After blowing up with her 2023 stand-up special, the Tennessee grandma returns to confront her new life as a Hollywood star.
Photo: Netflix
Leanne Morgan speaks to her audience as an emissary from another world. Her comedy plays like a loving travelogue of her life laid out with an assurance that these details will be unfamiliar, thrilling, and exotic. In her first Netflix special, 2023’s I’m Every WomanMorgan represented a land of honest pragmatism and everyday, down-to-earth sensibility. She acts as a tour guide there, too, but she’s painting a life they already know well: Jell-O salad, Sunday mornings at church, practical underwear from big-box retailers. But in a Netflix carousel of hourlong specials, Morgan looks like a voyager from somewhere else entirely. That territory has a bounty of middle-aged men humping stools and occasionally noticing that death eventually comes for us all. Being a grandparent is just as common an experience as being frightened by trans people (I would hope much more so, in fact), but only one of those is a well-represented comedic perspective on a stand-up stage. Morgan’s catapult to fame in the past few years is partly because of her skill and partly because her existence as a 60-year-old woman from rural America allows her to depict experiences everyone knows exist but are relatively rare in this context. From that perspective, the title of that special almost looks defiant.
Every second special, Unspeakable Thingsis an attempt to translate Morgan’s sensibility into the new place she has found herself since the release of that first hour two and a half years ago. She’s blown up. 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 is no longer just Leanne Morgan; she is Leanne Morgan Gone Hollywood. She is still an emissary from a foreign country, but instead of Target and fishing trips, her country is now shaped by hotel rooms and craft services. But it’s all happened very quickly, and as a result, Unspeakable Things is an incomplete, underdeveloped look at whoever Morgan is now becoming: someone famous.
Morgan’s great gift as a comedian is in drawing vivid imagery. Unspeakable Things opens with a recap of her life over the last few years, beginning with the painful act of watching her own first special. She tells the crowd it changed her life, but she’s only been able to watch it once, because it bothers her so much to look at her own body and wonder, “When did my breasts get so fat?” Not cute luck, she rushes to clarify. They’re not attractive breasts. They’re “big ol’ mamaw breasts.” This is how Morgan positions herself throughout the special’s opening sections: She may now find herself hanging out with Will Ferrell and the hair-and-makeup crew of a straight-to-streaming rom-com, but they are celebrities, and she is the one with big ol’ mamaw breasts. She is the one still grounded, still trapped by all the rules of human bodies and moral standards that keep people from losing themselves to fame, and unlike everyone else in Hollywood, she’s got enough of a foot back in the real world that she can still see how wild this world really is. She has a strong sense of this happening bodily — she is so much bigger than her co-star, she says while holding up a bottle of water to demonstrate Witherspoon’s size compared to hers. She figured she’d lose so much weight while shooting her movie out of sheer nerves alone, but unlike everyone else on set, she’s not accustomed to the ubiquity of a craft-service meal, so of course she ate every hot meal offered to her. She wore sandals with an ankle strap for many of her scenes, she says, and by the time she got to the end of the shoot, “those darling wardrobe people had to poke an extra hole in my strap.”
The less cliché and more personal version of this idea — Morgan, the real human suddenly transported into a Hollywood fantasyland — arrives later, when she describes going on an outing with the film’s hair-and-makeup department to a historic hotel, which was in fact Atlanta’s Clermont Lounge. “That,” she says, pausing and lowering her voice for emphasis, “is a strip club.” One of her eyes closes slightly, turning her into a cartoon of shock and dismay. “When I found that out, I said, ‘Oh I’m sorry. I have the Holy Spirit.‘” The crowd woos, but the look on Morgan’s face is not fire-and-brimstone fury; it’s blank confusion. Why should she be in there? What is this world she’s now inhabiting? “Do you think if I go to this thing, I’m going to feel the presence of Satan?” she asks her daughter. “‘Yeah, girl. I love them.’”
Morgan’s smart enough to twist the story, veering away from an Evangelical lesson about righteousness and towards a more terrestrial concern. By the end of her time at the Clermont Lounge, her worry is not about the presence of Satan or women being taken advantage of, but a 30-something dancer who looks like Ms. Frizzle from The Magic School Bus who danced in a patriotic red, white, and blue bra and panties. “And I’ll just tell y’all,” Morgan says, “it was a little dingy. And as a mother, all I could think of when that little thing was dancing was, mulberry, I wish I could take that bra and panty set home and Biz that overnight.“It is a fantastic metaphor for Morgan’s overall comedic approach. It allows for entertainment to be a little revealing, and it’s good to talk about the hidden, unmentionable things in life. It can be about sex and body parts and underwear (Morgan, after all, loves a big pantie); she loves to think about parts of life that are generally covered by polite society. But please, while we’re stripping down to reveal naked parts of ourselves, let’s at least make sure that those panties are clean. Let’s return often to the preciousness of grandchildren, and how hard Morgan’s husband has worked to support their family, and, yes, that she has the Holy Spirit.
If all of Unspeakable Things was built around that premise, or at least willing to then go deeper into Morgan’s ambivalence about Hollywood culture, it would be a stronger hour. She has an impressive handle on a tricky idea; even though she now arguably belongs on those film sets just as much as Witherspoon, she doesn’t feel like she’s misrepresenting how much she still feels like an outsider. Nor do religious beliefs or cleanliness standards come off as scold-y or judgmental. She knows she’s the one out of place here, sitting in a strip club and fantasizing about dunking underwear into a bowl of soapy water. She’s enjoying how far it feels from her previous life, even if she also feels distinctly out of step.
But after the first 20 minutes of Morgan grappling with her current life, Unspeakable Things pivots backward into a family album of Morgan’s past. These stories about stuffing kids into snowsuits and her husband’s perpetual lateness are still charming, but there’s a different valence to them after the opening context of craft services and the Clermont Lounge. They are dispatches from a version of Morgan’s life that no longer exists. As she shuffles through them over the rest of the hour, it becomes clear that the jokes about spoiling her grandchildren lack the tension of Morgan trying to reconcile her persona with her current reality, or the self-aware twinkle of longing for a den of iniquity better suited to her own preferred grandma aesthetic. But Morgan has not reconciled that contradiction within her own new persona. Is she willing to embrace the Hollywood mess, or is she still holding herself apart?
Her closing joke is about her husband, who she always refers to by his full name. Chuck Morgan spent years being egregiously late for church, and Morgan recalls the struggle of getting all their kids ready to leave the house without any help. “Eventually, Chuck Morgan would get up, pop his boxers, cough up something,” Morgan says, “and start staring at me.” But the undercurrent of that joke is how Morgan has to negotiate for power. She’s trying to please her husband while wrangling her kids, and she’s not able to set the agenda or make anything happen that way CEO wants. All she can do is say, “Okay.” Morgan tells that story with fondness, looking back on a simpler time when her own desires were secondary to what everyone else in her family wanted. It’s a discordant note to end a special that begins with Morgan wrestling with her new cultural power. She’s left with the choice of getting to church on time or having a closet quickie with her husband so that everyone has a nice Sunday, and of course she has no real option but the latter. “But I’m only taking one leg out of these pantyhose!” she tells him It’s the Leanne Morgan recipe again, built on pleasant contradictions: sex but wholesome, hidden 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 trademarks and selling them with style, they feel safe and baggy, endearing but soft. Short jabs about how little financial power Morgan once had over how to spend her time now end with an implicit ellipsis she cannot figure out how to turn into a punch line. Now she doesn’t have to pack herself a lunch unless she really wants to. What’s left unclear is whether Morgan has accepted the embrace of craft services, and whether that means her days of Jell-O salad are over.
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