Transcription
Should we start the show? Do you think we should start the show? Sorry, Miss. Do you think we should start the show? Yeah, yeah. Should we start the show? Okay. Should we start the show?
Please welcome to the stage. It's hello Auckland, hello Auckland. My name is Olga Koch, and I'm the first woman in history to ever turn 30 years old. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I can finally play a teenager in a high school movie. Thank you. I love 30. The second I turn 30, I immediately realized that 30 is younger than 28. Any 20-year-olds in here? Oh, you should be at home. It's late. No, because at 28, you're so filled with 30 panic that you're just like, "Oh my God, I need to get my ducks in a row. I need a pension. I need a mortgage. I need a partner." And then you turn 30, realize nothing has changed, and now you're doing MDMA again. It's fantastic. I cannot recommend 30 enough.
I'm doing so many new things now that I'm 30. I'm moisturizing more. I just put so much lotion on my butt, I slid off the toilet. I turned 30 and I did a triathlon. Anal, oral, [Applause] vaginal, in that order. I got a master's degree. I turned 30. I went back to university. I got a master's degree. Thank you so much. Joint honors: anal, oral, vaginal. That's a bunch line to every joke. Strap in, Auckland.
Oh man, I'm doing so many new things now that I'm 30. All right. I traveled the world. I went on like an adult gap year. I went everywhere. Turned 30. I am based in the UK, so I went to Australia, I went to Peru, I went to New Zealand twice. Yeah, I live in the UK. I've been to New Zealand twice in one year. I think we can all collectively agree that's too many times to go to New Zealand. My body clock permanently thinks I'm here. I'm always 12 hours ahead. For me, it's always tomorrow. And don't worry, you guys love the show. You were confused by the lotion thing earlier. I promise it ends up being your favorite bit. I got a new lease on life, baby. I'm 30. Last April, I had no tattoos. Now I have three tattoos. And Auckland, they mean absolutely nothing.
All right, I'll show you my first tattoo. I'll show you one tattoo because both my producer and my director strongly advise me not to show you the other ones. You have seen Garfield before, but never doing that. All right, so I'll show you my first tattoo. One day, I was feeling very humiliated, very, very, very humiliated, like deeply humiliated. And I thought, "Okay, what will make me feel better? What will make me feel like I have control over my own body?" So I walked into a tattoo parlor and I got this prawn right here. Can you tell, front row, corroborate that there's a prawn on my foot? A prawn. It, there's no hidden meaning. I just like seafood. Okay. And then I took a picture of the prawn and I posted it on Instagram, and three separate people sent me the definition for something called shrimping, which means to suck on someone's toes for sexual pleasure. Unanimously, I got a tattoo of a shrimp on my foot, and shrimping means to suck on someone's toes for sexual pleasure. Thank God I'm into that. But it didn't really help with the humiliation that day.
Okay, I also was hanging out with a seven-year-old. Um, her parents were also there. Who cares? And so me and a seven-year-old, we were playing with her mom's Old Spice Girl Barbies. And you know how the Spice Girl Barbies have all the Spice Girl tattoos on them? So I was obviously like, "Hey, do you want to see my tattoos?" And the seven-year-old just went, "No." And the mom overheard the entire interaction, and the mom just went, "That's probably good boundaries." And that's the first time I've ever been stranger-dangered in a home. I was explicitly invited.
To the most exciting thing that happened to me at the age of 30, Auckland. The rumors are true. This year, I got both salmonella and HPV. Thank you, thank you so much. Thank you. Salmonella and HPV. Ladies, you can have it all.
Olga, how'd you get salmonella? Thank you so much for asking. As I mentioned, I went to Peru. In Peru, I took a selfie with an alpaca, and then she spat in my mouth because she's freaking like that. Thank God I'm into that. And I was like, "What's the worst that can happen?" Seven hours later, I was pooping myself dry in a hospital bed. You don't see Joe Lycett doing that on Travel Man. I was [expletive] myself to death, and there wasn't even a camera crew to film it. But I looked so skinny. So yes, I did get salmonella from an alpaca spitting in my mouth.
How do I get HPV? Same exact [Music] way. That's a joke. I have no idea how I got HPV. I have some idea how I got HPV. Look, I got a pap smear like a responsible adult, right? And then I got a letter from the National Health Service, the NHS, in the UK, where I live, saying that I got a bad pap smear and that I had HPV. And I don't know if anyone here has ever had the luxury or the privilege of receiving this very formal, very scary letter from your national healthcare provider. But this letter just opens with, "Hey [expletive]," all lowercase. I know that's not what it says. I know it's those, "Dear Olga Koch, we're writing to inform you that following your pap smear, we're diagnosing you with being a dirty little [expletive]." And then this letter from a national health service provider proceeds to be the most sarcastic letter I have ever read in my life. Okay, the NHS just keeps saying [expletive] like, "Well, does it make you feel any better that one in four women is a [expletive]? Doesn't make you feel any better that being a [expletive] cannot be diagnosed in a man? Well, you're a [expletive], okay? And you might die." What we're not thing to are related. We're just giving you two isolated pieces of information in the same letter. You're a [expletive] who might die. Does it make you feel any better that everybody dies? No. Well, don't shoot the messenger. Don't even touch the messenger, you dreaded little [expletive]. And then in the bottom of the letter, it says, "Here's a time and place for your cervical scraping." Parenthesis: not recreational.
