy over the years, and you don’t get older behind your own back. There’s something very human and relatable about all that when it comes to Whitney Cummings, but there’s also some element of it that rubs off on the audience, who never seem to be able to settle into her material, even though most of it is pretty safe and cozy. Whatever you might think of his more recent output — I personally thought his acceptance speech at the Duke Ellington School of Arts, which Netflix released as a mini-feature titled What’s In A Name?, was a work of minor genius — there’s no denying that his four back-to-back 2017 specials, Deep in the Heart of Texas, The Age of Spin, Equanimity, and The Bird Revelation, all felt like a nomad returning to civilization and trying to take account of everything that had changed in his absence. Like Bill Burr, whose latest special Live At Red Rocks was regarded even by his own ardent fanbase as more of the same, there’s a sense of familiarity to Cummings’s stage persona. Cummings is a performer who receives a perhaps undue amount of hate — she isn’t unfunny, even if she’s rarely hysterical — but she’s pretty inarguably better-suited to looser formats. In the same way that, say, Nikki Glaser is dynamite in celebrity roasts but thoroughly mediocre on stage, Cummings is funnier in a casual hang-out than she is in the midst of what she reminds us is her fifth special.