No ... You Shutup

Lauren Weedman is very, very funny.

Chances are, you may have known that already. She performed her show Bust in Boise last year (I didn't get to see it), and she was a correspondent on The Daily Show in 2001 (I didn't have cable). For me, she was wonderfully new and fresh.

Her new show, No ... You Shutup, is incredibly funny. It starts off with extremely awkward banter as Lauren talks to a couple of new parents and makes uncomfortable jokes about how "your boys can swim" and anecdotes about the blood in her boyfriend's stool. In later scenes she switches between playing herself and her boyfriend, her boyfriend's son (still in protracted grief over the death of his mother), her birth mother, her adopted mother, her assistant at work, her gynecologist, an intense lesbian couple, and an adoption agency worker who sounds like a specialty retailer of rare goods when she talks about the Guatemalan babies ("You can't get these any more," she says. Lauren, for her part, continues the babies-as-commodities theme by saying she'd prefer "a gay, sparkly baby"). She throws in a few bodily fluid jokes and some silly dances for good measure.

Weedman manages to find the humor behind the fears and hopes of wanting to become a mother at 40 in a living situation where that seems simply impossible. Her humor is delightfully irreverent, mocking everything from family dinner table conversations to adoption agency marketing videos.