So then you rock up to your cervical scraping. You kick open the door of the waiting room. You go, "How do you do, you fellow raw-dogging legends? Fellow bear-backing aficionados?" You're lighting each other's cigars. It's a great vibe. They're my people. Bumping prawn tattoos. How'd you get in here? Shrimping. Some of you need to lighten up. Everybody gets HPV at least once before they die. At least that's what the letter said. And some of you may be confused as to what HPV is, and that's because you're [expletive] and you've definitely given it to somebody. This year, I had my first ever threesome. So I've given HPV to at least two people. Come on. Yeah. A threesome in Sydney, Australia.
Olga, why go all the way to Sydney, Australia to have a threesome? Why not have one in the UK where you live? Well, it's difficult enough to have sex with one person. Who goes, "May I come, please?" It's me. Who does that? Um, and look, I had a time in my life. I had a time in my life during this threesome. What I will say is, I don't think I would have been able to have a threesome at the age of 25, because a 25-year-old doesn't have the administrative skill set to navigate a threesome. Only now, at the ripe old age of 30 and seven years of corporate work experience under my belt, do I have the professional tools to showcase in a threesome setting. I am great at delegating tasks. I think outside the box. And I thrive in a top-down management structure. That is all I learned at my corporate job. I learned that, and I learned that drinking with your HR manager is not fun. It is in fact entrapment. Trust me, when she corners you in the bathroom at the Christmas party and says something like, "So, tell me, girl to girl, have you ever shared any of your internal spreadsheets with an external server?" That is not just toilet chat. Trust me.
While I was in Sydney, I also took this completely life-changing walk. It was very like, "Just turned 30, very Eat Pray Love." I did the Bondi to Coogee walk at sunrise alone. Like, I walked the coastline for hours, and I was having these big thoughts, like big realizations. I was walking around thinking, "They tell you that when you're alone, you're meant to feel lonely." But now that I'm alone for the first time in 10 years, I realize that being alone doesn't mean you're lonely. Being alone just means that you're free." Which is my next lower back tattoo. And as I was having this thunderous realization about loneliness, I walked out onto this gorgeous cliff overlooking the vastness of the ocean. And on that cliff stood a sign. And the sign said, "Are you thinking of suicide?" Well, now I am. Now that I saw the sign. And I know exactly how I do it. Lima, Peru. Mouth wide open. Alpaca farm. But it's funny how that one sign reframed everything, right? That one sign reframed the best day of my life as the last day of my life. And I love reframing things like this. I love reframing things like this on purpose because my most controversial opinion in life is that regrets aren't real. That's not to say we don't do regrettable things. I just think we can reframe anything we do. Think about it. Is it a tax, or is it an infrastructure subscription service? Are you just subscribing to the road? Did Elizabeth Holmes defraud her investors, or was she just pranking? Did you cheat, or is he just as bad at forgiveness? That's why whenever I do anything questionable, I just say, "It made me the woman I am today." And the woman I am today is a dirty little [expletive].
Okay, so this dirty little [expletive] went to a wedding in New Zealand. And on the way to New Zealand, I even joined the mile-high club. I had an orgasm on an airplane. I still think it counts. Okay, I took a weed edible on this very long flight from London to Auckland, New Zealand. And then I put on the movie *The Lost City* starring Channing Tatum and Sandra Bullock. And I had what I can only describe as the most powerful orgasm I have ever had in my life to a scene where they don't even kiss. Auckland, I came to a car chase. I did a big come watching one car chase another car. And I don't know if anyone here has ever had to cover up the fact that they were climaxing on an airplane. But the more you try to cover up the fact that you're climaxing on an airplane, the more it looks like you're climaxing on an airplane. And the guy sitting next to me knew exactly what was happening because he kept looking at me, and then the screen, and then me, and then the screen, watching us like tennis. And I was so high, and I was so paranoid. What I'm trying to say is, I spent $24.99 on inflight Wi-Fi just to Google the phrase, "Is it legal to cum on a plane?" Inconclusive.
