Tax Day rolled around late this year. It was yet another ripple effect from a pandemic that has emptied out classrooms, shuttered Broadway, and rerouted performers from stage sets to Instagram Lives. But on May 17, the IRS finally came knocking (that old line about death and taxes grimmer than it’s ever been), and thank God it was Meg Stalter who answered.
“Lady Legit Tax Center, how can I help you?” the comedian trills at the start of her two-minute video, posted to Twitter. She is holding an ancient-looking computer mouse to her ear; a pastel barrette shaped like a butterfly anchors the ponytail at the top of her head. After stage-whispering to an unseen coworker that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, she cheerily takes the caller off hold: “Hello, I’m back and I know what I’m doing!” Stalter, an Ohio native, slips into her buttery Midwestern phone voice, giving it an absurdist slant. “Have you been to a Scholastic book fair in the last 12 months?” she asks between forkfuls of instant mac and cheese, her white eyeliner flashing at the camera. She shuffles make-believe paperwork like a certain former president. “Have you jumped on a trampoline this year? Because that can be a write-off!”
Stalter’s brand of comedy operates in the liminal space between universally familiar and hyper-specific. We might think we know “drunk mom” or “corporate spokesperson” or even “dog-food influencer”—archetypes from sketches, sitcoms, life. But when her character sidles into episode 1 of the HBO show Hacks (starring Jean Smart as stand-up legend Deborah Vance, with Hannah Einbinder as Ava, the Gen-Z writer tasked with freshening up her material), Stalter isn’t just a cookie-cutter assistant barging in on her talent-agent boss (played by series co-creator Paul W. Downs). Stalter’s Kayla glimmers like a precision-cut cubic zirconia: baby-blue eye shadow, scrunchie-wrapped high pony, one-shoulder animal-print top. “Follow me, chica!” she chirps to Ava, effervescently inept. The day after the premiere, Judd Apatow tweeted for us all: “I hope there is a five episode arc deeply exploring this character.”
Meg Stalter as Kayla in Hacks, with her talent-agent boss (Paul W. Downs).
Courtesy of HBO Max.“This is the perfect first-time role because I’m so lucky that Paul and Lucia [Aniello] and Jen [Statsky] wrote such a funny script,” Stalter says. (In fact, as the creators explained to A.V. Club, the part evolved with Stalter in mind, after she took off online and wowed them with a live show in L.A. They aimed “to really write to Meg’s strengths,” Downs said; even though Kayla is very much a character, she can “still do the thing that is so magical about Meg.”)
Stalter is calling from Ohio, where she is visiting family. “Today is my mom’s birthday. I feel like I’ve changed my outfit three times and it’s just been us,” she says, adding that she’s wearing her usual eyeliner with hot pink shadow for the occasion. (Later that night, she posted a video of the magician—a balding guy named Brad—she hired to perform in their living room. “Brad is a Meg Stalter character,” someone tweeted in response.) “Nobody has been, professionally, a comedian in my family, so it is all this new world,” explains Stalter, now based in Los Angeles. “But they’re so funny that every time I come home, we make videos together.”
Stalter’s output during our cooped-up year has been prodigious, between the steady run of Instagram Lives (recently a mock parent-teacher conference and a bathrobe dispatch from an “L.A. mama bear”), a podcast, and standalone videos. The New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman described her work as “essential escapist entertainment,” and that seems to ring true for Stalter as well—known to disappear under a peroxide wig or a sweep of banana-yellow eye shadow.
“I just feel like costume and makeup and the way someone’s hair looks, it tells so much about how they want the world to see them,” says Stalter, who came up in the sketch and improv world, where that kind of wearable transformation is often all that’s in the budget. It adds to that uncanny blur between art and artifice. “A lot of times people will see a video and be like, ‘I can’t tell if the wild makeup is her or the character,’ and now I feel it is kind of blending in together,” Stalter says. She stocks up on cheap waterproof liquid liners and mascaras with names like Better Than Sex: “It just reminds me of a mom doing those vibrator parties. It’s so funny.” Her go-to eye shadow palette—a mix of circus-bright oranges and purples and greens—is what she uses “when I’m thinking of Midwestern church moms or women who live to garage-sale.” It also fits her own cartoon-meets-real life aesthetic, shaped as much by vintage Cher as by Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “I just get so excited to dress like a character, but then I’m like, ‘Well, why wouldn’t I wear these big scrunchies in my real life, or these crazy earrings?”
Hacks, with its cross-generational look at women in comedy, resurfaces the norms of perfection that have long existed even on the stand-up stage: a cinched-waist, shellacked-hair standard that comedians like Joan Rivers and Carol Burnett and Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance bristled against. “I don’t know—I get really emotional watching Hacks,” Stalter says. She recalls the “scene where Jean is talking about, ‘It takes more than just being good. You’re clawing your way to the top.’ I just feel like women—and nonbinary people and trans people, people of color—all have to work so much harder at everything to prove themselves.” There is glory in the frayed edges of Stalter’s work: the mispronounced words and Christopher Guest-ish asides to people off-screen, but also the half-exposed bra or smudged white eyeliner. It’s for laughs, but also reflects a refreshing kind of looseness.
At this juncture—soft pants traded for party clothes, lipstick smeared under the occasional mask, Zoom snafus segueing into IRL ones—it feels right that we are treated to so much Meg. In the eighth episode of Hacks, dropping tonight, Kayla inserts herself back into the plot, making power plays of a hapless sort. Later this month, Stalter returns to New York for a sold-out six-show run at the Bell House. “My mom has been freaking out. She cried when the first one sold out within a minute!” says Stalter. (The rest of the sets followed suit.) With venues opening up, some comedians will invariably wind down their social-media stopgaps, but Stalter is excited to fold in live performance alongside her videos. “It was the scariest time and people have been through so much pain, and it just feels like we’ve built this online community,” she says. “People are connecting to comedy—and to each other—in a different way.”
Besides, Stalter adds, “there are so many characters I couldn’t do onstage the way I can do in a video in my mom’s backyard.” Or in a bathtub or in a Burlington Coat Factory parking lot. She knows how to give people what they want—and right about now, surely it’s a makeup tutorial: exaggerated cat eyes with, say, electric blue eye shadow. “People are like, ‘You can’t—it’s so ’80s.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s fun!’”
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