"Mothers are like tornadoes," says Lynne Koplitz, dry and straight-faced, in the first bit of her new hourlong Netflix special Hormonal Beast, which dropped earlier this week. "You can't prepare." She's talking about that thing men do when they call women crazy, and while I'm not a fan of gender stereotypes and binaries, it's funny as fuck.
"What [men] don't understand is that we didn't get upset over some small thing," she explains, "the tornado's been up there brewing — a small thing triggered it. You know who I think is crazy? Someone who goes out to a Level 5 twister and tells it, 'You need to calm down. You need to relax.' Don't you think we know? Don't you think we see the cows flying by?"
Even though she has been in the biz for 28 years, I had never heard of Lynne Koplitz until Tuesday, when Netflix's banner stared me in the face. That is truly a crime. I blame the industry. 28 years, and this is her first hour special. SMH.
The genius of Hormonal Beast lies in Koplitz's analogies and anecdotes. It's human observational humor at its finest — Amy Schumer could learn a few things. She takes generalizations about women (they're emotional) and men (they're dumb) and twists them into something productive. For example, in one bit, she explains that men are inherently very simple, and therefore only need three things: 1. food, 2. for women to shut the fuck up, and 3. sex (more specifically, blow jobs — because they combine two of their favorite things, sex and women not talking). And in another, she gives a PSA ("Now that I have a national platform — finally"), inviting husbands and sons to learn that a gagging sound (which she demonstrates) is not a good sound.
It's not all about how frustrating men are, though. The second half of the special is full of personal anecdotes, like how being a New Yorker means you can scowl at the thought of having children, and the time some millennials were yelling "pussy" at the top of their lungs at 7 a.m. outside her Greenwich Village apartment. "I don't mean to be a cunt," she says, "but get on your CitiBikes and drive uptown somewhere. Go to like, Kellyanne Conway's house. She needs you." You know what? I think we really need Lynne Koplitz.