And I was excited to go to this wedding. Okay, again, controversial opinion: I love hanging out with married couples. Third-wheeling gets a bad rap, but there is no one in the world I'd rather hang out with than a married couple because there's no one in the world who wants you to think they're still fun more than a married couple. In front of their single friend, you can make these [expletive] do anything, and they will pay for it. This year, I did acid for the first time in my life with a married couple. I smoked my first ever cigar with a married couple. I had a threesome with a married couple. At the time, and it was like a really fancy wedding was going to. Okay, they pulled out all the stops. We're talking canapés, waiters, black tie. At some point at this wedding, they brought out something called a duck press. I'm a vegetarian. I was. I was until they brought out a duck press. A duck press is this really intricate metal contraption that puts tremendous pressure onto cooked duck bones and then extracts liquid from those bones and turns that liquid into a sauce. So what I'm trying to say is, at this wedding, I went from not eating meat at all to saying, "Meat, it isn't enough juice. The ball." And at this wedding in New Zealand, I was looking for someone to lord over my ring, if you catch my drift. For someone to middle finger my Earth, so to speak. Someone I could serve myself to a second breakfast. And the reason those jokes don't really work is because they require you to both know Lord of the Rings and have sex, and those circles never cross. And inevitably, there'll be someone in the audience desperate to tell me that second breakfast is actually a reference to *The Hobbit* and not a reference to *Lord of the Rings*. And honey, I guess we know which circle you're in. And I think I had my sights set quite realistically at this wedding. Okay, I was maybe looking for second place prize of wedding hookups, which is of course, best man. First place prize of all wedding hookups is obviously Father of the Bride. But I was going to settle for anyone as long as they were hot. Okay, mother of the groom, crying bridesmaid, the bridesmaid that made the bride cry, secretly heartbroken childhood friend, or the ultimate consolation prize of all wedding hookups: the DJ. If you're hot, I will hear what you have to say. Kind of like men on the internet feel about women on panel shows. Look, I love having sex with hot people. Has having sex with hot people come to Auckland yet? It's good. It's good stuff. It's called it's called having sex with hot people. Is this relatable, guys? Having sex with hot, having sex with hot people. It's good stuff. You should try it. Okay, love it. I love having sex with hot people. I love some stuff is over hot, but I do. I love having sex with hot people. I had sex with a femme for the first time this year. Okay, where the allies at? Let's try that again. I had sex with a femme for the first time this year. Maybe don't fetishize two women having sex. No, we did. We did. No, because the thing is, I'm a bisexual woman who mostly dates men. And I'm obviously generalizing here. I'm painting in broad strokes. But your experience is usually like, you come out as a bisexual woman who mostly dates men, and then you join a bunch of other bisexual women who mostly date men in a queue to the closest butch, because the butch looks like they know what they're doing. But after having some incredible sex with a feminine lady with long hair, I had this earth-shattering realization: the femes can [expletive] each other. And when the other girls in the queue find out about this, ho, your stock is going down. May Martin. [Laughter]
But at this particular wedding, in this specific scenario, here in New Zealand, I looked across the dance floor and I saw the most beautiful man I've ever seen in my life. He was tall. He had a mustache. End of list. Was he the most beautiful man I've ever seen in my life, or did he just look exactly like my uncle who killed himself? We don't have the time. It's not that sad of a story. He took a walk in Sydney. Don't worry. Um, there's a sign there now. So we're going to call this man from the wedding Freddy because he's just close enough to his real name so you can look him up on Instagram after the show, but just different enough for him not to threaten legal action. I think so. I walk across a dance floor. Freddy and I start chatting. And you guys can guess the rest. Imagine Taylor's Oldest Time from Disney's *Beauty and the Beast* playing. We [expletive] in my hotel room. We wake up the next morning and we say, "This was so much fun. We should do it again sometime." But Freddy lives in New Zealand, and I live in the United Kingdom. So the only logical solution is to meet three months later in Tokyo, Japan. Now imagine Taylor's Oldest Time from Disney's *Beauty and the Beast* playing in Japanese. Freddy and I spend the next three months of our lives planning the trip of a lifetime. We spent it in admin bliss. I [expletive] love admin. Okay, I'm a freaking the sheets, the spreadsheets. People often ask me, "Olga, was the threesome fun?" Sure, the sex was great, but nothing ever came close to the pre-threesome logistics. Coordinating three separate calendars of three separate working professionals in their 30s. Nothing hotter than that. Maybe Sandra Bullock driving a car. Freddy and I planned that trip within an inch of its life. Okay, we had a spreadsheet, an email chain, a text thread, a shared playlist. We were reading the same book so we can book club it when we arrived in Japan. Some days I'd wake up to nude photos of Freddy. But other days, I'd wake up to an email summarizing his ventures into hotel price comparison websites. And whenever we weren't DMing on Instagram or flirting on Splitwise, how do you flirt on Splitwise? Easy. You purchase something for exactly £138 and invoice them for half. £69. Hotter for me than it was for him because it's $144 New Zealand dollars. Look, whenever we weren't DMing on Instagram or flirting on Splitwise, I was staying up late every night scouring the internet for any shred of information about this stranger that I was going on holiday with. It'd be 2 a.m. and I'd be like, "Ooh, a bachelor's in marketing. Ah, a ubiquitous female best friend that's perennial plus one to every social occasion and every family barbecue. A shooting spree in downtown Denver." Turns out different Freddy. Look, to be completely clear with everybody, it's not like I was in love with this guy. I was just so excited to meet someone who was as horny about admin and as admin about horny as me. I distinctly remember going to dinner with my friend Yan, and over dinner, I would not stop talking about all this sex that I was going to have. And we were both just like, "Okay, so do I pierce the condom or just microwave it?" This is a joke. No one's putting a condom into a microwave. That's how Oppenheimer was made, guys. Obviously, I'm kidding. No, if women don't do that, no one's [expletive] piercing a condom. I'm a feminist. I believe in a woman's right to choose to trap a man in a pregnancy. Guys, I feel like you don't feel like you're allowed to laugh. It's okay. Women don't do that. No one's putting a condom into a microwave. Women don't pierce condoms. We just say that we're on the pill.
