The almost famous drag king comedian Murray Hill struts through Melvyn’s Restaurant & Lounge, an old school steakhouse in Palm Springs, Calif.
Melvyn’s is Mr. Hill’s kind of place. It has steak Diane on the menu, black-and-white head shots of celebrities on the walls and the aroma of crêpes suzette flambéing in the air. And Palm Springs is Mr. Hill’s kind of town — faded midcentury Hollywood glamour, with a modern dash of queer culture.
Moving past diners wearing pastel polo shirts and golf shorts, Mr. Hill cuts a distinctive figure in his three-piece baby blue seersucker suit and white loafers. His pencil-thin mustache, tinted glasses and shiny rings complete a look that brings to mind a 1970s Las Vegas lounge singer crossed with a 1950s Borscht Belt comedian.
He is a somebody, clearly. But who?
He sits down, studies the menu. His glance falls on the section for steak toppings, which are listed under the heading “Enhancements.”
“‘Enhancements’?” he cries, loudly enough for almost everyone in the place to hear. “I already got them. They’re back at the house. They’re on the drying rack!”
Mr. Hill, 52, speaks with the hint of a Brooklyn wiseguy accent and punctuates anything remotely to do with the entertainment industry — the rungs of which he has been tirelessly climbing for some 30 years — with a cry of “Showbiz!”
This is the Murray Hill that audiences that have come to know and love at small New York venues, from Cake to Joe’s Pub — a garrulous, semi-washed-up comedian who belongs to the bygone show-business age of zingers and rimshots.
The other Murray Hill is an ascendant character actor who has distinguished himself with heartfelt performances on the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere” and Amy Schumer’s Hulu show, “Life & Beth.”
He also has a key role in “Jackpot,” an upcoming film by Paul Feig, the director of “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and other comedy hits. And he was among the comics selected to perform at the annual Netflix Is a Joke festival last month.
The waiter arrives. Mr. Hill orders filet mignon, a Caesar salad and a seltzer.
“Any sides?” the waiter asks.
“I got so many sides, I’m a circle!” Mr. Hill says.
He’ll be here all night, folks!
Mr. Hill, who lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, explains that he’s in Palm Springs to scout locations for “Shorty Big Time,” a detective show he is developing and hoping to sell. He notes that it will be nothing like “Law & Order” or the other prime time staples of the genre.
“Nobody’s getting killed,” he says.
Sample plotline: “Someone took somebody’s teeth at the nursing home, and they call me in,” he says. “Or the gay rodeo’s in town, and the chaps are missing. Just fun and campy. We need it. Things are rough out there.”
Does it have interest from a studio or streaming platform?
“It’s on a couple of desks,” Mr. Hill replies. “Hey — showbiz talk!”
“Now that I have some outside validation,” he continues, “I feel like it’s my duty and my obligation to do this show and get it made. You know, RuPaul is the mother, and I’m the father. People are starting to catch up. The only problem is, I’m getting older!”
Origin Story
One of the stock jokes in any Murray Hill show goes like this: “I’m reading your mind, sir,” he will say to a man in the front row. “You’re thinking, ‘Is it a man or a woman? Is it a man or a woman?’ Sir, the answer is — no!”
Like a lot of jokes, this one may come from hard experience. Mr. Hill grew up in small New England towns, a child of conservative Catholic parents.
“The only thing I knew about gay and queer was that it was wrong and you’re going to hell,” he says. “And there was no language about trans. So I had to do a lot of unlearning. I didn’t come out until way later. Now I say, ‘I came out — but I don’t know as what!’ Hey, where’s my rimshot?”
After college at Boston University, he moved to New York to pursue a graduate degree in photography at the School of Visual Arts. Posing as a photojournalist on assignment for The Village Voice, Mr. Hill began to explore drag clubs in the East Village and the Meatpacking District.
“These clubs were so vibrant, full of life and accepting,” he recalls. “And funny! The drag queens were crazy. The politics was hardcore. There was darkness, but the presentation was camp and fun. That’s how we’re going to handle all these bad feelings of being discriminated against.”
