In one of the funniest sketches on “I Think You Should Leave,” Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s absurdist show on Netflix, co-workers at a humdrum office discover that the company they work for has purchased a new printer. “I guess Christmas came early this year!” a man in a navy-blue tie says, eliciting chuckles from his officemates. Seeing this reaction, another employee, a willowy woman with long brown hair, tries making her own Christmas-themed wisecrack. “Santa should have wrapped it,” she says, but the joke doesn’t land. She continues: “And Santa and all his elves must have worked so hard on it, and then . . . they gave it to us early?” Her co-workers simply blink. She tries doing stranger and stranger voices, growling and moving her hands like they’re bear claws. Her insistence turns to impatience, which turns into a full-blown meltdown over the fact that no one finds her funny. Sitting behind her desk, she screams, “I’m not popular at all???” It’s a scene-stealing moment. In my home we’ve repeated the line a thousand times, as a plea for attention or an expression of exasperation. And we have Patti Harrison to thank for that.
Harrison, who plays the desperate officemate—and other, equally memorable kooks elsewhere on “I Think You Should Leave”—is an actress, writer, and standup comedian. Now thirty-one years old, she has in recent years become a rising star of the so-called alternative comedy scene, performing in variety showcases, doing deadpan character monologues on Instagram, and touring a standup set involving deranged song parodies. Harrison has worked in many television writer’s rooms, including for the Netflix animated series “Big Mouth,” and played a sardonic sidekick character on three seasons of the Hulu series “Shrill.” Last year, she starred in her first dramatic film, Nikole Beckwith’s “Together Together,” opposite Ed Helms. It was a quietly barrier-breaking role—Harrison, who is transgender, played a cisgender woman serving as a gestational surrogate—but she is leery of having her performances viewed through the lens of her identity. “I think in a lot of ways I’ve become visible because of the social-media-liberal, self-back-patting wave that has felt pretty condescending and minimizing of the work that I want to do,” she told me. In February of 2021, after Oreo Cookie’s Twitter account posted the message “Trans people exist,” Harrison decided to impersonate the brand account of Nabisco Nilla Wafers, tweeting statements such as “We, the brand Nilla wafers, are pansexual.” It was her small way of protesting corporate co-opting of queer culture, and it got her kicked off of Twitter for good—but she was ready to leave the platform anyway. During several recent interviews by phone and over Zoom, Harrison discussed detoxing from social media, the problem with Hollywood executives, and comedy that swerves between sarcasm and sincerity. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
You grew up in a very small town. Tell me a little bit about Orient, Ohio.
The upbringing vibes there were very specific. At my childhood home, there were cows that we shared the property line with, so we could go and feed them little apples. We had a nice hill in our back yard that we would sled on. But in Orient, for the most part, the biggest thing going on is the prison.
What did your parents do?
My dad died when I was, like, six, but he was a mechanic and worked on cars and motorcycles, and he worked for General Motors. My mom was a translator for a while—she’s from Vietnam—and then I think she started working in a mailroom and then kind of hopping around a lot. She has a pretty diverse résumé. We were in a rural area that’s on the outskirts of Columbus. It’s not a far trek into the city, but the job opportunities are kind of random.
I read somewhere that you were into spiders as a child, and maybe sharks for a while?
I really thought I was going to be a marine biologist, because I had a National Geographic VHS tape that tracked Eugenie Clark and her research around shark repellent and the Moses sole, this fish that is like a flounder that squirts shit out that sharks hate. I was, like, I’m going to be exactly that. But I didn’t swim. I didn’t see the ocean for the first time until I was in middle school.
Did you have a lot of friends growing up?
I didn’t get popular until my last two years of high school. I started to throw parties at my house, bonfires, so it was, like, “Oh, you’re someone who can host a bonfire, that means that we immediately want to start networking with you.” It was kind of my exposure to the awesome power of [in Valleyspeak] networking and connecting with my peers for business reasons.
That really primed you for Hollywood.
