Patti Harrison and Mitski on Caffeine Enemas, Model Minorities, and Fascist Takeovers

Over a decade of scene-stealing turns in your favorite television shows (and one especially memorable appearance on The Tonight Show in 2017), the comedian Patti Harrison has developed a reputation as one of the most naturally funny people in entertainment. Her sense of humor is zany, deeply ironic and, until recently, not as preoccupied with current events so much as bizarre breaches of social etiquette and the embarrassing quandary of being alive. Lately, though, the generally grim state of the world—and a federal assault on trans rights—has her feeling fired up. “My life felt so politicized outside of comedy that when I’d write, I could just be as random as I wanted and not have to deal with the strife of being marginalized,” the 34-year-old star of I Think You Should Leave and Together Together told her friend Mitski on a call earlier this month. “Now though, it definitely feels inseparable, and it’s a very violent thing to watch people be completely complicit or numb.” Lucky for Harrison, comedy is a space where she can do or say whatever she wants. As she joked to Mitski: “I am my own boss. I am my own HR. I can grope myself.” While Harrison prepared for her upcoming variety shows at Edinburgh Fringe, the two hd a wide-ranging conversation about trauma responses, showing tits, totalitarian governments, and the war in Gaza, below.

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MITSKI: Are you in London?

PATTI HARRISON: I am. I’m doing shows at the Soho Theatre. Something just fell over in my flat. I’m calling it a flat because I’m assimilating.

MITSKI: Is it haunted?

HARRISON: No, the windows are open and it’s really windy in the UK right now. I have a friend who’s doing the Edinburgh Fringe comedy festival right now who said a bunch of shows just got canceled because of wind. I was like, “Oh, did the wind blow the power out?” And she was like, “No, there’s a wind danger warning for stuff flying through the air,” because there’s all these cardboard signs and things.

MITSKI: When you’re on location, are there things that you like to do for yourself? A routine to keep you grounded, or some way to have fun?

HARRISON: Do I like to have fun?

MITSKI: [Laughs]

HARRISON: I knew you were going to be such a bitch and ask that. I told you yesterday when we had our preliminary call that I don’t like to talk about fun. [Laughs] When I travel for work, I’m pretty scatterbrained and doing things until my five-minute warning to go on stage, so most of the time I’m kind of in a haze trying to figure out stuff. But I have friends here, so I’ve been going to galleries and going on little walks. That wasn’t something that I liked doing for a while because I have a lot of commuter anxiety. I used to not be able to eat or do anything in public by myself. I think that compounded with the trans anxiety of getting clocked or harassed. And when I’m in another country, that kind of can be amplified a little bit.

MITSKI: Right.

HARRISON: I’m flagging to you right now that I am on Ritalin, because I was working on my show earlier and I thought I had therapy today and then I didn’t. 

MITSKI: You’re in therapy space. But I’m not your therapist. This is being recorded. 

HARRISON: I don’t want to remember that this is being recorded. I just want to be real and live in that. You haven’t asked me one question about my complex PTSD. 

MITSKI: [Laughs]

HARRISON: I’m also drinking this crazy coffee that is doing the damn thing.

MITSKI: You are playing mad games with your body right now.

HARRISON: Have you seen people do the caffeine enemas?

MITSKI: No, I’ve never watched a caffeine enema.

HARRISON: You of all people have never watched caffeine enema? I feel like there’s never been a niche thing online that you don’t know about.

MITSKI: You’re right. I do watch the cyst release. I do watch the pimple popping. I do watch the ear wax. I’ve discovered this new thing where people take mucus out of their eyeballs. 

HARRISON: Is it like when you get allergies and you get the stringy goop in your eye?

MITSKI: I guess. There’s a closeup shot of an eyeball, and then some kind of tweezer pulls goop out of the eyeball. The algorithm just led me there. 

HARRISON: How long do you watch it for and what’s going through your mind when you’re watching that? 

MITSKI: I just get mesmerized. Should we be talking about this in public? ’Cause I don’t know…

HARRISON: This is what the space is for. I think this is what we’d be talking about if we were having one of our normal days where we go shopping at Target.

MITSKI: Wait, back to the coffee enema. First of all, I really hate butt stuff of any kind.

HARRISON: Okay? Sydney Sweeney and you both revealed as Republicans this week. [Laughs] 

MITSKI: I know. I’m sorry to tell you that I’m super conservative. But wait, I think the enema setup alone would take longer than just drinking a coffee.

HARRISON: Well, we’re industrializing at a never-before-seen rate. We’re propelling into the future in terms of the technology of tubes that go in your ass. You just lube the little douche thing and pop it in there. That’s less sick to me than the people who put shit in their ass to rebalance their flora or whatever.

