Whitney's Wit

I just watched the HBO special Whitney Cummings: I'm Your Girlfriend.  I'd caught an episode of her ill-fated sitcom Whitney, and a few episodes of the more successful show she created, 2 Broke Girls, but I'd never seen her do stand-up before, so I was interested.

Her subject matter is well-trod territory: how men describe sex, different methods of birth control, women paying for dates, cheating on your partner, unusual sexual practices, etc.  Sex and relationships are by far the most common topics in stand-up, so if you're going to do them, you better have a different take, or be a lot more clever than the others.  Cummings, however, is neither.

A few months ago I reviewed an Amy Schumer stand-up special, and it was interesting to see Amy and Whitney covering the same ground.  For instance, both discussed what life is like for women when they're in their twenties compared to their thirties.  I may not have gone crazy over Schumer's material, but it was considerably better (and better-delivered) than Cummings'.

The hour goes by painlessly, but that's about the nicest thing I can say.  Cummings is professional enough to keep it moving. That's not nothing.  But it's not much--if you're going to do an hour on HBO, there should be more.