Yeah, you make a ton of beautifully meaningful friendships that way, based on if you have a fire pit, and if people are allowed to drive their trucks through your back yard. I was kind of a terror, to my mom and my neighbor, because I was, like, “Dude, it’s O.K. It’s going to be fine. They can drive their trucks back there.” And then they would leave big tire marks in our yard, and my mom would have a meltdown, and I was just, like, “Hey, I didn’t know Corbin was going to do that. That’s just not like Corbin to have done that.”
Of course that’s what Corbin would do. I want to know about your time doing improv in college, at Ohio University. Did your improv group have a name?
Oh, fuck yeah, it did. It had multiple names and you’re going to fucking love every single one. When I first joined they already had a name and it was Amsterdarn Alliterates, which they said had, like, eleven different puns. I don’t really know what they are. Then it split into two troupes. The group that I was in, our name was Six to Midnight, which is a boner joke from “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”
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That’s the most two-thousands reference.
I later worked in a writer’s room with Jason Segel, and at the end I was, like, “I didn’t want to be a freak or anything, but my college improv group was named after a quote from ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall.’ ” It’s when Russell Brand’s character is performing and Jonah Hill’s character is, like, “I just went from six to midnight.” Jason was, like, “Oh, yeah, that was actually an ad-lib that Jonah did!” Then years later I saw Jonah Hill at an event, and I was so trashed. I was, like, [slurring drunkenly] “I need to tell you, my college improv troupe . . .” He was an angel. I don’t think there’s any world where I tell either of them this dull information and they’re, like, “Fuck you, bitch.” But maybe that’s what I wanted? Maybe that’s the response I feel I deserve.
What was your improv strength in college?
I kind of bulldozed a lot. I don’t think I was a good scene partner. I think I went in and just did a crazy character who was killing everybody or committing suicide instantly in the scene, like, “ha ha!” and then leaving my scene partners to die. I think I got better by the end of it. So many people were coming to our improv shows. It was crazy. I remember our improv coach, who was a grad student from Chicago, had studied and done shows at Second City, and he was, like, “You will never get a crowd this big for an improv show ever again in your life. You should enjoy it.”
What was your experience after college?
Well, I didn’t graduate. I quit school. Once Ohio University’s Twitter page D.M.ed and was, like, “Hey, we would love to feature you on the front of the O.U. Web site and do an interview with you as some sort of cool alum thing!” I was, like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m really flattered. I would love to do that. Just so you know, I didn’t graduate, but I credit my experience at O.U. as what helped guide me into deciding what I wanted to do with my life.” And they never responded. I know that’s probably some twenty-year-old journalism student running that page. But I feel spurned by that every day.
Her nerve!
It’s a huge fucking display of disrespect. My lawyers have been all over it for years.
You’ll have your day in court. Why did you leave school?
I was so mentally checked out. All my friends were graduating and I had failed a billion classes and was just also violently depressed. I hadn’t come out as trans. Then, the summer that I quit school, I came out to two of my close friends and was, like, “I’m just going to move home and focus on doing this.” I remember my mom picking me up, because I don’t drive. She was, like, “We’re not coming back here ever again are we?” I was, like, “Nope.” I hadn’t even told her yet, but she just kind of felt it coming, how distant I was being. I was home for a whole year, just depressed in my room. Then I got a job doing customer service for Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic. It’s all one company.
Was it a job that required you to wear a headset or were you actually folding clothes?
It was a call-center job. I was on the headset at a computer.
What was that job like?
The customers are so brutal. You get all sorts of people whose goal going into the call is, “I think I’ll get what I want if I come in screaming.” Those customer-service jobs are just designed to abuse the employee, who’s making no money. What I will say is, I think the employee culture while working there was good. There was a zero-tolerance policy for discrimination. It was my first job after coming out as trans, and I was walking into a place just truly shivering every day in pure anxiety that someone was going to harass me or something. It never happened at that job, because I think anyone was afraid to say anything, because they would immediately get fired.
Only the customers harassed you on the phone about how their polo shirt didn’t fit.
Or their Rockstar boot-cut denim ripped. They’d be, like, “My son has had these jeans for about fifteen years and he did a cartwheel today and the jeans split. What are you going to do to rectify the situation?”
