Off Brand Video #13: Dynasty Handbag’s “Masterpiece Weirdo: Episode 5”

If you find anglophiles intolerable, blame Alistair Cooke. From 1971 to 1992, Cooke hosted Masterpiece Theatre, a PBS-produced TV program that introduced nostalgia-hungry Americans to British period drama. An Englishman who spent most of his life in the US, Cooke’s accent and tweed jacket made him irresistible to those eager to denounce Hollywood and worship the BBC. Sitting across from a single candle, Cooke introduces a 1977 adaptation of the British novel Poldark by saying, “Now is the time for the party to settle into a spate of dueling and loving and wenching and poaching.” Eighteenth-century Cornwall sounds a lot like Jersey Shore.

In Masterpiece Weirdo, Jibz Cameron has stepped into Cooke’s loafers to deliver recaps of Weirdo Night, the monthly variety show she’s hosted in LA since 2016 featuring comedians, drag kings, musicians, and oddball entertainers. She says her partner, filmmaker Mariah Garnett, who directs each episode, came up with the Masterpiece parody idea, which the two shoot in their garage. But whereas Cooke plays the professor eager to hold Americans’ hand across the Atlantic Ocean towards refinement, Cameron bites that hand and eats it with a dollop of cashew yogurt. 

“This is quite a show,” says Cameron’s persona, Dynasty Handbag, from the stage in Episode 5, putting “show” in air quotes. “We’ll see. There’s a lot of younger people in the show and I don’t have any faith in that, so, I don’t know, you get what you get.” After Uberdanzlaborunion performs choreography to Arcade Fire and Foreigner, Handbag quips to the camera, “White women! What can’t we do?!” In a recent conversation, Cameron said, “I make fun of the acts just enough to be abusive and to show I care enough to abuse them.” She cites hosts like Elvira and Cryptkeeper as influences, and says she learned the art of gibing from performers like Linda Simpson and Murray Hill. “I was in many of Murray’s shows in New York in the early 2000s, and he would act like he was completely disgusted by all the acts that came on, or tease you so badly you almost believed he thought you were terrible.” And she also points that snark at the audience. 

Handbag makes fart jokes for the supposedly woke. How different is the sneer of an anglophile from that of a morally superior, oat milk-guzzling urban queer? “And then you called the Lyft and there was a weird smell in it! And a banana peel was driving it. Or it was a man, and you had to talk to a MAN.” Handbag knows the privileged gripes of her crowd, who she describes...