Stand-Up Comedy Challenge Archives

I’m back with more coverage of the Drag Olympics of Drag Race! RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs. The World Season 2 Episode 7 – Haters Wedding Roast, a stand-and-plant stand-up challenge delivered from behind a wedding dais paired with a “Take Me Up The Aisle” bridal runway.

If you engage in a retrospective Ru-watch of Drag Race, it’s interesting to watch how the show transforms over the years from a competition where drag queens must occasionally be funny to a full-fledged comedy competition. At this point, the show is known (and memed) as much for its laugh-out-loud absurd moments as for its fashion. At this point, there’s no way to win RuPaul’s lasting affection if you’re not at least a little bit funny.

The peculiar thing about that transformation into a full-on comedy competition is that it hinges entirely on RuPaul’s sense of humor. What Ru finds funny is grounded strongly in references that are older than most of her competitors. Though she’s twenty years older than me, RuPaul and I have an incredibly similar set of comedy references – Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, 80s sitcoms like The Golden Girls, campy game show hosts and guests, and the deadpan early seasons of Saturday Night Live.

That’s a big reason why campy queens and old souls tend to do so well with RuPaul – they tap into her comfort zone when it comes to humor. Would someone learning to be funny today for the young consumers of now be funny to RuPaul? Would they do well on Drag Race? I’m never sure. I think we got a hint of this with Willow Pill, who has a darker, edgier kind of humor that’s right on the edge of Millennial and Gen Z. RuPaul ate that up. Yet, most times when we see anyone with a more youthful sense of ironic humor on the show, Ru is quick to serve them neutch and chop them down at the first chance.

This Haters Comedy Roast included two sets that were legitimately hilarious for audiences of all ages. That gave us a tiny but critical shuffle to the rankings compared to last week’s Strictly Come Prancing power rankings. What does that mean for next week’s finale? I think we have a clear powerhouse pair of potential winners, but also a black horse (wonk wonk) who could come through and surprise them both.

I’ll be back next week to congratulate our winner and reflect on my predictions and power rankings for the season!

(Want to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs. The World outside of the UK? For most of the world, it’s available with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best international drag superstar win!

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the eleventh episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Two Queens, One Joke.” It’s a typical Drag Race stand-up challenge with the added twist of being performed in pairs, a la All Stars Season 2. Plus, a voguing mini-challenge, a “Rip Her To Shreds” runway, and an all-time best lip sync!

There’s a reason that Drag Race places stand-up comedy challenges towards the back half of the season, and it’s not just to have enough run-time to show comedy sets from every queen.

Comedy challenges are some of the most-subjective Drag Race challenges of all. It’s easy for producers to craft any kind of narrative they want for a queen purely by having RuPaul laugh more or less during her set and then matching Ru’s energy in the edit. Even a genuinely hilarious queen like Bianca del Rio could be stopped short by complete silence between her jokes..

While queens have a little bit of control over their fates in writing their own jokes, it’s not much. There have been many re-edits of iconically bad past comedy challenges where the addition of an audience laugh track or Ru’s own screaming laughter makes seemingly dead jokes come alive. There’s a version of Laganja Estranja’s iconically bad stand-up set with laughter included that makes her out to be mildly amusing!

With that in mind, it’s no coincidence that “Two Queens One Joke” was used to dismiss a queen who did perfectly okay but who would’ve likely crushed her competitors next week. That would have made the road to the finale more complicated and potentially cost us several front-runners along the way. Of course, this is exactly what I predicted last week, because I have seen a few (dozen) Drag Race comedy challenges before!

Luckily for us as viewers, the challenge yielded a highly-entertaining lip sync to Doja Cat’s wildly fun “Boss Bitch.” It’s a song I am utterly addicted to even without a lip sync to pair with it! It helped that the lip sync ran a full two minutes and five seconds of a 2:14 song.

That’s not totally unusual. The Ariana Grande lip sync on the full-length Episode 2 was a couple of seconds shy of two minutes. However, last week’s “Single Ladies” was a slim 1:47.

Eighteen more seconds in a lip sync is a lot of time for queens to endear themselves, especially when it means we get a full song with virtually no edits. Even some of our favorite evenly-matched lip syncs of all time like “Shut Up & Drive,” “Sorry Not Sorry,” and “Miss You Much” are heavily edited, and it’s obvious we lost some material to the cutting room floor. Here, we saw the nearly entire thing.

That longer lip sync was a result of this week’s second lucky turn for viewers: this was the first week of Drag Race returning to a 90-minute TV runtime on MTV, which means an hour-long episode edit! The episode had so much more room to breathe with an extra 20 minutes of footage. The return of seeing the judges in their private deliberations reinforced for me how essential they are to keeping the narrative of the show moving forward.

What does this mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s interview challenge? Absolutely nothing when it comes to the dismissal (which I anticipated), but this episode’s placements shook up our potential final four in a major way for the first time in several weeks.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!