MITSKI: Patti, I can’t.

HARRISON: I’m really excited about all the federal deregulating of the natural sciences because it has allowed for a lot of awesome stuff, like the return of crazy bacteria in sitting water. Now, the odds of us getting the plague from taking a dip in the pond are exponentially rising. I hate to reference a conversation that happened off the record, but it’s kind of like what we were talking about yesterday with the internet becoming an obsolete place to see information. Soon there won’t be any way to tell if the information you’re seeing on the internet is real or fake, because it will be so convincingly realistic. We’ll be completely packed in with an endless sea of convincing, lifelike, fake shit.

MITSKI: Wait, this is a good segue for me to ask you how the “real world” affects your work now. A lot of your past work is about creating a space where you’re safe to laugh about stupid stuff, but as you have continued in your career, there’s less of a wall between the safe silly space of your comedy and the outside world.

HARRISON: Well, when I started performing on my own in New York, I was working at a restaurant during the election cycle for Hillary and Trump. It was a really heightened, politicized time. Growing up in the Midwest, I didn’t consider myself political in any way. I always had low self-esteem about understanding how systems work in general. Government was always a bad subject for me. Anything where I had to remember dates or remember people’s names was off the table, even in my own life.

MITSKI: That’s a CPTSD thing. My memory’s shit.

HARRISON: Yeah. I was struggling really hard to get booked on comedy shows, and I was in a job where I wasn’t making enough money to pay my rent. Comedy performing was a space that I felt I had control over. My life felt so politicized outside of comedy that when I’d write, I could just be as random as I wanted and not have to deal with the strife of being marginalized. Now though, it definitely feels inseparable, and it’s a very violent thing to watch people be completely complicit or numb. People are deflated and defeated. It’s like Steve Bannon’s little “flooding of the zone” technique. It does work if people just accept the barrage of information. 

MITSKI: Right. Now, the whole zone is flooded and chaotic, so you just want to make your own world where that doesn’t exist.

HARRISON: Yeah. I think other transgender artists would echo the sentiment. But for me, making stuff about transness was not as interesting because it was my daily life. It was kind of benign in a way. I really liked the idea of making work that was a reprieve from all the other times trans people are given a platform to showcase their work. A lot of times it’s by gatekeepers who aren’t trans, or people who are trying to do a great thing by elevating these voices, but they are only elevating the voices that are performing transgenderness in the way that they understand it as a cis person. So for a long time I stubbornly was like, “I’m not going to be political on stage.” But over time the feeling of fear and rage and sadness is so intertwined that it’s the well from which everything is drawn. I still try to extend into a lateral space, because when marginalized people are coming to my shows, you come to laugh. We’ve been indoctrinated by the capitalist media to think that every issue we see is our individual fault. It’s not the responsibility of these companies producing billions of pounds of unrecyclable plastic.

MITSKI: I know. It’s our plastic straws!

HARRISON: It’s our crazy swirly straws with Mickey Mouse on them. My Ritalin is making me go on diatribes.

MITSKI: No, I love this. How do you feel like you’re incorporating all of that now?

HARRISON: The shows that I’m doing now are hosted by me, so it’s just whatever I’m thinking at the time while emceeing. Getting to say whatever I want is such a huge part of what has compelled me to keep doing comedy. I think with the genocide in Gaza, a lot of actors and performers feel afraid to speak out because they’re going to lose work or they’re going to misspeak and be seen as antisemitic. But like, I made my own career.

MITSKI: You created your path.

HARRISON: Yeah, I am my own boss. I am my own HR. I can grope myself and the HR… [Laughs] Anyway, there are so many artists that feel emotionally cornered and frozen, but I also think if there’s one responsibility that a comedian can have, it’s to continue to do the thing that I love to do, whether or not my boss approves, because I am my boss. Ultimately, there’s no clean way to resist or dissent. It’s so crazy that we’re in a fascist overturn, and there’s the respectability politics of people trying to say that we have to protest in a lawful, civil way. We have to nonviolently protest a government that is being unlawfully violent to us? But I am a part of a community that’s immediately affected and it doesn’t feel like there’s a choice for me to opt out in that way.

When I was going to the ICE protests in L.A., there were so many people forming chains, linking their arms and not being violent, but they’re being physically assaulted by police and shot at with rubber bullets. Some of them are undocumented, some of them have office jobs. They have so much more to lose than a self-employed comedian. So I definitely have felt a lot of gears turning in my stomach, but I don’t feel like a super politically articulate person and I feel scared to speak on these things sometimes. If you want to argue the semantics of if I’m being antisemitic by calling the genocide in Gaza a genocide, you can waste time doing that. But starving people is wrong, and killing civilians is wrong, and apartheid is wrong.