Being 30 is such a mind [expletive] because your entire body's like, "I want a baby," and your brain's like, "I am [Laughter] baby." I was fizzing with excitement to go on this trip. But you don't have to take my word for it because you could hear it in my voice. I'm currently at um Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5, polishing off a vegan porridge, about to board a flight to fly 13 hours to Tokyo, Japan, to spend 10 days with a man I had sex with once and doubt them all. And the only thought that keeps going through my head over and over again is, "This is so [expletive] cool." It is cool. It's so cool. And I was the first to arrive in Japan, so I was the first in our hotel room. And I was like, "Wait, I'm going to meet Freddy in yet another hotel room. How chic is that?" He's about to arrive. He's about to ride. Oh my [expletive] god. He's about to ride. He's about to ride. He's about to [expletive] ride. Oh my [expletive] god. Oh my [expletive] [expletive] god. Oh my God. I have my opener. My opener is like, "We really should stop meeting like this. We really, really should stop meeting like that."
Can you imagine? As I mentioned, this year I got a master's degree. And people often ask me, "Oh, what's it like going back to university at the age of 30?" Well, the entire experience can be summed up with the time a 22-year-old tried flirting with me by saying he was into old Hollywood classics like *Step Up 2: The Streets*. We're not. I did not [expletive] the 22-year-old. Gen Z famously don't [expletive]. I don't know if you've seen this. There's research going into the fact that Gen Z aren't having any sex. I conducted the research. I'm the primary source. No, but it's true. If you look it up, there is academic research going into the fact that Gen Z aren't doing as many drugs or having as much sex as previous generations. And when I came across this, I realized that no matter how much skincare I use or how much slang I learn, I will never fit in with Gen Z. It won't be my hands that give me away. It'll be what I'm doing. [Music]
So I got my undergrad in computer science. I got my master's degree in the social science of the internet. Because of those two things, people often ask me about technology because they assume that I know things. The truth is, I don't know anything. I'm not very smart. You'll say, "Oh, Olga, you must be smart. You could speak four languages." You could be stupid in four languages. You could believe in angels or crystals or trickle-down economics in four languages. That just means honk if you're horny. People constantly ask me about technology. They'll ask me about AI. They'll be like, "Are you afraid of AI?" No, I'm not afraid of AI. But we'll be like, "This AI painted this gorgeous painting or beat a man at chess." Oh yeah, I know what a traffic light looks like. Not afraid of AI. My master's thesis is focused on something called parasocial relationships. Parasocial relationships is a term that was coined in the 1950s by two academics to refer to the one-sided personal attachment that audiences at home developed with talk show hosts. And people still develop these parasocial relationships with talk show hosts today. Apart from, of course, James Corden. That is the first academic instance of a parasocial rivalry. But thanks to the rise of social media, we are now developing these parasocial relationships with everybody, not just talk show hosts. And the parasocial relationships that I wanted to focus on were the ones that men develop on the internet with female public figures. These men are commonly referred to as reply guys. But if you've never heard the term, you have definitely seen their work. Someone like Katy Perry will tweet something completely innocuous like, "I'm having a nice day." And a reply guy will immediately come back with, "But what about Yemen?" Any reply guys in here? I'll see you in the DMs. Look, there's all kinds of reply guys. The ones that I wanted to focus on were the ones that act like they are friends with these female celebrities. They're like way too overfamiliar with these female celebrities. So in an instance like that, someone like Cheryl Cole would tweet something like, "I love me soon." [Laughter] I got a dialect coach for that. Thank you, Diane. Uh, worth every penny. Okay, so Cheryl Cole says, "I love me soon." And then like an overfamiliar, super friendly reply guy will say something like, "They grow up so fast." And it's like, "Who the [expletive] are you?" According to your profile picture, you're a [expletive] car. Ever seen the worst tweet you've ever come across and you're like, "Who the [expletive] is posting this?" And it's just a Ford Fiesta challenging you to a fight in a parking lot. The Ford Fiesta, uh, parking lot is home turf. That's my favorite joke of the show. Something for me. Just the idea of a Ford Fiesta angrily driving in a mall parking lot, furious about pronouns. Anyways, um, so when I first submitted my thesis, I was like, "Oh my God, this is going to be a book." And then I got my marks back and I was like, "Oh my God, this is going to be a musical." Then I heard myself saying, I was like, "All right, this is a comedy show." Look, the reason I got a bad grade is because I kept interviewing my own reply guys. My academic advisor was like, "This is not a thesis. You can't just keep interviewing men who said you were hot on the internet." And I emailed back saying, "I don't think I should incur academic penalties for having a perfect ass." Signed, Olga Koch, BBL. And I'll have you know, not all of them were men. One of them's a car. And look, it was really easy to go into these interviews condescending to these men, right? I was going in thinking, "Are you delusional? Do you not understand how social conventions work? Do you really think that you're friends with these women?" But to be fair to them, within one minute of every single interview, all of the men immediately acknowledged that they knew they didn't know the women they were talking to. But even though they knew they didn't know the woman they were talking to, they couldn't help feeling like they knew them. And think about it. Think about the stuff that we post on social media. People will post photos of the insides of their houses, selfies without makeup, ultrasounds of their unborn children. Ma'am, I've never met you. I don't need to see inside of you. An ultrasound is the duck press of porn. The boob is not enough. Send me the mammogram. 