Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Everything about Jen Kirkman exudes timelessness.
There’s something about her look, her style, her flair that conjures up Old Hollywood, even if her reality comes more from old Boston Catholic attitudes and upbringing. Kirkman delivered one of the best stand-up specials in 2015 – I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine) – precisely because her humor didn’t rely on the headlines of those days or any specific timeframe. For her Netflix follow-up, Just Keep Livin’?, the New York Times best-selling author, former Chelsea Lately writer/panelist and award-winning Drunk History narrator reveals her thoughts on meditation and she just keeps living in her 40s.
Kirkman’s opening salvo jokes about the paradox of meditating in quiet solitude versus living with the rest of the world and the people who inhabit it, and expands into wondering why we don’t all have to divulge our own crazy issues, much like registered sex offenders, instead getting the privilege of entering a new building, situation or party with a clean psychological slate. “I know you can sense, I’m a bit of a bad-ass. Not because of that story,” she says afterward. “But I have a tattoo.”
In her stage act and her books, Kirkman has made her defiant stand against whatever conventional wisdom or societal pressures might suggest about a woman confidently living single without children today. And in this new hour, she compares her preparation for getting a tattoo – only one, mind you – to bearing a child, because it’s an equally permanent, serious choice. Her friend’s tattoo pays homage to her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor with a beautiful story. Kirkman didn’t have that option available to her. “I come from a family of Catholic people from Boston. And we don’t talk to God like that,” she says. The Kirkmans believed God didn’t like them if bad things happened, so why show gratitude for that?
So Kirkman’s ankle tattoo, “JKL,” serves as a reminder to, as her special’s title suggests, Just Keep Livin’, as well as the mantra of a certain A-list celebrity that provides her with a funny backstory.
JK, of course, also stands for Just Kidding or Jen Kirkman, and JKL bring us almost halfway through the alphabetical order. In that latter sense, at least, we’re catching Kirkman as she’s climbing to her own peak near the halfway mark of her career.
She only just got that tattoo, too, as a recent birthday gift to herself. Her mother’s birthday gifts come complete with dramatic speeches now, and this past year’s present, a piece of paper the hospital gave Kirkman’s mother with instructions on how to care for Jen helps show how far we’ve come since the 1970s. Kirkman is 42 and proud of it. Don’t try to compliment her by saying she looks like she’s in her 20s still. “I don’t want to look like I have four roommates and shitty towels,” she jokes.
And despite what you may continue to think and project, Kirkman can travel alone quite confidently without looking like she needs anyone’s help or companionship. “People are very freaked out with being alone,” she notes, before illustrating it with a tale about visiting Italy by herself and even accidentally signing up for a private walking tour of Venice. I’ve seen couples argue with airline boarding agents so they could sit next to each other and wondered why they’d need to do that since everyone on the plane is going to the same place and they can just sleep or enjoy themselves without each other for an hour, right? Kirkman takes it even farther and further, saying that taking the trip together in the first place is a bad idea. You’ll spend 24 hours a day, every day of it noticing everything potentially wrong about your significant other. “Why risk the relationship?” Kirkman asks. Wondering if a single woman in Europe might need to fear ISIS only reminds Kirkman that “plain old men” can and do threaten women, too, much more frequently. If only there were a website to avoid them, she suggests.
When it comes to her own womanhood, though, Kirkman plays off her own naivete and ignorance about health to highlight two stories about her sexuality to great effect, even greater when she identifies with male disdain for “period jokes” by imagining life with tables turned, and she never had to experience menstruation but her boyfriends did.
These days, male feminists might not be as great as they think they are, but that’s nothing compared to the continued offensiveness and pervasiveness of street harassment of women. Kirkman challenges a male friend who admits he still catcalls women, only to realize that any challenge might make her sound like the guy’s mother. Her solution, then? Let someone else know instead of the woman. Tell God. Tell a friend. Just don’t yell at her. With perhaps one exception? “If you must, yell about our outfit, not our bodies.”
Did I mention how her ring matched her boots?
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
