Clare O’Kane’s Official Website

JUMP TO:
(2018) Let It Be
(2024) Everything I Know How to Do

Let It Be (2018)
Rating: Good

“She’s not going to be like Chappelle. She’s not coming out here to be transphobic. She’s not going to keep banging the mic against her leg.”

This is one of the many ways Megan Koester introduces Clare O’Kane, and now I want to listen to Megan Koester because she sounds hilarious! But we ain’t talking about Megan Koester here. We’re talking about Clare O’Kane, a queer half-Asian young lady who talks about being queer, half-Asian, and a young lady! She promises that the end of straight, white, male comedy is near AS IT SHOULD BE. I’M LOOKING AT YOU BRIAN POSEHN.

Since I recently listened to Cara Connors, another queer young lady, I’ll compare O’Kane to Connors now and say this: while Connors’ comedy was painfully bitter and depressing, O’Kane’s comedy is more light-hearted. While Connors talked about having seven bridesmaids at her sham wedding with mirthless laughter, O’Kane talks about how her ex-boyfriend won $1,000,000 at a Big Bang Theory slot machine with mild incredulity (and then the subsequent tooth falling out of her head for no reason, but trust her, she’s fine, seriously). And while Connors seems to be using her standup set as a tense therapy session, O’Kane uses it as a vehicle for what she calls her “sexual renaissance”.

As far as being a woman goes, she finds it less of a difficult thing and more of an “oh well, ugh, I guess this is how it’s going to be” kind of thing. After describing being catcalled at 13 by a guy who told her “damn, you’re gonna be fine as fuck when you get older”, she jokes that she got fine as fuck at 14 and starts doing a sing-song about sucking that teenage pussy and her tiny little titties that cracked me up harder than I have in a while. Sounds crass on paper, whoops! She also makes this fantastic comparison: “Women’s bodies are built better [than men’s bodies], like the Great Barrier Reef, or, like, a rainforest, or something else destroyed by a man.” Jokes about HPV and Planned Parenthood are also in the mix, but I won’t bore you with my writings about them! Clare O’Kane is a storyteller and I recommend letting her tell the stories!

O’Kane spends lot of time covering other avenues as well, mining comedy out of her grandmother’s ambulance calendar (where every ambulance looks like it was photographed in the same parking lot) or watching an ant carry a fingernail while she was high. She tells everyone to have a Happy Honda Days, she mixes up Nostradamus with Nosferatu, and she has a bit about football players beating their little wives. The icing on the cake, of course, is a five-minute chunk on accidentally walking in on her father jacking off! She waited until he was dead to tell it on stage, which was less than a week ago! So thank God she can tell the story now!

Good stuff all around! I hesitate to call it Very Good, but perhaps I’ll change my mind after a few more listens. O’Kane is pretty damn funny, you guys.

Everything I Know How to Do (2024)
Rating: Good

At one point in her second special, Clare O’Kane makes it clear that she doesn’t do observation comedy. She’s here to talk about her vagina and all the problems with it.

She doesn’t talk about her vagina the whole time, but I think this describes the essence of her stand-up style perfectly. At least she knows what her limitations are. Observational comedy feels like a performance. Personal comedy feels like a conversation. And O’Kane is pretty good at making her personal comedy sound naturally conversational, especially when she addresses the audience with topics like “Do you want to hear the ‘Yo Mama’ joke I made up about my dead parents?” (“Yo Mama so ugly, my parents are now dead”) or “I’m going to start singing this private message I got from a guy who was criticizing my full-frontal bush”. It makes for an immersive experience, which gives her bonus points. Good job, O’Kane!

This also means that she’s a good storyteller, explaining why she quit SNL because they made her work Saturdays (and also they wouldn’t let her write “She-Hulk’s pussy” in a sketch) and the aforementioned full-frontal bush, which she flashed for an Amazon Prime pilot that wasn’t picked up. She doesn’t forget to pepper the stories with funny bits, like when she talks about dating apps and how there are “full of guys with hats with clocks on them and neurodivergent dog dads”, or she describes a medium who told her the smell of baby powder means her dead mother is there in the room because she used to powder her pubes in the bathroom in front of her daughter. O’Kane has a childlike voice that mixes will with the bawdy subject matter, too, so when she’s talking about her horndog dad or how she pulled a muscle in her back while getting eaten out, I have to remind myself that this is a full grown adult person and not some teenager describing her sexual escapades with excruciating detail. Because that would be weird.

There are some misses. A non-sequitur about her dying grandmother dazedly asking her family to “please close the coffin” doesn’t land with me, and especially neither do the skits at the end of the CD with the actual played-out She-Hulk gynecology conversation or the bizarre trip-hop Filipino adobo chicken recipe. Those are tack-ons to the actual set, so I don’t factor that into the stand-up portion of the disc.

But I can excuse the problems by pointing out genius lines like “my husband’s girlfriend is nice for a whore” and “me wearing earrings is like a gym teacher trying to look nice at a school dance” or comparing pansexuality to rap rock and “those skateboards with the one big wheel”. It’s the little turns of phrase like these that make O’Kane a joy to listen to. I’m very much looking forward to what I hope is a long career.