For the first several years of his career, stand-up comedian Matteo Lane would open his sets by telling the audience, “Obviously, I’m gay.” At a certain point, he got tired of coming out to a room of strangers every night and instead begins his new Hulu hour The Al Dente Special by making fun of the way white women talk—a bit that delighted Gayle King and led to one of the more awkwardly hilarious morning TV moments in recent history.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Lane explains why he decided to give the CBS Mornings host a pass for repeating the “f-slur” back to him and reveals how King’s fellow astronaut Katy Perry ended up being part of his special as well. And as Pride Month comes to a close, he discusses why he’s so sick of people expecting gay comedians to relive their trauma, shares why he avoids talking politics on stage, and calls out TV bookers for keeping him off of late-night TV because they deemed his act “too gay.”
When Lane eventually did make his late-night stand-up debut on Seth Meyers’ show in 2016, he started by asking the audience to “clap if you can hear my gay voice.”
And yet, he reveals in our conversation that the year before that appearance aired, he had actually taped another set on a different late-night show that he declines to name. But it never aired because the powers that be thought it was “too gay.”
“The host said to the producers that I was doing too many gay jokes, and they’d like me to come back and redo it and make it less gay,” Lane says, refusing to tell me whether it is a show that is still currently on the air. “Let’s just say that I said no.”
Finding the silver lining a decade later, the 38-year-old comic says it was a “good thing in a weird way” because it “really put a lot into perspective of the world I was actually living in.” He ended up going on his first big tour of “the worst comedy clubs in America,” which allowed him to “hone” his voice and really “learn how to be a comic.”
Eventually, he worked his way up to regular status at the famed Comedy Cellar in New York, which he credits for literally saving his life.
“I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for the Comedy Cellar, I really really mean that,” Lane says, explaining that before that “nobody” in the comedy world would book him for gigs. “How else would I have paid rent? How would I have eaten?” he asks. “I wouldn’t have had any way to work out my material. I wouldn’t have an hour. I wouldn’t have social media clips. I would have nothing.”
Compared to the unnamed show that told him his jokes were “too gay,” Lane says the team at Late Night with Seth Meyers was “wonderful” and gave him “no restrictions whatsoever about anything that I wanted to do.”
In the years since, Lane has performed stand-up on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and appeared as a guest on both Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Daily Show but never performed on either The Late Late Show with James Corden or The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
It will be difficult, however, for Lane to ever have a talk show appearance more memorable than his sit-down with Gayle King and the rest of the CBS Mornings team earlier this year. During that interview, King prefaced a question about one of the jokes in his new special by saying, “I hope I don’t get in trouble.”
She then quoted Lane’s unique usage of the “f-slur”—“What in the f—-try are you talking about?”— before adding, “I thought that was hilarious. What does that mean?”
Laughing hysterically, Lane replied in the moment, “I love you, Gayle King! It means exactly what you think it means.”
The internet at large had a lot of thoughts about King’s use of that word uncensored on live morning television, but Lane maintains that he did not think twice about giving the host a pass.
“I thought, first of all, if anyone can say the word f—-t, it’s Gayle, let’s be honest here,” Lane says now. “There are certain women in this world that can say f—-t. Jennifer Coolidge can say f—-t. Gayle King can say f—-t.”
Lane admits that “plenty of people were offended by it,” but that just emphasizes the fact that gay people are “not a monolith.” He says, “Being gay doesn’t mean that how I feel is how everybody else feels. There are plenty of people who have a different relationship with that word. They came up at a different time. They grew up in different environments. So I can’t expect that everyone is going to laugh at it the way that I have. I just happen to look at life and laugh at it.”
Asked if he ended up speaking to King at all about the fallout, Lane says, “No, they rocketed her off the planet! CBS is like, we gotta get her out of here. Her controversy went from calling me a f—-t—joking, obviously—to being in space with the world’s most insufferable human being Katy Perry.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
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