The Cut - Welcome to 'The Church of Ziwe'

It’s a bad day for both of us. An early, inconvenient hour, a last-minute location change, and the kind of hot, soupy weather that means boob sweat and bad smells. But the comedian Ziwe Fumudoh is neat, in a white teacup dress covered in candy-colored splotches, her hair tucked into a fluffy, orange bucket hat. This hat is enormous, and the effect is that Ziwe, who has forgone her usual platforms for a pair of sneakers, looks very small. She wears no makeup and looks younger than her 29 years. Costumes — latex gloves, pink eyeliner, wild wigs — are her usual trademark, and I wonder, Could this be Ziwe, unproduced?

“It’s my first time outside in four days,” she says, a bit harried. It’s reasonable — she has had her head down, working on her new Showtime series, Ziwe, which she stars in, writes, edits, and produces (and which just concluded last night). It’s an extended version of her infamous Instagram Live series, Baited, which went viral last summer after a series of painful-to-watch interviews with the likes of Alison Roman, Caroline Calloway, and other semi-canceled white women. Ziwe includes sketches and musical numbers, but the show revolves around the interviews — in which she asks her guests very direct questions about race — which are still the best part.

Read your horoscope for the week of June 14. Then pity the fool who paid $28M to go to space with Jeff Bezos. It’s the summer of exes, and even Angelina Jolie is getting on the bandwagon (no, not with Brad Pitt). Biden was too cool for Queen Elizabeth this weekend. “When a dog bite lands you in the ER 30 mins before the red carpet,” but you go anyway. How do you get into this skyscraper pool, and perhaps more important, why would you? Chrissy Teigen has posted, and if nothing else, we now know she has watched My Name is Earl. Now that our free subscriptions have lapsed, we’re actually considering paying for Apple TV+ just to watch The Morning Show season 2, though we can’t really explain why. And finally, this week in unlikely animals.

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