Favorite “Characters”: Karamo Brown (Queer Eye)

I got a little sidetracked from finishing my Favorite “Characters” posts (in quotes since they’re not actually characters) on the Fab Five, because So Much Pop Culture, Not Enough Hours in the Day. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like Karamo or Antoni, quite the contrary. It took me a little while to get back to it, but really, I’m just spreading out the Queer Eye goodness a bit more.

In both the original and rebooted versions of the show, the “culture expert” has the most difficult job of conveying the value of their expertise in a TV-friendly format. And despite having the same title, Karamo’s role on the show is very different than Jai Rodriguez’s in the original. While Karamo occasionally dips into “cultured” stuff like introducing the heroes to new experiences/more “sophisticated” activities, his focus generally lies elsewhere. For him and the new Queer Eye, “culture expert” might more accurately be termed therapist or life coach.

More than anything, Karamo’s time with the heroes is spent digging into the internal issues that are maybe manifesting more visibly in the stuff that the rest of the Fab Five helps them with. On TV, a borderline-hoarder disaster of an apartment or a wardrobe that hasn’t been updated in 15 years is both easy to display and cinematic to go about fixing. But Karamo wants to know why the hero isn’t spending time on keeping their home or appearance in order. Are they too depressed to do anything, or are they afraid of putting themselves out there? Do they spend so much time taking care of other people that they don’t leave anything for themselves (a common issue for probably the majority of the women the Fab Five have helped)? Do they need to find the confidence to take a needed first step, or do they need to resolve something in their past before they can move forward? These are the questions Karamo tries to get at.

Again, it’s difficult to show this in a 45-minute episode format (especially when Karamo is splitting his time with four other people whose expertise is all more visually-apparent than his!) Sometimes, the show boils it down to a particular action (like a hero in a wheelchair sitting down to talk with the man who shot him or a trans hero getting the gender on his ID changed,) but often, these are just conversations/sessions that Karamo has with the hero. Although the show sometimes tries to jazz these up and make them a little more dynamic, throwing in visual metaphors to symbolize what Karamo and the hero are talking about, the work that’s happening is much more internal.

And the tears, oh, how they flow! Karamo’s secondary expertise is making people cry – heroes and viewers alike – and he’s super good at it. But it’s about a lot more than just heartstring-pulling and good TV. I mean, I get that it’s a reality show, so of course that’s part of it, but it’s not just that. One thing I really adore about Queer Eye is about how, with the male heroes in particular, it regularly touches on the effects of toxic masculinity. If many female heroes have a common thread of helping everyone except themselves, many of the guys are struggling with something in silence. Whether it’s insecurity, depression, fear, or past traumas, we see so many of them telling Karamo that they don’t think they can admit these feelings, like they’re less of a man if they tell someone they’re having a hard time or ask for help. It’s an important way to show how much sexism can hurt men too, and Karamo’s work is huge in helping these guys dismantle some of that and realize it’s okay to be vulnerable.

Jonathan Van Ness: November 6th, 2019 (Live)

I’d just finished watching the first three seasons of Queer Eye when I saw online that Jonathan Van Ness was going to be doing a standup show not too far away from me. I admittedly that no idea what Jonathan would be like as a standup comic, but I knew I didn’t want to pass up the chance to see him live.

Again, I couldn’t predict what a JVN standup show would be like, but now having seen it, I’d say it fit him to a tee. There were numerous points where it didn’t necessarily feel like standup, but a) it definitely felt like Jonathan Van Ness and b) it was still very funny. There were jokes, there were personal and social observations, there were meandering anecdotes, there were dirty non-sequitirs, there were pop culture references, there was political commentary, there were ensemble changes, there were life lessons, there were Queer Eye stories, and yes, there was gymnastics.

For starters, Jonathan’s performing style is both very loose and very upfront. He let us know right away that he had notes taped to the floor, he admitted that he loves bringing up the house lights to see the crowd but that the size of the audience simultaneously “scares the shit out of [him,]” and he noted several lines as “hard-right” improvs that got way dirtier than he was expecting. This is an aspect of his career that’s still very much in-progress; his warm-up act, Naomi Ekperigin (who was hilarious,) performed a set that was clearly more polished and put-together than his was.

