Carmen Lynch Brings Her Deadpan Wit to Arlington Drafthouse
Carmen Lynch has built a career on saying unsettling things in the calmest possible voice, and DC-area audiences will get four chances to experience it when the New York comedian headlines Arlington Drafthouse on Friday, September 11 and Saturday, September 12, with shows at 7:00 PM and 9:30 PM each night.
Lynch is one of those comics whose reputation among other comedians ran ahead of her mainstream profile for years, and the material explains why. Her delivery is dry to the point of being almost affectless, which is precisely what makes the punchlines land the way they do. She works in the space between polite small talk and the strange, morbid thoughts underneath it, mining mortality, dating, family, aging, and her own anxieties with a straight face that never breaks. The setup sounds like an ordinary observation. The turn arrives from somewhere considerably darker, and it arrives before you've had time to brace for it.
She is a familiar face to anyone who watched late-night television over the past decade and a half. Lynch made her network debut on The Late Show with David Letterman and returned for a second set, then went on to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Conan, and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. She has turned up in scripted television as well, with credits including Inside Amy Schumer, The Good Wife, Life & Beth, and That Damn Michael Che, and she was featured in the documentary Hysterical. Twice she advanced to the late rounds of NBC's Last Comic Standing. In 2017 she took her show Lynched to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a sold-out run, and her album Dance Like You Don't Need the Money was named to a New York Times streaming roundup and topped multiple critics' lists that year.
What genuinely sets Lynch apart, though, is that she does all of this in two languages. Born in Carmel, California to a Spanish mother and an American father, she grew up moving constantly before the family settled in Spain, where she picked up fluent Spanish and, for a stretch, flamenco. She studied psychology at the College of William & Mary — a degree that arguably shows in her act — and moved to New York after graduation intending to pursue acting before an open mic redirected the whole plan. Today she headlines in English and in Spanish, touring Spain and Latin America and hosting podcasts in both languages: The Human CentiPOD in English, which also streams on SiriusXM, and Podría Ser Peor in Spanish alongside Venezuelan radio personality Luis Chataing. She has also performed for American troops stationed across the Middle East and Africa, including Iraq and Kuwait.
Fans arriving in Arlington will find her working with a substantial amount of fresh material. Lynch recently released two new specials in quick succession, an English-language hour titled Queef Week, available on Mark Normand's YouTube channel, and a Spanish-language special, Carmen Lynch en Español, streaming on her own channel. Recording back-to-back specials in two different languages is a feat almost no one in stand-up has attempted, and it says a lot about how completely she inhabits both audiences rather than translating one act for the other.
Opening the shows is Audrey Stewart, a Los Angeles-based actress and stand-up comedian who is a regular at the Hollywood Improv and the Laugh Factory and is currently in development at the World Famous Comedy Store.