He started to perform as different characters — “Saturday Night Fever”–era John Travolta, 1970s Elvis Presley and the gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi — while lip-syncing to prerecorded songs, a drag-club performance trope.
“What set him apart was his outlandish behavior,” said Mo B. Dick, a fellow drag king. “He really couldn’t stand lip-syncing. He didn’t follow the standard procedures. He took it further in developing his own character.”
In 1997 Mr. Hill ran, as a write-in candidate, for New York City mayor against the incumbent, Rudy Giuliani, on the platform “Let the Kids Dance.” He says he received 341 votes. He wasn’t exactly the Murray Hill of today, but in his white suit, large glasses and executive-contour hairstyle, he was gradually assembling his signature look.
“I’m kind of like a used-car salesman,” he says, describing the persona. “Jackie Gleason. Archie Bunker. Your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. Which happens to be all my Italian relatives. But I switch gender. So I became the subject I wanted to see.”
Another influence was his love of classic American comedy.
“I used to watch Johnny Carson,” Mr. Hill says. “He would have these old-school comedians on — Buddy Hackett, Dean Martin, Totie Fields, Phyllis Diller. It felt like I had some kinship with them. Funny. Kind. They rib each other, but they’re still family.”
He made a particular study of Don Rickles’s live shows — the pacing, the crowd work, the subtle shifts in tone to elicit laughs and tears.
“Those Catskills comedians all came from rough lives, and drag queens have the same thing,” he said. “They’re dealing with all this heavy stuff. Drag queens and Borscht Belt comedians have that in common. A sense of entertaining and really giving it to you, but you’re in on it. Comedy. They say it’s healing, and guess what — it’s true.”
From these influences — drag queens, drag kings, Borscht Belt tummlers and his Italian family members — a character was born. All these years later, the line between the persona and the person behind it has gotten a bit fuzzy.
While waiting for the world to catch up with his act, he has done everything from hosting eating contests to headlining shows. He has opened for the bands Le Tigre and Gossip and toured with the burlesque performer Dita Von Teese. Along the way he amassed an ever widening circle of friends, admirers and colleagues, including Mr. Feig, the director.
“In today’s world, where everyone tries to present themselves in three dimensions, there’s something so lovely about someone who has become a persona and that’s what they present to the world,” Mr. Feig said. “Murray has dedicated his life to this character and I think that’s so special.”
While the traditional understanding of gender and sex has come under increased examination in recent years, it seems that Mr. Hill, for the most part, would prefer to express his views on those issues through his work. As he sees it, he feels comfortable as Murray Hill, and if anyone else has trouble categorizing him, well, that’s their problem.
“What I love about Murray is he doesn’t clap you over the head with feminism and a queer agenda,” Mo B. Dick said. “He does it in this comedic way, and you clock the political aspects.”
Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies at Columbia University, got to know Mr. Hill in New York in the 1990s, while researching his pioneering work of queer theory, “Female Masculinity.” When informed of Mr. Hill’s recent foray into TV and film, Mr. Halberstam seemed surprised. “Really?” he said.
“Well,” he continued, “he deserves everything. He is an absolute treasure.”
The professor then summed up the appeal of the Murray Hill character: “He’s presenting the arrogance and narcissism of a world that continues to be male-dominated, by men who barely have to try. It’s a sleazy version of masculinity that we all want to take down.”
Mr. Hill’s longtime friends include the comedian and cabaret chanteuse Bridget Everett, the star of “Somebody Somewhere,” which recently completed the filming of its third season. On the show, which is set in Manhattan, Kansas, Mr. Hill plays the kindhearted soil scientist Fred Rococo. The character, a gentle optimist, requires Mr. Hill to display more tenderness than he does in his stage act.
“Murray and I have been moving through the ranks and kicking around downtown for years,” said Ms. Everett, who has been a frequent guest performer at Mr. Hill’s club shows. “We’re kindred spirits. We look out for each other. It’s just like the circle of life. Like ‘The Lion King,’ except totally different.”
