Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.
In the stand-up hour filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn-born comic muses on a range of subjects – mostly sex, politics and relationships – but also riffs on Disney princes and the things that annoy her.
Berner has called her comedy “female locker room” but that's to mis-sell it slightly; yes, there's a lot of sexual material but there's craft in the gags and her energetic performance – although her internet origins come through in the fact that her anecdotes don't always end with a punchline, and there are jerky segues between others.
She gives a spirited performance – even starting the evening by doing the worm as she comes on stage (“I don't know why I did that”) – and talks about how thirtysomething women like her are constantly being told they have to make a lot of effort to keep looking good. But Pilates (or “basically BDSM”, as she terms it) is not for her, not least because she hates the type of people permanently attached to a water bottle.
Berner is recently married and while her husband, fellow comic Des Bishop, is not named he's mentioned a fair bit, and she examines the realities of being with a partner several years older, or her “zaddy”, as she calls him. He's happy to stay at home – “The only thing going anywhere is his hairline” – and when he had a health scare in a restaurant it annoyed rather than worried her because it interrupted their meal.
She wants more realistic sex in movies, not least the kind that shows “queefing”, and she talks about her experience of buying the morning-after pill. But among the more raw material there are some smart lines – she gets in a sly dig at Andrew Tate while talking about bathroom products and makes her point about America's crazy gun laws in a strong section about a girls' night out.
Berner is an upfront comic who appears unembarassable on stage, and one who has a real connection with her (at this gig at least) largely female audience. For a debut stand-up hour, it's a strong start – and easy to see why Variety has hailed her as a comic to watch.