30 years ago, if you were exposed to any of that personal information, it would have to come from a friend or family member. So you can't really blame your brain for short-circuiting and assuming that you know the person whose menstrual cycle you've synced with via TikTok. So reply guys exist in this really contradictory space where they know they don't know who they're talking to, but they can't help feeling like they know them. But our feelings and our reality are mismatched all the time. Think about it. Do you miss your mom, or is rent just due? I take advantage of this all the time. I'll bring a guy home, I'll put on some music, and he'll be like, "I love you." And I'll be like, "Do you love me, or am I just playing a song from when you had all your [Laughter] hair?"
We're not doing enough. Um, sorry, this is just from the heart. This is not part of the show. But I think we sexualize men who have hair, and we sexualize men who don't have hair, but we don't sexualize balding men. And I feel very passionate about that community. Um, yeah, I know you'll [expletive] Vin Diesel. Call me when you [expletive] Paul Giamatti. You know what I mean? I said it. I need to get that off my chest. Look, and look, these emotions, they're valid on some level, right? Like when you read a book and a character dies, you know it's fiction, but you're still crying. The tears are still real. You're still being asked to leave the theater. And I have so many of these imaginary parasocial relationships in my head. Not only with people, there's so many dogs I'm not speaking to right now. They know what they did. I have a parasocial relationship with my own siblings. And look, I know we all think we have dysfunctional families. We all want what the Dolopasta family has. But I think mine truly takes the cake. Okay, so on the surface, I have quite a standard nuclear family: mom, dad, brother, sister. But there is one major twist. My parents decided to have their children in three separate decades of their lives: their 20s, their 30s, and their 40s. As far as I can tell, my parents [expletive] according to the Mayan calendar. And sometimes it feels like they're staging some sort of multi-decade social experiment of having not one, not two, but three insufferable only children. My sister's 42, I'm 30, my brother's 19. I'm over a decade away from both of them. I know nothing about them. Everything I know about my siblings, I've completely made up. Over a decade away in every direction. We had no crossover growing up. I felt like growing up in a haunted house. I'd walk around being like, "Mother, was there a little girl here? I've seen her in photographs." [Laughter] Thank you, Diane. Oh man.
I know nothing about my sister. I only have one memory of my sister, and that's at the age of seven. I offered her all of my pocket money to watch her and her boyfriend make out, and she obliged. Which I think makes us less sisters, more women in business. I don't know anything about my brother either. I assume he's like a typical Gen Z. I assume he believes in everything like cryptocurrency, creatine powder, exercising for pleasure. Last time I saw him, I had to pay for his KFC because he put all of his pocket money into NFTs and he's, and I quote, "not exactly liquid right now." But paying for my brother's KFC is the least I can do because my brother was famously an accident. Subcategory: Wishful Menopause. My mother was 44 years old and thought God had stopped watching. And common wisdom will tell you that the pregnancies that rob you of your best years are the ones that you have in your early 20s. I'm here to make the argument that the pregnancy that robbed my mother of her best years is the one that she had at 44 years old. 44. Do you hear that? Instagram, stop serving me ads about freezing my eggs. They're ice cold. Imagine 44. You'd pee on the pregnancy test, you'd be like, "Let me get my reading glasses." 44. She was ready for menopause. And I reckon, who wouldn't be? It's the best time of your life. Who wouldn't want to spend their days being warm and eating yogurt? She didn't want to change someone's [expletive] diapers. She wanted to go on a cruise, buy crisp linen sheets, get a close female friend. Menopause is literally about putting men on pause. Why do you think there's such a rise in late-in-life lesbians? Sure, some of these women are gay, but some of them just want their house to be clean. If not a close female friend, maybe she wanted to be Meryl Streep. And it's complicated. You know what's complicated? Doing math homework with some guy who's 44 years younger than you. He's her first son, too. Imagine almost getting to the finish line thinking you've avoided sock masturbation culture. My mother shouldn't have to know what BeReal is. No one who could have feasibly been from the fall of the Berlin Wall should have to know what it is. Even though BeReal is the perfect out for the fall of the Berlin Wall because it uses your phones, both front and back-facing cameras. And in order to fully understand that joke, you need to both remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and know how BeReal works. And there's only one person in the middle of that Venn diagram, and she's too busy doing math homework. Any self-identifying Youngs in the audience? Anyone self-identify as a young? Youngs? No Youngs at all. Anyone under 25s? Any self-identified under 25? Yeah. Who? Um, there was a wall in Germany. Um, that's it. That's the extent of the audience interaction in my show. Thank you so much for coming. There's a wall in Germany. It's split West and East Germany. The rest of you, BeReal is a camera app that takes that takes a photo of both the front and the back of your phone. So imagine 1989, communist in the front, David Hasselhoff in the back. Don't threaten me with a good time. What I'm trying to say is, my mother should only be doing two things any menopausal woman wants to do: number one, thinking of creative solutions to cover up her neck, and number two, emailing our friends in the largest font available.