MITSKI: I think you’re hitting on something really important, which is that semantics have taken over to the point that people are afraid to say anything that’s not completely academically informed. They feel like they can’t say, “Genocide is wrong,” because there’s going to be a million naysayers trying to educate you.

HARRISON: And I think there’s interesting points to be made about how some of the left uses communication tactics that are not actual communication tactics. We need to be able to give people the space to misspeak and try to understand something. I think a lot of this is trauma responses; so many people are in deep emotional pain that is causing cognitive dissonance. There is just so much internal, emotional work of carrying this fear of another Holocaust with you. It makes me so sad, because I grew up in Ohio in a very rural area and when I transitioned, a lot of people came from conservative, poor, Christian families. I was surrounded by homophobic, racist, transphobic jokes, and I was really afraid to come out. I felt protected by this bubble of family and college and progressive friends, but I was really pleasantly surprised by how many people I did not give the benefit of the doubt to who were way more accepting than I imagined. My mom was super Trumpy, and she’s an immigrant from Vietnam, she has war trauma. She’s so shocked at the mention of communism. It makes her enraged. And we have these well-intentioned, college-educated white kids who are not giving someone like that any grace. If you actually want to enact the change you claim you want to see in the world, it takes more work than just telling someone they’re a stupid Midwesterner or whatever. 

MITSKI: It takes empathy. 

HARRISON: Yeah. I feel fortunate to have had the experience that I have, but it gave me some insight into the ways we discredit people as bigots when we need to appeal to them a little bit. Coalition building is so important and we need to pick our priorities. Right now we are in a fascist world reconfiguration. God damn, why am I talking about this? I’m literally going to go on stage tonight and show a picture of some Ronald McDonald hentai. But I don’t get a choice, and I don’t think it’s right that Sydney Sweeney gets to sit there and not do anything and make money. It’s like, “Why don’t I get a lot of money for—”

MITSKI: Ronald McDonald hentai? I totally get it.

HARRISON: Ronald McDonald has good genes.

MITSKI: Oh my god. [Laughs]

HARRISON: And now I feel this pressure to be a model minority, because we’ve got to prove to people that trans people aren’t abject. 

MITSKI: I also want to add, especially when I go abroad, people outside of America don’t fully understand how much propaganda American people have been fed from a very young age. That, combined with an underfunded education system and food deserts and isolated communities because the country’s so big. I feel like I have to be like, “No, Americans are not somehow more violent or stupid than anyone else. You just have to understand the Petri dish that we’ve been living in.”

HARRISON: How do you feel about showing cleavage and tits?

MITSKI: [Laughs] Well, I haven’t done it. But, I think it’s because no one has asked me.

HARRISON: [Laughs] You’re not of your own will like, “Does anyone want to see?”

MITSKI: No, I tend to be quite avoidant and passive, so if no one’s asking, I’m not offering. Have you?

HARRISON: I will say that with my HRT, I have more boobs now. For a long time I was like, “Trans people are so sexualized in the media that I’m going to desexualize my image by wearing baggy clothes. If you’re going to sexualize me, then it’s going to be over here in this glass dome with my hand on the lid.” Now, I think everyone regresses a bit in times of peril. So I feel like I do show more cleavage now because I worked so hard to get me boobies and the government is trying to take that away from me. Like, I never even got to flaunt it. I never even got to swing them around my back and use the extra momentum to do a back tuck off of a Cybertruck.

MITSKI: You just have to believe in yourself.

HARRISON: I think for your next tour, you should come out in a full body lamé fabric that covers everything except for one boob.

MITSKI: This is my laziness, but when I hear that I think, “That’s going to be a pain to wash.”

HARRISON: Didn’t you do the full tour in knee pads?

MITSKI: Yeah, but they shrink in the wash. You can see by the end of the tour that my legs look extra plump because the knee pads are squeezing them.

HARRISON: Oh, they’re like Monica Bellucci’s breasts spilling over the corset. That’s sexy. That’s kind of like showing your tits.

MITSKI: If there was no context and you had all the money in the world, what would be your dream wardrobe on stage? 

HARRISON: This is a really tough question. Mitski is the Barbara Walters of internet culture journalism.

MITSKI: Spread it around.

HARRISON: Mitski is like the Joe Rogan of—

MITSKI: No, stop it!