Also, I mean Kohl’s Cash is the fucking bane of the existence of anybody who works for Gap, because Gap has Gap Cash and then there’s Kohl’s Cash. I think you could just use Kohl’s Cash whenever. Gap Cash you could only use during the window of the promotion. People would call thinking Gap Cash was Kohl’s Cash, and then when it wasn’t they would scream at me.
This is going to be the main part of this interview, by the way. The headline is going to say “Patti Harrison explains Kohl’s Cash.”
There should be one of those little [warnings], like, “Before sharing this, are you sure this information is correct?” Like, covid-info caveats.
What was that time back home like for you? Did you get along with your mom?
She was really great and supportive. I didn’t know which way it would swing, because she generally had pretty conservative views. In a way it’s really impressive and beautiful and spectacular. But I was so isolated. I wasn’t going places. My mom was getting groceries. One day my college laptop just stopped working, and I remember feeling this, like, chill through my body. I felt like someone at the bottom of a well, like in “The Ring,” when she learns that the ring is the view of a lid of the well being slid over. That was the vibe of that moment. But, you know, I got a little replacement laptop. And I was able to watch porn again, which was really crucial.
I can imagine that going through what you were going through in a small town in the Midwest might have been more stressful than if you were in New York or L.A.
Well, I didn’t really have that option. I didn’t have money saved. And I didn’t drive. I was nervous that I would run into people I knew from high school. There were people who stopped talking to me, for sure, when I came out, which I expected. [But] I would say that, in my over-all experience, there were a lot of pleasant surprises. There were people who, even if they didn’t understand everything at first or didn’t have the proper vocabulary, they were willing to listen.
When you moved to New York, how did you try to pursue comedy?
The dream was to go and take classes at [Upright Citizens Brigade]. And I just didn’t realize how expensive classes were, so I never ended up taking any classes there, which I was really salty about for a long time. Now I have peace in my soul, but there was a lot of, like, “Fuck U.C.B.!” Then [my friend] Mitra [Jouhari] asked me to do a show that she was co-hosting with Alyssa Stonoha and Sandy Honig. They went on to do their “Three Busy Debras” show together. They hosted a little character show at a smaller part of the People’s Improv Theatre. That was, like, the first show that I ever did, and no one was in the audience, except for my roommate at the time.
You say a “character show.” Did you do a specific character?
The theme of it was a cul-de-sac barbecue, and each person performing was a person you would meet in the neighborhood. I did this monologue about a woman who was, like, “My baby choked to death on an iPad 2, because my boyfriend made a bet that my baby couldn’t fit the iPad 2 in his mouth!” And my character took it really offensively, that my boyfriend would say that my baby couldn’t do something, and felt like I really had to prove myself. So that was the joke. There’s no joke there. That was where my humor really was vibrating at the time. It’s not far from that now.
When you say that’s where your humor was vibrating, it wasn’t unprovocative.
Yeah. I think a lot of that’s rooted in having death early on in my childhood, and living with older sisters who were coping and using humor. That’s what I knee-jerk laugh at, which I think is trauma-based. So maybe not the best, but—well, it’s my toolset.
Do you think of yourself as a person who writes jokes?
No. I’ve worked in a bunch of writer’s rooms, and there are people who really excel at the linguistics part. It’s very mathematical, I think, of setup and punchline, and a lot of the stuff that I think is funny is more tonal. It wouldn’t necessarily be funny on the page, but it’s maybe more about the juxtaposition of what we’re seeing happening. The way people are saying something versus what they’re saying, which I don’t think is always conducive to certain styles of comedy.
How do you feel in a writer’s room, then, where so much is about punchlines?
In some rooms there is space for a variety of jokes. If I have felt frustrated in the past, it is because I feel like the way I’m imagining something I’m not able to articulate effectively. So I worry. I think, This person thinks I’m just not funny and wasting their time. That’s all internal stuff that I project on other people. The best I can do is learn how to articulate what I mean when I’m imagining something that’s kind of more nebulous.
At the same time, you’ve been part of a scene of up-and-coming comedians who are kind of on that same wavelength, where things are more absurdist or conceptual.
