Hannah Einbinder's climate change bit burns brightest in Everything Must Go
The Hacks star's debut standup special is solid, but this one bit is excellent
Hannah Einbinder’s debut stand-up special Everything Must Go, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday and on Max today, sees the 29-year-old Hacks breakout doing exactly as its title suggests: making a case for what belongs in the trash. The staging—the lighting direction, especially—at the El Rey theater in her native Los Angeles is stunning by standup special standards. This, according to Einbinder in a post-premiere Q&A with SNL’s Sarah Sherman and director Sandy Honig, was intentional. “Standup comedy is not typically a medium where aesthetics are considered,” she noted. Her inspiration came from a myriad of places, including David Lynch’s repertoire and the Barbra Streisand-starring A Star Is Born. Frankly, it shows. In fact, the result feels more akin to a one-woman show, theatrically punctuated by Zach Galifianakis-esque prolonged pauses.
Einbinder’s list of other considerations includes capitalism, humanity, and, perhaps most notably, male trees. It’s the latter, the basis of an extended bit, that reveals more about its messenger than most else in the 55-minute set. It begins with what one might first suspect is a simple anecdote. What it becomes by its end—over 10 minutes later—is a delightful tirade about climate change made distinctly, neurotically her, thanks to the twists and turns of an O. Henry story and one pitch-perfect My Cousin Vinny impression.
The comedian begins with a history lesson. “In 1949, a man named Alfred Stefferud wrote an article in the USDA Journal of Agriculture and in it, he recommended that city and urban planners only plant trees of the male variety because he said trees of the female variety littered cumbersome seeds and fruit that made the streets unbecoming,” she deadpans. As Einbinder ramps up, she vacillates between academic journal-adjacent jargon (“trees in the wild operate under essentially botanical communism”) and the vernacular of, well, a millennial former stoner (“fuckass boy trees”). With impressive lucidity, Einbinder parses how Stefferud’s influence has led to a staggering increase in Americans’ allergies. Male trees emit toxins through pollen that then winds up on the surfaces of water and—as the sniffly and suffering community knows—literally everywhere else. “You want to talk to me about toxic masculinity?” Einbinder exclaims.