But the most powerful parasocial relationship that I have in my life is not with my siblings. It is, of course, with all of my husbands at the Magic Mike Live experience in London's London's O2. Has anyone here been to Magic Mike Live? Oh my God, yay! The rest of you, go right now. Okay, I go every Sunday to the matinee. It is my church. It is how I boost morale. Okay, some of you may be confused as to what Magic Mike Live is. I too was confused the very first time I went to something called Magic Mike Live. I was like, "Hey, buddy, how about you put your pants back on and tell me what card I'm thinking of?" Magic Mike Live is the brainchild of *Lost City* star Channing Tatum, the man who puts "cum" in "dancer," "cum" actor. Magic Mike Live is in fact a strip show. Olga, why is it fun to see men take their tops off? So I can check for sure they're not two kids on top of each other wearing a trench coat. I have been hurt before. And yet, it's a strip show, but it is so much more than that because you feel like you really get to know the boys. Like, there's this one guy, his name's The CEO, and it's just a fully naked man holding an espresso cup. And the boys at Magic Mike Live, they need to be every kind of sexy because they need to appeal to every single demographic. So the way that looks is, a dancer will bring a woman up on stage, he'll dry hump her from behind, turn her around, stroke her cheek, and then say something like, "I think it's really cool that you work for a living. You cover a lot of ground." Every kind of sexy, right? So they'll be like, "I see you, and I appreciate you backing that ass up." The boys at Magic Mike Live, they make you feel like you're the only girl in the room. The problem is, there's 399 other only girls in the room, and we all paid for a lap dance. But there's only so many Magical Michaels there. So every lap dance is seven seconds long. Enough to say "I love you," but not enough to hear it. [Laughter] Back there's always next Sunday. Don't worry about it. My favorite part of any Magical Michael Live show is when one of the Michaels goes down a row of a bachelorette party, and he moves from the bride to the bride's sister-in-law, and you could just see in the bride's eyes, she's going, "Wait, I thought you thought it was cool that I like music?" [Laughter] So you can have these parasocial relationships with individual people, like I do with my siblings. You can have them with whole groups of people, like I do with all my husbands at Magic Mike Live. But you can also have them with places. Like, there's this thing called Paris Syndrome, and no, it's not CIA. [Applause] [Laughter] Paris Syndrome is something Japanese people get when they visit Paris, and then they become disappointed when Paris doesn't live up to their romantic expectations. And I got something called Tokyo Syndrome. Okay, I genuinely think that we hate each other. It was the worst 10 days of my life. On the very first night, Freddy sat me down and he said, "I know you think I'm just a hot guy from a wedding, Olga, but I'm actually..." "Oh, weirdo." "What?" "*Donnie Darko*." The man had more red flags than a Soviet war march. Every single day, Freddy had to BeReal. Truly to capture two of the most miserable people you've ever seen in your life. You ever seen a BeReal where both people are trying not to cry? BeReal. That's the realest [expletive] you've ever seen. Freddy loved to use his apps. I have to walk around the makeup aisle of a department store waiting for him so he can finish his Wordle. It's a V-word for you, Freddy. Creep. One night we did karaoke, and Freddy sang three separate Radiohead songs. He started singing one Radiohead song, then stopped, but only because he felt he chose the wrong Radiohead song. Here, a five-letter word for you, Freddy. Creep. The entire time, he would not stop talking about he was in love with his best friend, the one from the photos. We're going to call her Britney because every time he talked about her, it was toxic. No, it's because every time you thought he was done talking about her, he'd bring her up one more time. He never kissed me on the mouth. Like, we still had sex because it was in the spreadsheet, but never kissed me on the mouth. It was like *Pretty Woman* rules. Um, he asked me so few questions, and I had to force conversation so hard that at some point on this trip, I genuinely overheard myself utter the phrase, "Oh yeah, what's your landlord's name?" He asked me so few questions on the trip that on this trip, I knew the layout of every single flat he's ever lived in, whether his bedroom was an en-suite, and whether he had an elevator or if it was a walk-up. He, at no point, asked me how I became a comedian. Do you want to know how I became a comedian? Thank you so much for asking. Bullied in high school, yet an incredible degree of [Applause] self-regard. Ricky Gervais and I have more in common than our perfect asses. One night, we spent an exorbitant amount of money on a hotel room with a private outdoor hot tub. And you know what we did in that private outdoor hot tub? We watched old episodes of *Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?