Everything wrong with Che Diaz's stand-up

I have been radicalized. I am now anti-woke.

The chances of seeing Che Diaz at a Brooklyn comedy club are near zero.

This is Downtown Julie Brown and I’m sad to report that after a handful of episodes with some legitimate growth, everyone’s favourite* enby comedian is fully regressing. I never expected to miss And Just Like That…’s animal rescue scenes, but here we are.

Spoilers for episode 10 ensue below. One thing you can never say is that you haven’t been told.

AJLT seems to be adopting the position of early aughts pro-Ana websites everywhere: that which nourishes Che destroys Che. Performing is the thing they crave, presumably because they need an audience to help carry their massive ego for a while. But performing also clearly brings out the worst in Che, whether it’s the demonic voice they use for their Cameos, or the complete shutdown of empathy for any living human.

Which brings me to their most recent stand-up performance, in Episode 10. Thanks to some admiring flirtation from young twinkly-eyed groupie Toby, Che is back on the stand-up circuit. This appears to be a big enough deal for them that they invite their oldest and dearest work colleague from their cancelled podcast, Carrie Bradshaw, for moral support/guaranteed applause. Miranda is also invited, which makes every single thing Che says onstage even more bizarre. (Charlotte, the wise, is conspicuously having actual fun elsewhere.)

Miranda meets Carrie and Aidan outside the club and gleefully tells them that Che doesn’t know she’s coming, because Miranda wants it to be a surprise. In response, Carrie makes this face:

Hold on to your butts.

Sadly, Carrie is exactly right to make this face, because the evening quickly falls apart in mournful fashion. The first problem?

1. Not funny!
   Che launches into a Hannah Gadsby-esque (derogatory) monologue about the painful death of her eight-month relationship “with a straight white married woman.” And, look. I’ll accept the premise that you can make a joke about anything, but that premise requires the joke be an actual joke. All Che has is a very labored joke cadence, essentially standing on stage in the Gucci bomber jacket they borrowed from Kendall Roy saying “so I was fucking someone I hated…” and then glaring for (muted) applause. Which only makes it more obvious that the whole routine is just…

2. Bullying, actually
   Che is one of those annoying people who can only speak in references to their own identities. Hell, they just starred in a sitcom pilot that was created around these identities (and then flopped because test audiences hated their personality). We also know that they are 47, and based on the date on their old stand-up, only came out as non-binary within the past decade. So of all people, Che shouldn’t be on stage bashing someone for going through their own middle-aged identity crisis.

   And what a fascinating choice, to have Che watch their old, hacky, “men be like this on dates, but women be like this!” performance and decide they should double down on the reductive takes.
   But, while we’re on the topic of fascinating choices,

3. Fucking Carrie.

   This woman is fucking sinister. A good friend would have offered to leave with Miranda, rather than letting Miranda skulk out on her own and apologize for doing so. A brave friend would have pulled a Samantha Jones.

   

   Right after this she went and made out with Sônia fucking Braga.

   But Carrie has never been brave and rarely been good, so instead she makes awkward eye contact with her friend of 30 years while her work proximity associate buffoonishly complains about their sex life together.

   

   “Is this because I picked out your first engagement ring? Because I feel like I already apologized about that.”

   And Carrie’s nonsense doesn’t even stop there! Since she’s moving out of her beloved apartment for the 300th time, Carrie is throwing a house-cooling dinner party, and demands that both Che and Miranda attend. Miranda phones Carrie to say that, after Che’s appalling performance, she does not want to be in the same room with them. Carrie, being Carrie, hits Miranda with the same horseshit she hit Aidan with in Season 4 when Big came to Suffern— “they’re part of my life.” Girl…Miranda is the friend who nursed you through 17 break-ups with the same 2 men over 25 years. Che Diaz is the friend who vaped and fingerbanged Miranda in your kitchen while you wet the bed trying to pee into a Snapple bottle. (For non-viewers, that was NOT an exaggeration.)

Things really were looking better for me and Che for a while. I even found myself (gulp) relating to them when they went into a post-rejection spiral after their pilot got cancelled. Unfortunately, it looks like And Just Like That…is determined to keep them a malevolent force until the very end.