Applause
On the day after the dinner at Melvyn’s, Mr. Hill is dressed in what you might call his “off-duty” look — red track suit, red baseball cap, gold chain — as he enters the West Hollywood showroom of the tailor Leon Elias Wu, who specializes in making gender-inclusive custom suits. It is a bright May afternoon, a little more than 24 hours before his Netflix Is a Joke performance.
As Mr. Wu prepares to unveil his latest suit (they start at $2,000), Mr. Hill pants in anticipation. It’s a bit, clearly, but it contains a truth. In this case, the truth is that Mr. Hill can’t seem to stop acquiring custom suits. Until a fire destroyed his apartment in Greenpoint last year, he owned 80 of them. Now, with the TV money rolling in, Mr. Hill is rebuilding the collection, with 25 and counting.
The suit presented by Mr. Wu, it must be said, is magnificent — a three-piece plaid affair in blue and pink, with a rich paisley lining.
“Look at that lining,” Mr. Hill says. “Sick!”
“There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in this business,” he continues. “I can’t go into a regular suit place. I’ve done that — and you look like an idiot.”
Mr. Wu makes slight alterations, a pinch here, a tuck there.
“As masc people, we have slim arms,” Mr. Wu says. “That’s why you want it tailored, because it’s supposed to look filled-up in the sleeve. Usually, when you buy a men’s suit and you’re a masc person, your arms look like tubes. So having it slimmed down a little actually makes you look more masculine. Those are the tricks we learn. Learning drag performance is learning about style.”
Before you know it, Mr. Hill is ordering another suit. “It’s got to look either super sharp, or super 1970s ‘Love Boat,’ or Dean Martin,” he says.
Mr. Wu opens a book of fabrics, saying, “We’ve got colors, plaids and patterns.”
“That’s what my shrink says — I have too many patterns!” Mr. Hill says.
The next evening, Mr. Hill is making last-minute preparations for his Netflix Is a Joke show at the Kookaburra Lounge, a nightclub in a shopping mall behind the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
It is his first show in Los Angeles, and he has put together a seven-piece band with a horn section for the occasion, as if he were about to play the Sands in Las Vegas. Shortly before the audience streams in, he tapes printouts of song lyrics and jokes to the floor monitors and music stands. Just like Joan Rivers!
Close to 8 p.m., Mr. Hill starts the show with a bit where he struggles to mount the stage, a slapstick display that he drags out for a few minutes. The crowd is loose by the time he throws himself into the opening number, “About to Break,” an upbeat tune written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the team behind the musical “Hairspray.”
“I was afraid that my act had stalled,” Mr. Hill sings. “Imagine my shock when my agent called.” He starts tap dancing, terribly, just like Rickles, and the trombone player assists with a few fart jokes. The crowd is with him.
“The more you applaud, the less I think about my childhood,” he says.
The band begins vamping on the “Family Feud” theme song.
“It’s been a long journey, because there are not enough lights, and I can’t see my cue cards,” Mr. Hill says. “Kids, all kidding aside, I’ve been in showbiz over 30 years, and if you didn’t keep coming to see me — I’d still be in rehab!”
“We love you!” a woman screams from the audience.
“I can hear you — we’re two feet away from each other!” Mr. Hill says. “I love you, too.”
The music changes color as Mr. Hill heads toward the big finish, the part when you go for the heart and hit them with a sentimental ballad. Don Rickles used to do “Laughter for Love.” For Totie Fields, it was “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.”
“This is one that I wrote,” Mr. Hill says.
Chuckles from the audience.
“That’s not a joke, but thank you for laughing.”
He launches into “Just Me,” which he calls his theme song.
“Some people can’t understand what’s inside of this man,” he sings. “And I’m not so sure I can explain it.”
The horn section swells. You can almost feel the spirits of Fields and Rickles looking down approvingly on their unlikely acolyte. Murray Hill, of all people, is entering the stream.
He finishes “Just Me” with one final triumphant “me.” The word lands horribly, hilariously flat, and it lingers for a few seconds. It is ridiculous. And beautiful. The crowd at the Kookaburra Lounge erupts.
Are they laughing or choking up? Folks, the answer is — yes.
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