Comedy Challenge Archives

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 16, Episode 4 gave us another rendition of RDR Live – their spoof on Saturday Night Live – with with an all-time great “Night of 1,000 Chers” runway branded as “Everything Every-Cher All At Once.” The combo led to some great television, a shocking win, and some shake-ups in the power ranking!

This episode emphasized our tightly-grouped trio of front-runners, but it also allowed several queens from the middle of the pack to make a case for why they should stick around until the back half of the season. There was no “I was rooting for us” levels of disastrous performances here, although one queen in particular completely missed the reference of her skit.

RDR Live is actually an interesting bit of illusion. Because it is satirizing Saturday Night Live, it’s easy to think of it as an improv challenge where queens have some control over their fate. However, it’s really just a scripted comedy acting challenge like Daytona Wind, which means certain roles are locked in as mediocre or even risky based on the script.

(Here’s another interesting tidbit to mull over: These queens may have shot this “RDR Live” challenge without even seeing the All Stars Season 8 version, which aired around the same time this cast was sequestered. Of course, you don’t have to see a spoof of SNL to know how to play a spoof of SNL, but it meant that they were choosing roles without any intel of how Ru and the judges reacted to similar choices from another cast of queens.)

The result was the three front-runner queens making wise choices and doing well for themselves, one upstart taking a risk and paying it off big-time, and a handful of potential cannon fodder queens doing their best to break out of the pack of early-outs.

That yielded a Bottom Two that surprised me with a shocking elimination that I claimed would be impossible in my Power Rankings of the Mother of All Balls last week. Not only was this episode’s “Sashay Away” a shocker, but it also slightly jostled our pack of front-runners with a potential new narrative.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!

Welcome to my recap of the tenth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7 – The Kennedy Davenport Center Honors Hall of Shade, a roast where the comedy barbs are directed at the rest of the cast, plus an unusual light-up runway.

One of the first things I ever wanted to be as a child was a comedian, long before I ever set foot on stage to discover my love of performing.

Mostly I think I appreciated it when adults were laughing with me instead of laughing at me because I loved watching stand-up specials from all-time greats like Robin Williams and George Carlin.

Later, I realized that being intentionally funny is an incredibly hard task – much too difficult and unpredictable to pin career aspirations upon.

Many drag queens have a similar realization during their runs on Drag Race.

While a sense of humor is essential for almost any queen to survive her early days performing for tips in local bars, that off-the-cuff self-deprecation isn’t the same as the improv and roasting required to make it through a season of Drag Race. We’ve seen many a queen arrive on the show assuming they are hilarious who then fall flat in comedy challenges.

If you’ve ever thought that queens tend to be funnier when they return for All Stars, that’s because they are cheating. It’s an open secret that while queens are prepping outfits for their return runs, they are also turning to their funnier peers and to actual career comedians to supply them with a stock of jokes about other queens most-likely to return to the show. Many queens who have cleaned up in an All Stars library session or roast challenge were working entirely from pre-written material.

That’s why I’m not surprised that this challenge is not about roasting a random honoree, like Lady Bunny or even the titular Kennedy Davenport. This season has taken every opportunity to let its winners be well-prepared for the challenges, and this is no exception. Even if the queens didn’t have a single back-channel source on which other winners to expect, the pool of possible queens was small and mostly full of friendly faces.

Did Monét workshop her set with Bob? Absolutely. Did Shea ring up Peppermint or Miss Cracker? I wouldn’t be surprised. Even a powerhouse like Jinkx might’ve ran some lines with Ben de la Creme.

That means I went into this episode with incredibly high expectations. An All-Winners roast should be all hits, and no Farrah Moans. Did every queen rise to the challenge? Find out in my full-episode recap, below. Plus, at the end of the recap I have a deep game theory update to my Episode 9 rankings to explain who can make it into the finale and how. (Want to skip right to the power rankings? Go for it!)

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen… win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 7, Episode 10 –The Kennedy Davenport Center Honors Hall of Shade recap & power ranking!