Leanne Morgan speaks to her audience as an emissary from another world. Her comedy plays like a loving travelogue of her life laid out with an assurance that these details will be unfamiliar, thrilling, and exotic. In her first Netflix special, 2023’s I’m Every Woman, Morgan represented a land of honest pragmatism and everyday, down-to-earth sensibility. She acts as a tour guide there, too, but she’s painting a life they already know well: Jell-O salad, Sunday mornings at church, practical underwear from big-box retailers. But in a Netflix carousel of hourlong specials, Morgan looks like a voyager from somewhere else entirely. That territory has a bounty of middle-age men humping stools and occasionally noticing that death eventually comes for us all. Being a grandparent is just as common an experience as being frightened by trans people (I would hope much more so, in fact), but only one of those is a well-represented comedic perspective on a stand-up stage. Morgan’s catapult to fame in the past few years is partly because of her skill and partly because her existence as a 60-year-old woman from rural America allows her to depict experiences everyone knows exist but are relatively rare in this context. From that perspective, the title of that special almost looks defiant.
