Summary
Crushing It is Fortune Feimster on classic form, delivering positive and straightforward laughs without any embellishment.
Crushing It is Fortune Feimster’s third solo Netflix special after Sweet and Salty and Good Fortune, and while I’m not quite sure it’s the best or most purely cathartic, it’s nonetheless an integral part of what has formed into a great trilogy. While Sweet and Salty looked back on Feimster’s childhood in North Carolina and Good Fortune was about her finding love in her now-wife, Jax, Crushing It picks up in the honeymoon phase and beyond.
Holistically, it’s a nice narrative arc. The familiarity and continuity fit neatly with Feimster’s positive style, a kind of best-of-a-bad-situation determination to Uno reverse any attribute or scenario that could be perceived as negative into a funny bit or a personal epiphany. I like Fortune Feimster – and, spoiler alert, I like Crushing It – precisely because of that laidback nonplussed demeanor.
There’s no anger here, anywhere. And there are things to be angry about. But Feimster doesn’t peddle outrage or bestow heroic status on herself for being a masculine-looking lesbian who has to navigate the world on that basis. It’s played for laughs. In a comedy special! Who’d have thought it?
Nowhere is this more evident than in an opening segment that recounts Feimster and Jax’s overdue honeymoon to the Maldives, where it’s illegal to be gay, via an overnight layover in Qatar, where it’s even more illegal to be gay. I loved this whole bit; it’s funny, obviously, but also crucially eye-opening in how it relays an experience that most of us have probably never considered. And the payoff punchline is excellent, at least in part because it seems very likely to be true.
All of the stuff involving Jax in Crushing It is pretty good, but usually in ways that are reminders of how seasoned Fortune Feimster is as a performer. A silent mime fight is the best example of well-rehearsed material delivered with the confidence of someone who knows their audience and their act intimately. It’s solid physical comedy.
And Feimster seems to have a knack even for simply describing that kind of comedy. There are a couple of extended bits that are articulated so well that they didn’t even need the physical embellishments (the graveyard story in particular). You don’t notice how little Feimster needs to move to keep the audience engaged until she sees fit to throw in a performatively ostentatious walk or something just for a flourish. It hits every time.
There is a personal element to the material here, including a lengthy section about her parents divorcing when she was 12 and inadvertently becoming her mother’s husband in the aftermath, but it doesn’t feel like soul-searching. Feimster’s self-awareness keeps her act laser-focused and tightly edited. There’s no fluff in this hour, and the late callbacks to earlier jokes are an excellent closer.
Fortune Feimster is just a really good comic, and Crushing It proves that capably. It doesn’t push the boat out, and it might not resonate in the some way as some of her previous work or snatch headlines like experimental Netflix specials like Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees or the wonderful Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Special. But it’s a dependable hour from a solid talent who just wants to make you laugh, first and foremost. Sometimes that’s all you need.