HARRISON: [Laughs] I just wear my normal clothes, but I’ve done shows where I used to dress up more. A lot of comedy is like the coalescence of online sexuality with onstage comedy, and I don’t think that’s an evil thing but I’m like, “Why am I trying to look sexy? What does that have to do with the show?” I have tried to be really intentional about how I dress on stage. Like the last show, where I wore big prosthetic breasts that were infected and squirted blood. I also did this other style of crunchy granola whites and creams to evoke this ethereal, virginal, Jezebel 2011 pseudo-boho girl who, like, loves Madewell. And that’s valid. 

MITSKI: Would you say it’s like Venice Beach style?

HARRISON: I actually don’t go there. I would say it’s maybe a Santa Clarita vibe. But I’ve had phases. I read somewhere that you like Sheena Ringo.

MITSKI: Oh, I love Sheena Ringo. Have you seen videos of her performing? She’s so fierce.

HARRISON: I love Sheena Ringo. That’s what I was going to say, the show with Tokyo Jihen. It’s so Alexander McQueen “Highland Rape.” It’s so ornate, and she’s wearing those big antlers that are wrapped in the fabric. I don’t feel like I’m a standup, but I aspire to do a standup show where the presentation is unnecessarily ornate and there’s like, an H.R. Giger thing going on on stage, but the content is brain-liquifyingly banal and boring and like, all about Tinder.

MITSKI: [Laughs] Right. 

HARRISON: Do you think you would ever go super extravagant for a live show?

MITSKI: I don’t know. I’ve been focused on being able to move and sweat in these clothes, and that’s made it really utilitarian. Maybe if I stop moving so much. For example, Björk’s wardrobe just gets more and more elaborate as the years pass by. I don’t know if I’ll be made to quit. But we’ll see.

HARRISON: You’ll be made to quit because of your statements about your hatred for butt-oriented stuff.

MITSKI: You’re right. That’s so regressive of me.

HARRISON: Someday I will take my adopted kids to some colonial reenactment town and you’re going to be someone who’s dusting a shop.

MITSKI: Yeah, a puritan. I feel like you should keep dreaming and get the most extravagant Sheena Ringo wardrobe of your dreams.

HARRISON: Keep dreaming? That’s so patronizing, bitch.

MITSKI: I’m sorry. I should just fucking die.

HARRISON: No, you have so much to give. You’ve given the world so much already. Even if you gave everything you had to give, you’ve given more than so many other people can say they ever gave. And actually, I do think you’ve given enough and you don’t really need to give anymore.

MITSKI: You’re like, “Actually bitch, just go away.”

HARRISON: No, I’m joking. I like that if you watch Bjork throughout her career, sometimes she’ll be wearing these super crazy Iris van Herpen dresses, but then she’s just wearing orthopedic shoes. That’s cool. 

MITSKI: Comfort first.

HARRISON: You can be fully into the performance and the singing if you’re not worried that you’re going to fall. I would way rather see a concert where they sit in one place and sing really well versus someone who’s not singing very well and doing a ton of choreography with a ton of dancers and auto-tune and backing tracks and stuff. But that’s a preference thing. I think some people want the spectacle.

MITSKI: I agree. I don’t even use backing vocal tracks because I’m just like, “Sure, I’m not the best singer, but they came to hear me sing and I’m going to do it.”

HARRISON: I would argue that you are one of the best singers, and what makes you one of the best singers is that you have this crazy vocal ability, but you have restraint. 

MITSKI: Wow.

HARRISON: That is such a taste thing. You don’t oversaturate it. So when it happens it’s like, “Whoa, she could really be doing it to them, but—”

MITSKI: But I’m choosing not to. 

HARRISON: Some people are doing it the whole time and it’s like eating something that’s too sweet. 

MITSKI: How did this become about how great I am? This is so cool.

HARRISON: I’m just trying to dig us out of the hole of you being a right-wing homophobe.

MITSKI: [Laughs] I really appreciate that.

HARRISON: I was thinking that a rebrand for you could be wearing a propeller baseball hat sideways and a backpack and the zipper is broken so people can see the books that are inside. It’s Infinite Jest, but then Ayn Rand, and also Captain Underpants.

MITSKI: Thank you so much.

HARRISON: It’s here for you if you want it. Oh, I saw Ben Whishaw at a party in London recently and I wanted to take a picture of him to send it to you. And then I was like, “This is me buying into the surveillance state,” so I didn’t do it.

MITSKI: Wow. That’s too bad. I hope you haven’t been using me for Interview and that now that you’ve got what you want, you don’t talk to me anymore.

HARRISON: Actually, we only talk for press. Our only conversations ever were with Men’s Health and Delta’s Sky Magazine and now this.