Are Bachelorette Parties at Comedy Shows Actually … Good?

Jamie Lee.
Photo-Illustration: by Vulture; Photo by Joe Scarnici/Getty Images

When comedians criticize comedy-club reveals, early in the listing of complaints will be bachelorette parties, with their collections of penis-hatted audience members drunkenly stepping on punchlines. It’s uncertain how comedy shows even became something that bachelorette parties did. My guess is it is because bachelorette parties rose to prominence in the mid-1980therefore, a time when the country was poor with awful comedy clubs. Regardless, the stereotype continues decades afterwards.

Jamie Lee wants to end the hate. On the comic new Netflix series, The Wedding Coach — that is a type of Queer Eye for weddings — Lee is trying to upend a lot of the conventional wisdom around weddings. And that comprises bachelorette parties in comedy shows, which takes place in the first episode.

On Vulture’s Good One podcast, Lee talks about bachelorette parties, The Wedding Coach, composing on Ted Lasso, and what it’s like when weddings are your comedic muse when you are getting a divorce. You may read an excerpt from the transcript or listen to the entire episode below. Tune in to Good One every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or where you get your podcasts.

If anyone makes fun of humor clubs, the first example is bachelorette parties.
Comedians typically don’t like it because they’re usually only very drunk and drunk. And it’s difficult to concentrate onstage if you’ve got drunk men and women in the front row yelling through your jokes.

Why put it in your own show? Would you wish to recover it?
Oh, I like this. I really love bachelorette parties. I adore doing bunch work. And I do get a rise from making them feel seen and finding a method to also use them as fodder by lightly jabbing at them in a manner that they’re having fun, but also, the audience may still have that shut the fuck up satisfaction.

I am kind of stating that even if they don’t realize I’m saying that about them. There was one series that I did it — Comedy Works in Denver. And I brought one of the women from the party up onstage and had this whole interaction with her. I actually really love their own energy. I’m excited to break out of my normal set and do something interesting at the moment, and I feel as they provide that. So I think there is a level for me of getting back the bachelorette party.

I can not remember if it made it into the incident, but there was something humorous, also, about me becoming an audience member in a show where I know pretty much everybody on the invoice. My buddies are performing, then they visit me at the front row, and now I’m not there to perform that night; I’m there to be with this girl who’s getting married and needs to have a bachelorette party because not one of her friends threw one.

So I made it my mission to make sure that she had a fantastic time. I also knew that night that the men and women who had been there… I mean, for TV, they did know we’re going to be there. We really were a really good audience. I meanwe definitely drank way too much, but that really just led to us laughing a lot. So honestly, it was nice. We were not being disrespectful. There was something sort of thrilling to me about just enjoying a comedy series in the way I did until I did comedy. Actually, there’s something very sort of candy and cathartic about it. Annie Lederman was onstage and she was like, “Oh my God, Jamie Lee is wasted in the front row.” And I was like, This is paradise.