Patti Harrison, like every great comic, knows how to use her face. If you’ve seen her stealing scenes in TV shows like Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave or Hulu’s Shrill, you know that she often starts out a bit demure, or pouty, before walking audiences into the deep end. She’s a bit innocent, until she’s deranged—and you’re gasping for air.
It’s that quality in Harrison’s work that WIRED borrowed for our own rather unhinged cover concept. Harrison plays five (well, actually six) of the current masters of the universe—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos (with Lauren Sánchez Bezos by his side). Combining her farcical sensibilities with our commentary on the man-heavy leadership of Silicon Valley worked perfectly—and she was happy to lampoon the people behind the platforms she used to enjoy. (RIP Harrison’s Twitter account.) We caught up with Harrison in London, where she had just finished a sold-out run of her show, Just Ironing Some Things Out!, and a week of performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: When we were putting together our WIRED Women cover, we knew we had to put the best possible woman on it. You immediately came to mind, and I can’t stress enough how much you nailed the assignment.
PATTI HARRISON: That’s such a nice intro. I want to argue with a bunch of it.
You do?
I was coming in today like, oh, I guess I didn’t really check to see what the interview was about. Then I had this natural creeping anxiety. What if this is some sort of ambush, like a transphobic takedown piece—and then it was going to launch into me having to define what a woman was.
Oh my God. Thank you for being here, Patti. You are our WIRED Woman.
I appreciate that so much. It’s very affirming.
To be honest, when we were thinking about this cover and who would be perfect for it, I knew you, and I knew you were hilarious. I had no idea that you were a trans woman. It wasn’t part of the calculus. We were just so thrilled at the idea of imagining you and your really over-the-top absurdist approach to comedy embodying these characters. That was the whole joy of it for us.
From the start, I’ve been pretty outspoken about being transgender. I just don’t talk about it a lot in my work explicitly. Or when I do acting stuff, I’m not always playing a character that’s said to be trans.
Nor should you have to.
It’s fun to kind of leave that open and nebulous, especially if it’s not important to the content of the work or the jokes I’m making. So, it is meaningful to me to get to do this on the basis of you guys liking how much I’m online talking about jism and kissing my dog on the mouth, that kind of discourse.
I mean, the kissing-the-dog-on-the-mouth discourse is so important. You are so, and I mean this as a compliment, conventionally funny. You’ve talked before about feeling pressure to incorporate politics into your work and how you don’t necessarily want to. You’ve also talked about how those things can’t really be separated. I’m curious about that line for you, because obviously sometimes we just want to make jokes about jizz and poo and kissing dogs.
I think there’s a balance. I think in our current climate of social media access, the kind of social media we have access to and how it’s been monopolized, we have been corralled Temple Grandin–style humanely into choosing to be in this very limited silo where our speech is heavily censored.