Leanne Morgan addresses her audience like an emissary from another world. Her comedy unfolds as a charming account of her life, told with the assurance that these details will be unfamiliar, exciting, and exotic. In her 2023 Netflix special, I'm Every Woman, Morgan portrayed a world of honest pragmatism and down-to-earth, everyday sensibilities. There, too, she acts as a tour guide, but she describes a life they already know well: Jell-O salad, Sunday mornings at church, practical department store underwear.
But in the catalog of Netflix's hour-long specials, Morgan seems like a traveler from a completely different place. That territory abounds with middle-aged men who nap on ottomans and occasionally realize that death comes for us all. Being a grandparent is as common an experience as being afraid of trans people (in fact, hopefully much more so), but only one of those perspectives is well-represented in the world of stand-up comedy. Morgan's rise to fame in recent years is due partly to her talent and partly to the fact that her status as a 60-year-old woman from rural America allows her to portray experiences that everyone knows exist but are relatively rare in this context. From that perspective, the title of that special almost seems defiant.
Director: Manny Rodriguez
Stars: Leanne Morgan
Her second special, Unspeakable Things, is an attempt to translate Morgan's sensibility to the new place she finds herself in since the release of that first hour two and a half years ago. She's become famous. She's on Amy Poehler's podcast, in a movie playing Reese Witherspoon's sister, and starring as a version of herself in the new (and recently renewed) Chuck Lorre sitcom called Leanne. She's no longer just Leanne Morgan; she's Leanne Morgan in Hollywood. She's still an emissary from a foreign land, but instead of Target and fishing trips, her world is now marked by hotel rooms and catering services. But it's all happened very quickly, and as a result, Unspeakable Things is an incomplete and underdeveloped glimpse into who Morgan is becoming: a famous person. Morgan's great talent as a comedian lies in her ability to create vivid imagery.
Unspeakable Things opens with a summary of her life over the past few years, starting with the painful moment of watching her first special. She tells the audience it changed her life, but she's only been able to watch it once, because it bothers her so much to look at her body and wonder, "When did my breasts get so fat?" Not pretty fat, she's quick to clarify. They're not attractive breasts. They're "huge grandma breasts." This is how Morgan positions herself throughout the first sections of the special: she may now be rubbing shoulders with Will Ferrell and the hair and makeup team of a straight-to-streaming romantic comedy, but they're the celebrities, and she's the one with the huge grandma breasts.
She's the one who's still grounded, still bound by all the rules of human bodies and moral standards that keep people from getting lost in fame, and unlike everyone else in Hollywood, she has enough connection to the real world to see how crazy this world is. She has a strong sense that this is happening to her physically: she's so much bigger than her co-star, she says, holding up a water bottle to demonstrate Witherspoon's size compared to hers. She thought she would lose a lot of weight during filming just from nerves, but unlike everyone else on set, she's not used to the omnipresence of catered food, so of course she ate every single hot meal they offered her. She wore ankle-strap sandals for many of her scenes, she says, and by the time filming wrapped, "those lovely people in wardrobe had to punch an extra hole in the strap."
The less cliché, more personal version of this idea—Morgan, the real person suddenly transported to a Hollywood fantasy world—comes later, when she describes an outing with the film's hair and makeup department to a historic hotel, which was actually the Clermont Lounge in Atlanta. “That,” she says, pausing and lowering her voice for emphasis, “is a strip club.” One of her eyes narrows slightly, making her look like a caricature of surprise and dismay. “When I found out, I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I have the Holy Spirit.’” The crowd cheers, but the expression on Morgan’s face isn’t one of anger or outrage; it’s one of utter bewilderment. Why should she be there? What kind of world is this that she now finds herself in? “Do you think if I go to this, I’m going to feel the presence of Satan?” she asks her daughter. “‘Yes, absolutely.’”
If the entire show Unspeakable Things were based on that premise, or at least willing to delve into Morgan's ambivalence about Hollywood culture, it would be a stronger hour. She masterfully handles a complex idea; even though she now undoubtedly belongs on those film sets as much as Witherspoon does, she doesn't give the impression of downplaying how much she still feels like an outsider. Nor do her religious beliefs or her standards of cleanliness come across as moralizing or judgmental. She knows she's the one who's out of place, sitting in a strip club and fantasizing about dunking underwear in a bowl of soapy water. She relishes how far removed she feels from her previous life, yet she also clearly feels out of place.
But after the first 20 minutes in which Morgan grapples with her current life, Unspeakable Things takes a turn backward, becoming a family album of Morgan's past. These stories about dressing children in snowsuits and her husband's perpetual lateness are still charming, but they take on a different nuance after the initial context of the catering gig and the Clermont Lounge. They are tales of a version of Morgan's life that no longer exists. As she recounts them for the rest of the hour, it becomes clear that the jokes about spoiling her grandchildren lack the tension of Morgan trying to reconcile her personality with her current reality, or the self-aware sparkle of longing for a den of iniquity more in keeping with her preferred grandmotherly aesthetic. But Morgan hasn't resolved that contradiction within her own new persona. Is she willing to embrace the chaos of Hollywood, or is she still holding herself apart?
Her final joke is about her husband, whom she always refers to by his full name. Chuck Morgan spent years being late for church, and Morgan recalls the difficulty of getting all her children ready to leave the house without any help. "Finally, Chuck Morgan would get up, adjust his underwear, cough a little," Morgan says, "and start staring at me." But the subtext of that joke is how Morgan has to negotiate power. She tries to please her husband while wrangling her children, and she's unable to set the agenda or make things happen the way she wants.
All she can do is say, "Okay." Morgan tells this story fondly, recalling a simpler time when her own desires were secondary to those of her family. It's a jarring note to end a special that begins with Morgan grappling with her newfound cultural power. She's faced with the dilemma of either getting to church on time or having a quickie with her husband in the closet so everyone can have a good Sunday, and, of course, she has no choice but the latter. "But I'm only going to take off one leg of these pantyhose!" she says. It's Leanne Morgan's recipe again, based on delightful contradictions: sex but with an innocent twist, sneaking around in a closet but on the way to church.
That material feels nostalgic, and while Morgan is more than capable of peppering her jokes with her usual linguistic flourishes and delivering them with style, they feel safe and predictable, endearing but bland. Brief comments about the lack of financial freedom Morgan previously had to decide how to use her time end with an implied ellipsis that she doesn't quite know how to turn into a punchline. Now she doesn't have to pack her own lunch unless she really wants to. What remains unclear is whether Morgan has embraced the comforts of success and whether that means her Jell-O salad days are truly over.
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