* I got 10 seconds of eye contact for getting the capital of Mozambique right. It's Maputo. Please keep looking at [Laughter] me. On the last night, over dinner, Freddy, in all earnestness, looked up and he said, "You know what, Olga? We should have taken Myers-Briggs tests before going on this trip." Sweetie, if you asked me to take a Myers-Briggs test before going on this trip, I wouldn't be on this trip now. Tell me your star sign. They say you can't be sad at a robot restaurant. Look, it was a comically bad trip. But in retrospect, I realized that I can't really blame Freddy for it. Sure, he wasn't what I was expecting him to be. But I probably wasn't what he was expecting either. He wouldn't stop talking about Britney, but I wouldn't stop talking about all my husbands at Magic Mike Live. And in the three-month period of planning this trip, we did so much projecting onto each other and so much extrapolating about each other because we were mostly talking to each other online. I think it's called Gestalt. You know the thing? Gestalt. When you see the back of a dog and the front of a dog, and your brain just imagines the rest of the body of the dog. I think that's what Gestalt is. I can give you the formal definition of Gestalt, but you can fill in the blanks yourself. [Applause] First time they even smiled. Got him. Sorry. Thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it. And in the three-month period of planning this trip, mainly online, we did so much Gestalt that we clearly got carried away. And I wanted to see how it happened. I wanted to see why it is that it came about. And I actually came across an academic paper that touched upon this exact subject. It said there's a whole apparatus designed to make people feel proximity and closeness to strangers on the internet. I.E. posts, stories, live streams, comments, reacts, etc. That is to say, the technology is deliberately built to make you feel like you know people online. And this is a quote from a paper called "The Behavioral Patterns of Male Twitter Users with Regards to Female Public Figures" by Olga [Applause] Koch. I wrote the [expletive] book on it. I wrote a paper about people making up relationships in their heads, and then I proceeded to make up a relationship in my head. It was an academic text, not an instruction manual. Like I said, I'm not very smart.
Some of you may also remember from the beginning of the show that I've been to New Zealand twice this year. Cu the three-month period when we were planning Japan, I happened to mention to Freddy that I had some gigs coming up later that year in Sydney, Australia. And I had already booked myself a gorgeous Airbnb, staying with a lovely married couple at the time. And when Freddy heard this information, he said, "Oh my God, why don't you come to New Zealand first? Since you're already coming to this part of the world, you could stay at my house. It'll be an amazing time. It will be great." What you need to understand is, at this point, Japan was fully planned, and Freddy and I were gagging for another spreadsheet. But after Japan, Freddy and I weren't exactly on speaking terms. But I had already booked myself a non-refundable flight from London to Auckland, New Zealand. And I knew I couldn't stay with Freddy. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was reframe. I called my agent and I said, "I'm going to break New Zealand. I will become huge in New Zealand. I will be the Peter Jackson of HPV jokes." Just a star of mimicry. And to be fair to her, my agent was like, "All right, cool. Let's reframe the sex story as a world tour. Okay, I'm now a global brand." I'm posting on Instagram being like, "Slay. I'm doing the New Zealand Comedy Festival." And all my friends are like, "What is that?" Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. I really appreciate this. I'm so honored that you're here. And the morning of my flight, I was sitting on uh my bathroom floor in my flat in London, getting all my toiletries together, packing up to get into my reframe taxi to board my reframe plane to get into my reframe trip to New Zealand. When I got a phone call from my friend, you of microwaved condom fame. He also hates that. And I realized that I hadn't caught him up with anything that happened in Japan. So I remember sitting on my bathroom floor and laughing hysterically about Myers-Briggs, about Radiohead, about all of Freddy's many, many en-suites. But when I hung up, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I was somehow lying. Like, I knew everything I said was true, but it didn't feel true. Repackaging it as funny as opposed to humiliating or embarrassing, which is what it was. This repackaging it as funny is actually it's like a coping mechanism. I used to be really, really proud of myself and quite smug about the fact that I don't get embarrassed. I don't get humiliated. And I used to explain it to myself as like, "Oh, you've been doing comedy for years. You've bombed so many times. You've like, are stages of various sizes. And so the more you bomb, the less it hurts. And so then you sort of become desensitized to it. And then you stop being embarrassed." And I was very proud of that. But I do realize that I never really stopped being embarrassed or never stopped being humiliated. I just don't know how to deal with it now because I commodified it, turned it into content. And that's not a healthy way to deal with a thing. It's just a way to get out on top. And I think a lot of comedians start doing comedy because I got bullied in high school. And so the instinct is, I make fun of me before you get to make fun of me. And it's really a way to get control in a situation where you don't want to be