Talking Purse Personalities
With Ziwe

The two Fendi bags belong to identical twins. The backpack sister was a child star who was emotionally arrested in 1975, the year of her last blockbuster, Escape to Witch Mountain. She and her sister have a contentious relationship. They compete for everything. She says things like, "I believe in one race; the human race." She only has 4-5 Black friends. She knows that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black and brown people. She’s done a protest where she locked herself in front of her middle school. She's part of the Green Party.

She wasn't allowed to go to school as a child star and believes no one should be able to go to school.

This was the stronger twin in the womb who sucked up all the nutrients. She has bangs that look hideous on her. She constantly wears too much bronzer; it borders on problematic. She is a self-proclaimed liberal and falls asleep in a baby tee that says "Kamala is my Mommala".

I grew up in Moore, Massachusetts, which is mostly minorities. And then I went to boarding school, and that was a lot of people who are not minorities.

It's inherently familiar. I did not invent the concept that people are uncomfortable discussing race. That is something that I've just learned to be true over the course of my lifetime, and there's a lot of dramatic irony with knowing that people are already uncomfortable, and still pushing them to have these conversations. This is something that I perform online with my Instagram Live, but it's something that I've repeatedly confronted all my life; I think any person of color has had these conversations. They just haven't been filmed and they haven't had, like, 5000 people commenting about how they don't know enough Asian men named Bowen Yang, you know?

I end every episode asking each guest why they did it, and every person has a different answer. Some people are fans of my comedy. Some people just think it's a really cool concept and wanted the challenge. I do think we have really interesting and substantive conversations about race. I can't speak to why they do it; I think I appreciate that.

I guess the question is like, why do people go on The Colbert Report? Why do people go on The Eric Andre Show? It's entertaining! It's fun, it expands your art, challenges you. It's an experience that you'll never have again.

The lady with the tasteful Versace believes that money talks, but wealth whispers. She lives in a townhouse adjacent to a parking garage on the Upper East Side. She's addicted to Botox which she insists are for her migraines. She has extraneous vowels in her name, a point of sensitivity for her, as she's faced discrimination on job applications...not that she needs to work. She once believed that UBI was a yeast infection, but now supports the socialist movement. She voted for Bernie in the primaries and she'll be voting for Biden in the general election.

Performance and learning are different sides of the same coin. She's growing, she's changing her personality and belief systems, so shoutout to her.

I'm sure there are people who watch the show and don't see any similarities in their lives. And I'm sure there are people who watch the show and think, “Well, how would I answer those questions?”

I'm just trying to prod people to examine how they would approach the questions. But as far as people's takeaway goes, I really have no indication. I can see my guests as contextualized in the greater American story. Caroline Calloway, Alison Roman, Rose McGowan, Alyssa Milano—they’re not outliers. Their patterns are consistent, their answers reflect the history and context they’ve grown up in.

The content of the show is ever-evolving, ever-changing. I do adjust to the new cycles. I adjust to what I'm reading about celebrities showing their ass over different racial issues. I'll add new questions, or modify the civil rights leaders that I bring up, because I’ll be like, I did four weeks of Angela Davis, so now I'm gonna bring up Shirley Chisholm.

Also, this is a show that I didn't just create when I did the Caroline Calloway episode. That’s the episode that kind of started the upswing, but it wasn't invented that week. This was a show I've been doing on Instagram Live since March or April, and in a bunch of iterations since 2015, 2016. It's constantly evolving for sure.

The right way to answer it depends on the person, right? I just find that every single response is interesting. I think what's really fascinating is the Alexis Neiers interview. I had a preconceived idea of what she’d be like, because I’ve seen Pretty Wild and The Bling Ring. I expected her to be more entitled. Was every answer that she gave for her interview perfect? No, but that's not really what I wanted. Her answers expanded my understanding of her; I saw someone who had learned from their mistakes.

There is nothing more impractical than a white clutch. What is in there? Their passport? I guess it’s an organizing tool. This lady speaks with an indistinguishable accent despite being from Connecticut. She constantly refers to her “art installation,” which is unfortunately just a renovated room in Buca di Beppo. She can speak seven languages, a party trick she uses when ordering foreign cuisine from English-speaking waiters. While she plans on voting for Jill Stein this election, she concedes that universal healthcare is an essential policy for the sustainability of the people's republic.

This is a horse girl with a famous parent who insists she's not in their shadow, despite still going by his famous last name. Her only friends are the majestic four-legged creatures that she tends to. She believes in prison abolition for horses, and "also for people, I guess, if that's what you were asking."

Even though every conversation is new and every single guest is different, the goal of the show is to feel familiar. So if you're asking me how it resonates with my Black audience: it depends. Black people are not a monolith. Everyone has a different reaction. A lot of Black audience members tell me that their favorite interview was Jeremy O. Harris, which I find really interesting.

But again, it’s never been about just talking to white people—it’s talking to Americans about race. There’s a lot of intimacy in watching people converse. I think that we can all relate to the experience of being a Black or brown person talking to someone about race and thinking, Man, I wish someone was watching this right now.