What was really frustrating for a while was seeing people blossoming in the community going into meetings with TV-production people and trying to explain comedy. A lot of TV-production people are just wanting to make more of the same. They want to use existing shows as the framework for the guaranteed success of the next show that they make. But things age, especially comedy. Comedy is cultural, it’s like a timestamp. And it was so frustrating to feel like all these people in New York are doing these shows that I think are so exciting, but then the reality sets in and you’re, like, “Oh, no. This Republican boy-band-looking guy on the audience team, who’s in charge of the budget for this company, is actually who you have to learn to talk to in this situation, if you want to get your stuff made with this specific company.”
When did you start getting called in for these executive meetings to pitch TV shows?
Once I met my agent, Caitlin, she started setting me up on general meetings. That was maybe 2016. I was working at [the comedy Web site] seriously.tv. My first day was the day before the election of Hillary Clinton and Trump. We had spent my whole first day making videos, like, “Now that we have a female President, . . .” Being such little stupid, stupid turds. And then just had our asses blown wide-open by the truth of our world, of our existence.
That was a very frustrating time to want to create stuff, because of this weird patronizing liberalism about my work. There was me being so excited that people seemed to want to meet with me about my comedy. But then it’s, like, they only want to meet with me to make some trans, coming-out TV show, or, like, trauma-porn thing. I’m, like, “If you actually watched my comedy, this isn’t what it’s about at all.” And then when you’re queer, and grinding in New York, and people start throwing money at you, after you’ve not been making rent for two and a half years, it’s, like, “Yeah, I’m going to make this video that I know is going to suck, but I’m supporting myself toward a bigger goal down the line.”
But also, I’m not going to sit here and say that it’s everyone else’s fault that I didn’t make stuff. I definitely also just have had a hard time focussing.
You were diagnosed with A.D.H.D. When was that?
Literally this year, in lockdown. It took me a really long time to just get the ball rolling on that, but I had reached a point where I was so frustrated with my inability to just stay on track.
Is this the period that you describe in one interview as feeling “farted out”?
Oh, that’s, like, all the time. But, yeah. I just felt like everything’s a poof. Things that happen, I forget immediately. It’s been hard, because I think it’s affected my friendships and my personal relationships, where I’m flighty or I forget. What I will say is that getting diagnosed is so amazing, because you can start to cope with it. Because I think, right now, especially if people are leaning into social media, I think [it] just makes people crazy and scrambles your brain.
Speaking of your relationship with social media. I hate to even talk about it seriously, because it was so obviously a stunt, but where did the Nilla Wafers controversy come from?
I mean, I wanted to quit Twitter. And I knew that would do it. I was listening to the Jaron Lanier book “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” And I would look at my phone and think, How long, from when I open Twitter, before I see something that either agitates me, makes me feel bad, makes me feel jealous, makes me feel like someone else is stupid. How long is that window? I was counting, and it was twenty seconds.
So you wanted to get kicked off, to go out with a bang?
Yeah. Just that day, seeing the Oreo stuff and just seeing how flimsy that corporatespeak . . . It’s just insidious, and it really is a product of the times that we’re in.
I want to ask about the experience of working with Tim Robinson on “I Think You Should Leave.” I truly have no idea where your line readings come from. They are just so original. In our apartment we say “Back in the pants!” and “I’m not popular at all?” all the time.
Wow. Well, the first sketch I was in, the printer sketch, that was my first time meeting Tim in person. I only got the one sketch sent to me. It was so decontextualized on paper, and I was, like, O.K., so she’s talking about this printer and she keeps bringing up . . . Santa? The first time I met him was in my trailer. Tim came in to say hi and Do you have any thoughts on the script. And I was, like, yeah, what is this about? I think a lot of what makes Tim brilliant is that the delivery or the tone is as much a part of the humor as any joke on paper.
Why do you think Tim thought of you for the show?
He said that he thought I was funny through Instagram, which is one positive of the sea of poison that is Instagram.
Well, social media, for all its ills, is a good tonal medium.
