Patti Harrison is the hilarious, subversive voice we need right now — and her star is ascending

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

Contains strong language.

I first became aware of comedian and actress Patti Harrison when she was the guest on an episode of Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers' podcast Las Culturistas in early 2018. On the episode, Harrison does a bit where she tells a (fictitious) story of the time she was touring as a pop star in Scandinavia and Ellen deGeneres started yelling transphobic slurs at her while impaling Harrison's fans with her engorged penis. It remains one of the funniest things I've ever heard, and is just one example of Harrison's brilliantly surreal, outrageous, and transgressive comedic sensibility. Suffice to say, I immediately became a huge fan, finding my way to her work (from her podcast A Woman's Smile to appearances on the series Shrill, Search Party and I Think You Should Leave) however I could. And when I got the chance to interview her last week over the phone, I couldn't help but start things off by gushing that I genuinely think she is one of the funniest people on the planet and how happy I am to see her have the big moment she is most certainly currently having. 

"Oh, wow, that is so nice," Harrison says after I rant about her. "That is like, the nicest thing I have heard in a while. I'm blushing. I'm painting a picture for you: I'm about six foot five, I'm seventy pounds on the dot, and blushing."

The interview is tied to Harrison's lead role in the new film Together Together, which was just released for digital rental (and in cinemas wherever they are open). And its release has coincided with Harrison's roles on three TV shows: the new series Ziwe and Made For Love, and the final season of the aforementioned Shrill. While these roles continue Harrison's recent rise in comedic television (she's also been in Broad City and High Maintenance and voiced several characters on BoJack Horseman), Together Together marks something entirely new for her: a lead role in a largely dramatic film. 

"It was definitely an anxious experience first going into it," Harrison says of the film. "I was pretty apprehensive. There were moments early on when I was like, 'I don't think I'm right for this.' But I think my mission internally was to deliver on [director Nikcole Beckwith's] creative vision and what she saw for it. Because I loved the script so much when I got it, even though I was like, 'This part is so different and strange to me,' in terms of why I was being sought for it."

The part is Anna, a 20-something woman who is hired by a 40-something man (Ed Helms) to be a surrogate for a child he intends on raising alone. As the two develop a deep friendship, Together Together messes with gender dynamics and pays homage to the too-often-disregarded importance of platonic love. And while I wish it wasn't so notable that Harrison — a trans woman — was cast as a pregnant cis woman, Together Together represents a badly-needed corrective to the entertainment industry's current casting norms.

"I feel like Nikcole has a light touch swinging around a sword," Harrison says of the film's director. "It's very transgressive in this very gentle way. If you don't have any subtext or context of what you're watching, you could go in and be like, 'Oh, that was a really nice movie to watch; it was cute and funny and all that stuff.' But I think if you're looking harder at the layers of it and you have more information about the back story and the creation of it, I think it's very sneaky. It's a sneaky movie. And I like that it's packaged in this little deceptive way. It's like Trojan horsey... Trojan horse-adjacent vibes. Sorry, I should be put in prison for saying that. Or, abolish all prisons except for the one that I get put into for saying 'Trojan horse-adjacent vibes.'"

Harrison feels that, as a comedian, she has a lot of autonomy in choosing what she does, and that puts a lot of the onus on her presentation. 

"It's like, whether or not you're humiliated or embarrassed or you do well is contingent on the choices that you make in your work," she says. "So that is a lot of pressure to be like, 'Oh no, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing something cool? Am I doing something bad?'"

"I think I get in my head a lot about that and I get over-obsessive. There's like a little bit of a narcissism — I think there's more than a little bit of narcissism about it, but it's just that you can become so anxious and self-obsessive about whether this thing that I'm writing is good; is this joke that I'm making good? And this was an opportunity to get out of my head about that stuff and just trust Nikcole. I just really wanted to do a good job for her, first and foremost."

Together Together co-stars Harrison's fellow comedians and friends Julio Torres, Jo Firestone and Greta Titelman, all of whom are also on Shrill with her.

"It's so surreal and dreamy to have gotten to work with them on this movie. It felt really special. And Shrill felt really special in that way, too — that so many of my friends were involved in it. You don't always get that. There are things that you work on where you don't know anybody on set and it's stressful and it's anxious because then you don't have anyone you can kind of shoot the shit with or decompress with if you're stressed out about something. Shrill and Together Together were both flooded with that."

