When I was in college, I was friends with this group of girls who had the driest, most deadpan sense of humor imaginable. (Just to be clear, since I have a moist sense of humor at best: I wasn’t in this particular group, I was just friends with them.) They were the kind of girls who would just flat-out lie to you about something, anything, for like fifteen minutes, or however long it took you to figure out that they were lying, but I’m pretty sure they assumed you were in on it and knew they were lying, because they were nice and generous enough to maybe think you were as smart as they were, or almost as smart. Also they had a wonderful, violent kitten named Cupcake.
They all grew up to be dry and deadpan and smart and generous in various careers, and one of them, Lizzie Prestel, grew up to make this webseries, Lizzie and Ali: A Mostly True Story, in which she plays a mostly-true version of Lizzie: one who is just as dry and deadpan as Real Lizzie, but a lot less smart and way less generous.That’s especially true in Lizzie and Ali‘s latest episode, which just went live on Funny or Die. Watch it there now, or take this opportunity to catch up on all eight episodes in order; binge-watching them all in a row will take you like half an hour.
Lizzie and Ali are awful and delightful in a way that’s kind of reminiscent of Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous: they’re shallow and oblivious and maybe stupid but maybe not that stupid because they’re so funny and scathing and mean, and they always seem to be drinking and doing drugs and having undignified sex and committing various crimes and saying really mean things to other people. But they’re, uh, more like me (duh, I went to college with one of them): the jokes are less Boomer, more halfway-between-Gen-X-and-millennial, and Lizzie and Ali often seem to take great pains to couch their outrageous selfishness in the ingratiating self-effacement or fake-tough-love “real talk” or empty sympathy required by Contemporary Female Friendship. This interview with the “real” Lizzie and her co-creator Alison Quinn is great, but I kind of disagree with its claim that Lizzie & Ali is “gender-neutral comedy.” It’s definitely comedy that people of any gender can enjoy, but its humor comes from its pitch-perfect attention to and amplification of highly gendered language and behavior. What I enjoy the most about the show, I think, is the complex stance it creates toward the “girl world” (OK, the thirtysomething-woman-child world) it depicts. Lizzie and Ali are parodying stereotypes of women as catty and shallow, but in presenting the show as a “(mostly) true story” they’re laughing at the fact that they kind of are catty and shallow, and having fun pretending to be even worse. What would it be like if we were the really awful girls we all sometimes think we are? There’s vicarious fun in watching them be awful—a fun that I would argue is feminist in how it pushes past the polite boundaries of “stereotypical” feminine hypocrisy into full-out, transgressive aggression—but at the same time you’re always aware that they’re awful, and kind of pathetic, and that the victims of their crimes are just kind of confused and annoyed. And yet! They’re consistently great friends to each other, best-friend antiheroines in the tradition of Thelma & Louise and the girls from Daisies and those dry-witted pathological liars I knew in school.