“Shrill” was the same thing. They used videos that I made as reference points when they were discussing bringing me onto the show. That’s really nice, because it’s not a formal reel per se of me acting out something that someone else wrote for me. It’s my pure voice. I’m saying what I want to say.
Back to “I Think You Should Leave,” I want to ask about the experience of coming up with the characters on the show.
I worked in the writer’s room for a couple of weeks in the second season. I remember showing up and being, like, Oh, Tim is an improv guy. There’s going to be ad-libbing. I can kind of be loosey-goosey about it. But they were really, really specific about hitting the words—every word. In terms of line delivery, we recorded a bunch of different versions. There were a lot of takes where my intonation wasn’t a character choice per se; it was me in real time remembering my lines, and it coming out as [does a slow, confused, growly voice] “Ooh, that naughty . . . old . . . elf?” My brain’s like a Gateway 2000. Just like a massive computer and very little processing power happening.
The first shoot we did, I was so anxious. Those sketches, a lot of them are formatted where it’s one person really going wild, and then everyone else is, like, “What the fuck’s going on?” And to be that [one] person in the sketch, I was, like, Oh, God, people are waiting for me to get through this line. I was fucking up the lines a lot. Because I was just so scared and in my own head about how I didn’t want to drop the ball.
Did you feel more comfortable by the second season?
Well, that was shot in lockdown. When I went in, it was just me and Tim and Zach [Kanin, the co-creator] in a room, and that helped me understand the specificity of the lines. Tim would be talking and pitching a joke and Zach would type it in the script exactly the way Tim was saying it. Every word, every additive word, every pause. For instance, right now, if Zach were the stenographer transcribing this interview, he would be typing all of what’s happening right now, which is me being, like, “Well, like, if the thing, if that, if the thing about that, well, what I, if that . . .” All of that makes it into the script. Why it’s so funny is that the details aren’t overlooked. It is important to fight for those little details.
Let’s talk about “Together Together,” and how that happened.
I got the log line for the script and it was a twentysomething girl who becomes a surrogate for a fortysomething man, and the unexpected ways their relationship unfolds. And I was, like, Jesus Christ, this movie sounds like it’s going to suck shit. I didn’t want to be a part of something where some older guy gets to fuck a young girl, and then we romanticize that. But, of course, when I read it, it subverted my expectations. I could just tell it was from a really gentle place, or a kind place, which is different from what I am usually trying to play. It’s usually some horrible, soulless asshole.
Did you have any of your own ideas for the character of Anna that shifted her one direction or another when you started filming?
The more we shot, the more time I spent with Nikole [Beckwith, the director], the more I started to feel Anna was not that far away from how Nikole is. Every character has bits of Nikole in them, but Anna’s point of view felt the strongest to Nikole’s voice.
So you were playing a surrogate who was the director’s surrogate. How poetic.
Oh, my God. You can’t see it, because I am sitting in bed right now, but I released a bunch of shit into the bed because that was so beautiful.
You’ve said that it was a ton of work to do the movie.
I had no idea! I worked on “Shrill” for three seasons, and my role is pretty small. I’m popping in to say something crazy and then I leave. The first two seasons we shot in the summer, so it’s beautiful, and I was having this enchanting, camp-like experience. And I would say to Aidy [Bryant], [whinily] “Aidy-y-y, let’s go get drinks!” She was working so hard in a way that I didn’t really realize until later on. But I thought of her a lot while I was doing this movie, because I was, like, Damn, I have got to be up at four, and you’re telling me I’m not getting home until dinnertime? This shit sucks. I was being such a baby about it. I never complained, but my internal monologue was, like, When am I going to get to go get snacks? I’ve got to shit.
Tell me more about the current act you have been touring. You got a rave from the Guardian, though I want to read you this one line from the review. It says, “The heavily ironic atmosphere she established earlier makes it impossible to take anything she says at face value.” What do you make of that?
I just feel like there’s space for both. I’m prepared to deal with the repercussions of very loosely wearing a mask of my own face over my face when saying my real opinions in one breath and then saying a horrific opinion. That is what I think is funny, especially now, when we’re being bludgeoned with people who identify as progressive. People want to do their best to be the little social-media woke liberal, to absorb as many infographics as we can.