"And then on top of that, Ed [Helms] was so amazing and then Nikcole has become one of my closest friends since we started filming. It just really was such a cool, weird, surreal, dreamy experience. It felt really special and it felt really cool to look around on set and be like, 'I've bombed at shitty bar shows in front of these people. I've watched them bomb.' We just have a lot of history together. And so to be shooting a movie with them ... it makes me giddy."

Harrison came up through a comedy scene largely made up of queer and trans people, people of colour and women. And as with Harrison, their years of work making bold, unapologetic comedy is starting to gain them the recognition they deserve (see: Torres, Firestone, Bowen Yang, John Early, Kate Berlant, Cole Escola, Catherine Cohen, Mitra Jouhari, Matt Rogers and Joel Kim Booster). But Harrison really wants to maintain the autonomy that she's been able to have "with a career that fewer eyes are on."

"The more money that's involved in something, it's usually because there are more hands involved," Harrison says. "There are more interests to serve. And that means more people who are controlling money have more notes; they have more opportunities to have creative say. And I think it dilutes it when people who are business-oriented are wanting to turn a profit before making something that's actually artistically cool. That's when I think your happiness inside just starts to, like sand in an hourglass, just all funnel out your puckered butthole, because it can be soul-sucking in those instances."

"I want to see what my opportunities are, of course. And I want to see how high things go. But I also just ultimately have the most fun when I'm making stuff that I feel like makes me laugh. And usually that's not what makes Goldman Sachs laugh. And that's because we broke up, I'm not dating him any longer. But best sex of my life. But yeah, definitely emotionally immature. Not ready yet. But I don't know, I left the door open after we broke up. So if he goes to therapy, then he can come back."

Harrison has found that the more visibility she has, the more scared she is to "talk shit about stuff that I see." 

"Because you never know who's worked on something. It's like, 'Oh, I'm talking shit about the show that I think is really fucked up and misogynistic and racist.' And then you find out one of the producers on that is producing this thing that you're auditioning for. There's little evil seeds all over the industry. It's something that I have taken into account more. I've noticed, too, that the more followers I get on social media, the more harassment I get. And that really is frustrating."

One place Harrison no longer has that problem is Twitter. Back in February, she was kicked off the platform after an incredibly audacious act of comedy performance art that I had the pleasure of witnessing go down in real time. After Oreo's official account tweeted "trans people exist," Harrison switched her own account to first look like she was guest-tweeting as the singer Sia on the official account of Nabisco Nilla Wafers and then as Vanessa Hudgens on Chips Ahoy's account. The result was hysterical but got Harrison banned — though she doesn't seem to miss it much. 

"I think I've just been annoyed with Twitter in general. Like I said earlier, the more followers that I've gotten, the more annoying people I'm exposed to online. And I think especially as a trans person [...] there's a lot of annoying people, and a lot of them are predominantly white cis people that are, like, policing my language. And l feel like this is going to make me sound conservative, but there's a lot of these people that are willfully de-contextualizing things that I say or don't follow me or know who I am. I think the more followers you get, the more you're exposed to annoying people all across the political spectrum. So you're getting your harassment from the Trump people and the alt right people. But you're also getting these people being like, 'Hey, you said something about having brown hair and I have brown hair and I just think you need to think about the harm that you're causing because I actually have trauma now from reading your tweet.' And it's like, this is enough for me today."

"[Twitter's] not doing that thing for me anymore," she continues. "It's purely promotional. And then I saw the Oreo tweets and I thought it was so funny. It was them saying trans people exist. It really made me laugh, the idea that a transphobic person happened to be on Twitter that day [...] and then they fully come around and then they're, like, 'Whoa, trans people are valid.' You know, that's the fantasy that I had with it."

"It's just like for a cookie to be liberal, for Oreo to be liberal, you know, then you're creating a whole universe out there to explore. There's conservative cookies. There's probably cookies that voted for Jill Stein. You know for sure those are Nutter Butters. We don't know."

While we'll miss Harrison's Twitter escapades, we're lucky to have no shortage of other options to enjoy her going forward. In addition to Together Together and her ongoing television work, she just finished production on the film Mack & RIta (opposite Diane Keaton, Nicole Byer and Dustin Milligan) and will soon start shooting Lost City of D (with Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum). Welcome to the era of movie star Patti Harrison, and aren't we so lucky to exist in it.

Together Together is available for digital rental on all major platforms and is screening wherever cinemas are open.