“Oh my God, are we best friends?” the comedian Michelle Buteau said, 27 seconds into meeting me.
Honestly, it was a joke that felt like it could ricochet into reality. It didn’t. But that is the power of Buteau’s ebullient charisma, which telegraphs to audiences that her preternatural comic rhythm and dolled-up, side-eye style of delivery are in service of being a warmhearted bestie. To her TV, film, podcast and stand-up fans, she’s a moral center with a blue streak. “I truly, sincerely care,” she said, “about these bitches.”
The B-word is one that Buteau and her friend and co-star in the new comedy “Babes,” Ilana Glazer, roll and dice into multiple syllables and meanings, in a sisterhood built on tell-it-like-it-is endearments, unfiltered but uplifting, like Buteau’s comedy.
In “Babes,” which was directed by Pamela Adlon, Buteau plays an exhausted working mother of two young children, reconfiguring her life minute by minute, task by task, to accommodate her career, her family, her partner and her friendships. Also the occasional hallucinogenic trip and breast pump-destroying dance party.
In real life, Buteau does that (or most of it), and is both cleareyed and funny about it: “Every day feels like a panic room — I’m just searching for the next clue.” Having 5-year-old twins with her Dutch husband, a house in the Bronx, some dogs and an ascending, multistrand career is undeniably a lot; the movie reflects that, too. “There’s no such thing as balance,” she said, during a recent lunch interview. “You do what you can, when you can.”
In the last five years, Buteau, 46, has made the leap from a 20-year stalwart of the New York comedy scene to a headliner and the star of her own scripted Netflix series, “Survival of the Thickest,” loosely based on her 2020 essay collection of the same name, and heading toward its second season. With “Babes,” now in wide release, she also moves up from the BFF and assistants she played in Ali Wong’s “Always Be My Maybe” and Jennifer Lopez’s “Marry Me,” to a lead: the movie is centered on the friendship between Glazer and Buteau’s characters. It arrives as Buteau is preparing to film her second hourlong Netflix special, “Full Heart, Tight Jeans,” on June 6 at Radio City Music Hall.
Her stories in that show, which she toured last year, lean inclusive and positive in what the New Yorker critic Hilton Als has described as a comedy of kindness. It’s a style that bucks convention, the typical denigration of standup. She is “a luscious wisecracker,” he wrote, who “treats herself — and us — like a snack.”
Buteau has consciously positioned herself against other big-name comics who have griped about social change; onstage, she has called out Dave Chappelle by name for his anti-trans rhetoric. “I just want them to evolve a little bit more,” she said of her (largely male) peers. “I don’t know why it’s so unpopular to be open-minded.”
“I choose to lead with love because if I don’t — like, I would just be on the floor the whole time,” she added. “I’ve been through enough hard stuff,” including, as she describes in her book, reproductive struggles, colorism and body-shaming. “I want to be happy.”
Overstretched, she initially turned down “Babes,” which was filming right before she went into production on the first season of her Netflix series. But Glazer, the “Babes” co-writer and “Broad City” alum who’s been a friend for over a decade, repeatedly begged her to reconsider, trimming down scenes to fit her schedule. “She’s just a bright, shining star — she doesn’t suck air out of the room,” Glazer said. “She gives light, and then we’re all lit up.” Even when Buteau pokes fun, “it’s never seeking to destroy. It’s curious, you know what I mean? She is naturally celebratory.”
Buteau’s self-confidence is expansive. It must feel good to be you right now, Stephen Colbert told her during a recent appearance on “The Late Show,” ticking off her accomplishments. It does, she agreed. “But it always felt good.” In her last special, she described her looks as “an achievable Beyoncé for government workers.”
Buteau grew up in New Jersey, the only child of a Jamaican mother and a Haitian father. It was a deeply Catholic household — an uncle is the archbishop of Jamaica — with large, raucous gatherings, courtesy of her Caribbean extended family in Brooklyn, and an explicit reggae soundtrack. The B-word (or as she now sometimes says, “bish”) was always part of her vocabulary, she said.