humiliated. And I think I'm so deeply, deeply humiliated by everything that happened in Japan. Humiliated that, and embarrassed that I spent so much money and took so much time off, and I told all my friends and any stranger that would listen about this really exciting thing that was happening. And then it wasn't exciting. And then it was really embarrassing. But instead of sitting in it and dealing with it and confronting it and sitting in that feeling, I just disassociated immediately. And instead of being the girl admitting that she's sad, just immediately hovered, hovered above my body and I said, "I can make money off of that." I disassociated, started floating over my body and I said, "I, this is content. This isn't sadness." Yeah. That is not the only realization that I had in my bathroom. I just put so much lotion on my butt. I like reply guys reframe their relationships with Cheryl Cole as friendships. Like my brother reframes being poor in cash as rich in crypto. Like the women at Magic Mike Live reframe themselves as not married. I reframe Japan. I'd only ever allowed it to be spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. Whatever happened, it had to be a story. But the truth is, it wasn't spectacularly good, and it wasn't spectacularly bad. The truth is, it wasn't spectacular at all. Most of the time, it was just kind of awkward and boring. So the time it was kind of fun, like in karaoke, when Freddy was done singing all the Radiohead songs, um, he sang that Cardi B song, "Love me, love me, say that." But he sang it in the voice of Dean Martin, which I thought was really funny. One day we were walking down the street, and Freddy saw a creature on the side of the road and he was like, "Oh my God, is that a dead bobcat?" And it was just a completely alive house cat. [Laughter] I actually didn't mind watching old episodes of *Who Wants To Be A Millionaire*. It was nice to be asked some questions, I guess. It's just really sad when someone who told you he wanted to [expletive] you every day for three months doesn't really want to [expletive] you anymore. And it's hard to come to terms with the fact that someone who made you happy never actually existed in the first place. But I'll always have my prawn tattoo.
So I arrived in New Zealand after a month of no contact with Freddy. And on the opening night of my show, I walked out on stage, and who was sitting in the front row, if not Freddy? And he came up to me after the show and he said, "So nice to see you. What are you doing in New Zealand?" And I immediately started crying because he knew exactly what I was doing in New Zealand. He had a spreadsheet with my flights in it. Sure, I can't blame him for not being the person I thought he was. But I can blame him for being a [expletive] [expletive]. And, you're never going to believe this, but he brought Britney to my show. And she was so pretty. I mean, I obviously stalked her before, but the second I saw them together, it immediately made sense. Like, they've been best friends for over 20 years. They have so much history. I'm not a part of it. It immediately made sense to me. And it turns out that she's also a stand-up comedian. He has a type. And I was obviously curious, so I went to go see her show. And I came up to her after the show and I was like, "Oh my God, it's so nice to meet you after I heard so much about you." And to be fair, she was very, very nice and very sweet. And we chatted for a bit. She was actually like, super understanding about the whole thing. She was very chill. Um, I told her I loved her show. And then, um, I had sex with her. [Applause] Something he will never [Applause] do. The femes can [expletive] each other. Of course, I had sex with her. She's so hot. Are you kidding me? Does two women having sex to get back at a man pass the bell test? Who's to say? And look, I don't know if having sex with Britney was the right thing to do. All I know is that it made me the woman I am today. And I still had some mixed feelings. Not, not for me. For me, Freddy's just some weirdo I met at a wedding. But I had them for her, right? Because this was different for her. This is her best friend of over 20 years. She says perennial plus one to every family barbecue and every social occasion. This is bigger for her. And the following morning, I could see in her face that she was deeply conflicted, right? And I was desperate, desperate to tell her that everything was going to be okay. Desperate to tell her that everything was going to get better. But I didn't know how to say it, and I didn't know what to say. So that morning, Britney was the first to speak. That morning, hand on my heart, the very first thing that was said in that room was, she turned to me, she looked me directly in the eye, and she said, "Do you want to go to Japan with me?"
Thank you so much, Auckland. Thank you, Auckland. I know I don't know you, but I feel like I do. Good night. Do we want to do pickups or anything? If anybody needs to leave right now, you could go. Can we get a pickup of the prawn being shown? That's you, Auckland, from the show. What are we doing a pickup of? Showing the prawn tattoo at the start. The microphone is a new bright. So some foot stuff is what you're asking for. Just for the freak, please. We're also live streaming this on on OnlyFans. Um, no sound on that one. Just, it's a foot cam. Can you imagine? Just a foot cam. Just the feet. Good. Good. Good. We got it.