But Jonathan’s authenticity has always been one of his strongest features on Queer Eye, and that continued to serve him well here. He had the (packed) house eating out of his hand when he performed an extended depiction of the “conversations” his hair- and skincare products have with him in the shower or admitted in a small voice, “I think the number of dicks I’ve sucked has a comma in it.” He charmed us when, after a “quick change,” he cheerfully informed us that he was going to run offstage for a second to adjust his spanx. Even if his routines were sometimes only tangentially related to the theme he was assigning them, and even if he sometimes got distracted and had to wind his way back to what he was talking about, the show was no less funny or engaging for it.

Over the course of the night, he covered a wide range of topics that are well within his wheelhouse. He had some good hairdresser stories (as well as some good terrible-day-jobs-while-going-to-hairdressing-school stories!) and dished on celebrities whose hair he’s done (but only naming the ones who were nice.) He had a long routine on his reactions to his very unexpected fame and the parts of himself he’s still trying to figure out in light of that fame. He discussed social media and dating, he told amusing Baby Jonathan stories (both elementary and high school editions,) and he used video clips from a roller dancing competition to comment on the state of America from 2016 to the present. Oh yeah, and he lectured us for not having an appropriately-aghast reaction to his admission of a childhood longing to try a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner.

Just a great night. I didn’t know what to expect going in, but afterwards, it was clear that it never could’ve been anything else.

Favorite “Characters”: Tan France (Queer Eye)

Yep, another Queer Eye post.  Tan was actually my first exposure to the Queer Eye reboot, as I saw a couple short online videos of him helping celebrities with their wardrobes (Hasan Minhaj – love that one! – and Pete Davidson.)  It was a good incentivizer to check out Queer Eye, because even though I first watched these videos for the other person in them, I immediately knew that I liked this guy.

If those promo videos weren’t enough to make me a Tan fan, he would’ve won me over in the first episode when he begrudging told the hero he could keep his ugly flannel pajamas only if he promised Tan that “no woman will ever see them.”  The clothing expert regularly has quite the time going through a hero’s closet, agog at various fashion disasters found therein and ably demonstrating when a T-shirt is torn past the point of wearability.  He has an eye for noting when heroes veer outside of age-appropriate style (both ways – he’s just as likely to say, “You’re almost 40, you shouldn’t be dressing like a college student,” as, “You’re only 35, but this looks like something my dad would wear!”), and he’s fond of asking straight male heroes how their wives/girlfriends make an effort to look good for them, then flips it around to ask what kind of effort they make.

Once he’s gotten rid of all the clothes he can’t bear, it’s shopping time, and I really love watching Tan in these scenes.  He’s very attuned to people’s insecurities about their bodies, and he’s a big advocate for helping people realize they don’t need to be a certain size in order to look/feel sexy.  His major thing – even more than printed shirts and French tucks! – is focusing on the fit of clothes and finding choices/sizes that are appropriate for the hero’s body shape.  During the initial walk-through of the hero’s home, a frequent exclamation of his is, “This looks massive on you!”, and when he gets the hero into a fitting room, Tan immediately starts to show them how wearing clothes that fit better will seem to take a good 20 pounds off them.  He has a repertoire of other satirical tricks as well, from using a busy print to take attention away from the size of someone’s belly to using a slim pant leg to make someone look taller and leaner.

Like all of the Fab Five, Tan has a talent for building people up.  As much as he gently ribs the heroes for the wardrobe they start out with, he’s filled with compliments when he takes them to try on clothes he picks out.  He not only tells them they look good, he checks in with them to make sure that that’s registering.  “Do you see how good you look?” He asks.  “Do you feel sexy?  Do you feel confident?”  I especially enjoy it when the show makes over women and he always prefaces his compliments about their figures with reminders that he’s gay and isn’t saying it in “that way.”

One more thing I like about Tan is how he tailors (clothing pun!) the shopping experiences to fit the hero’s needs.  He’s taken more than one to a a Big and Tall store, where they realize how much less demoralizing it is to shop in a place where they can find more than two things that fit them.  And when a father of six said that he got all his clothes secondhand (explaining that, if he’s going to buy new clothes, it’s going to be for the kids or his wife,) Tan brought him to Target to show him that he can still find good-looking things within his budget.  It fits into his whole emphasis on making over the hero in a way they like/that suits them rather than just making them all over the way he would want.