I’ve definitely felt resentment, as a transgender person who has become visible. I would love to say I’ve become visible for my comedy, but I think in a lot of ways I’ve become visible because of the social-media liberal self-back-patting wave that has felt pretty condescending and minimizing of the work that I want to do. A lot of the systems that are helping me get ahead are good. But then there’s a lot of it that’s bad, that I have to navigate. I never want to omit the line between the two, because I feel like that’s when you lose perspective and you buy the first floating Tesla house.
Ha.
I just feel like it’s funny to play with perceptions. If someone’s coming to my show because they’re, like, “Oh, there’s this trans comic . . .” Literally the first night of my show in London, there’s a joke saying I cut my nephew out of my life because—and this isn’t real, but I tell it like it’s a real story—he had a really hard time with my transition, and it’s because when I came out I beat the shit out of him. The joke is that I was really horrible. I kick him through the ceiling. His head goes through. It’s really absurd. But after that night I came back, and they were, like, “Someone in the audience flagged your show for pre-transition trauma. So we’re going to put a trigger warning and a content warning on your show, if that’s O.K. with you.” I was so irritated. Like, Louis C.K., who’s still making so much money doing standup, does not have to have someone be, like, “Hey, just so you know, someone is actually flagging your show as having pre-transition trauma.” There comes a point where I’m, like, we can have discourse around culture and around sensitivity, but I’m not bending my show for that. Because you have projected onto it that it’s about transness, sure. But I think they want Che Diaz.
Is there an artist you really look up to and think, That person has really lived their life right?
Fiona Apple has done a good job of navigating herself out of a public spotlight but still working on her music, and it’s released at her own pace. I watched an interview where someone was asking her what she did for six or seven years and she’s, like, I literally didn’t do anything, I was just living comfortably. I think that’s really beautiful. I aspire to that, to try and feel the autonomy in my career or the faith in myself that I don’t need to be making sure that I’m hitting milestones and that I’m, like, profitable and making my reps proud.
Now, I really, I have to say [in a sweet tone] I love my agency more than I love my own mom. They’ve been there for me in a way that my family never have and never fucking will be. And my family can go to hell, and long live new media and my agency, and all the agencies in general.
What are you thinking in terms of what’s next?
Oh, I’m going into poaching, in the ivory trade. And that’s really big for me. I bought an elephant gun, which is so heavy, and I go to the hospital every time I shoot it. It hurts so bad. But yeah, I think the goal for this year is orienting myself to just write something. I would love to build out a live show to then work into a special. I think where my anxiety really is detrimental is that it stops me. I get so encumbered by it. Right now I’m kind of in a stressful phase where I’m taking my time and I’m drinking my diuretic tea. I’m focussing on my constipation.
Last question: How did you develop your sense of style? I love the gamine outfits you wear—the turtlenecks, the sleek suits, the miniskirts.
Growing up, I was obsessed with sci-fi and video games. A lot of my sense of style, like turtlenecks, that’s just Regina from Dino Crisis. That’s me being, like, Oh, I want to be a video-game woman. I kind of want to look like I’m in Ghost in the Shell.
I dress very strategically for my body shape, too, and that’s something that’s been interesting to navigate. I’m trans. I’m mesomorphic. So my shoulders are broader than my hips. I have no hips, no ass, and so I dress to maneuver around that. I’ll wear a tighter top and a baggier pant or something that flares out at the bottom. Never a peplum top.
No one should ever wear a peplum top.
There are so many recent outfits I’ve worn that I’m, like, Dude, no one stopped me? No one said shit to me. I appreciate, at least, that the person I was then was taking a big swing.
You have to have kindness for your old self.
I think having kindness for yourself makes you extend it to other people. Me, I think turtlenecks are nice, because I am very self-conscious about my clavicles. I’ve seen people online say that they think it’s because I’m hiding my Adam’s apple, but I don’t have a very defined chin, so I have excess skin that kind of covers that. The turtleneck, I think, just makes me look like an android. And you can’t see my little clavicle bones, which are just for my husband.
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