Still, “I didn’t know I was funny,” she said. “I just thought I was surviving — trying not to get beat up in Jersey, or, whatever racist teacher I had, trying to defuse their toxicity.”
Her first ambition was to be an entertainment reporter, but a college professor told her, in front of the class, that she was “too fat to be on camera,” she recalled. “And I believed him, because Downtown Julie Brown” — the ’80s and ’90s MTV V.J. — “wasn’t a size 18.” Buteau went into production, becoming a news editor at local TV stations, where colleagues suggested she had the chops for comedy. That surprised her: “I’m like, really? I thought I was just happy. When I started working in the news, I realized how sad people were.”
Buteau’s stand-up origin story is either depressing or uniquely hopeful: She first got onstage on Sept. 14, 2001, after editing footage about the attacks three days before, and realizing she needed a different path.
Her family was not initially supportive. Talking about penises onstage “after he paid for college in cash?” she said of her father, an international auditor. Her mother, a customs broker, “was really sad.” And she didn’t want to ask them for money. So she continued to work her midnight production shift, going from comedy clubs to the newsroom, for six years, building up her network of besties along the way.
“I met Michelle at a grimy club in San Francisco that doesn’t exist anymore,” Wong, the comedian and Emmy-winning actress, said. “I was truly blown away by how funny and original she was. And I knew that if she had traveled all the way to San Francisco to perform at a place where the carpet was riddled with dry semen, she was going to make it.”
Besides their comic chemistry, Wong cast Buteau in her rom-com because “she’s just a very nurturing person offstage,” Wong said. “I just wanted an excuse to spend a lot of time with her.”
Over a delightful pasta lunch on the Upper West Side, Buteau riffed on making things happen and loving New York. She once lived nearby, in a building that was like “a Jewish retirement center,” she said. “No one thought I lived there; they thought I was, like, a nanny. And then — I don’t know how this rumor got started — I was Harry Belafonte’s niece. I wasn’t fighting it. I was like, ‘Yes, Esther, that’s who I am.’”
Her material can be raunchy, but there’s also a layer of graciousness to it: If she had her own perfume, she wrote in her book, it would be called “Just Sassy Enough.” But she makes a point to showcase lust and relationships, like how her one-night stand with a tourist, Gijs van der Most, turned into marriage. He’s a photographer and furniture store owner, and she has mined a lot from their cultural differences, although now she’s careful. “I don’t want him to always feel like he’s content,” she said.
In “Survival of the Thickest,” her character, a body-positive fashion stylist reeling from a breakup after catching her boyfriend cheating, barely suffers a night alone. The comedy is not in her wallowing, but in her harnessing her inherent sex appeal and ambition, and she meets-cute with a charming Italian man before the end of the season. In “Babes,” she has a supportive and adoring husband (Hasan Minhaj) who helps her through the waves of overwhelm.
For Adlon, a creator of the series “Better Things” who made her feature directing debut with “Babes,” the idea was to upend in a sneaky way the traditional Hollywood pregnancy and motherhood narratives (ineffectual spouse; postpartum bodies that immediately “bounce back”). “I like to do TED talks inside of a Milky Way bar,” she said. “Like, it’s delicious going down.”
Buteau was instrumental. “She’s just a perfect comedy machine,” the filmmaker said — although for this role, Adlon did direct the comedian to do less. “She’s like, you’re tired — lean into that; be still,” Buteau said. She worked on quieting her grandly expressive face. “You know, in stand-up comedy, you don’t want to hear any silence,” Buteau said, adding, “Pamela’s like, ‘Just take your time.’ And that’s real life.”
In her own show, “Full Heart,” Buteau hopes to have that breathing space, too, to tell stories “and just live in them,” she said. “Playing these bigger theaters has really allowed me to kind of grow into the comedian I’ve always wanted to be.”
It was expensive to book and challenging to fill, but choosing a large, notable venue like Radio City — where she opened for Jonathan Van Ness, the “Queer Eye” personality, a few years ago — was meant to be an explicit message, she said, to other generations of performers, especially marginalized ones, that they belong on a big stage, too.
“I’m excited,” she said. “I mean, I want to take a poop every time I think about it. It keeps me regular, in more ways than one.”
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