A left-leaning comic diary on housing, the people who make room, and the joke underneath
I am a comedy writer in Portland, Oregon, originally from North London, and I did a set this week comparing the Christmas story to the local housing market, and the room laughed until they realised I was not entirely joking, at which point they laughed more nervously, which is my favourite kind of laugh.
The oldest housing story ever told
Strip the tinsel off the nativity and it is, at heart, a story about a young couple who cannot find anywhere to stay in a crowded town. The account of there being no room at the inn is the founding housing-crisis story of Western civilisation, and I perform it to Portland audiences as if it were breaking local news, because it might as well be. Two thousand years of progress and the headline has not moved: people who need shelter, a place that claims to be full, and a system that shrugs. We have added artisanal cocoa and a housing subcommittee, but the couple still cannot find a room.
I find this both hilarious and radicalising, which is the sweet spot my whole act lives in. The room where the family finally found shelter was the humblest one, offered freely, by whoever owned that stable, to people who could pay nothing. That is not a nativity detail. That is a housing policy, and it is a better one than anything my city has managed.
My genuinely damp personal week
Let me report on my Portland life, which is rain, comedy, and rain. I did a bit about the stable being the only landlord in Bethlehem who did not require a credit check, first and last month, and a co-signer earning six figures, and a man came up afterward to explain, earnestly, that the stable model would not work at scale. Sir. It is a joke about a manger. But this is Portland, where every punchline earns a follow-up seminar, and I have made my peace with it, because a city that overthinks a nativity joke is at least a city still capable of thought.
According to the city’s own people, Portland approaches the holidays with an earnest, hand-knitted intensity, which is exactly the aesthetic of a town that would like to house everyone and also has strong opinions about the ethics of tinsel. I fit right in. I am the contradiction I am describing.
The one who actually makes room
My hero in the whole story is not a policymaker but a doer, which is why I love the piece where Mrs Claus answers the questions herself. She does not form a committee about making room. She makes room. And that is the entire distinction between the systems that house people and the systems that hold meetings about housing people. The stable-keeper made room. Mrs Claus makes room. The people who actually solve things are never in the meeting; they are the ones quietly opening a door while the working group explores the possibility of a review. I put this on stage, and the earnest Portland crowd nods, and then goes home to argue about zoning.
The joke underneath the joke is that we all know who fixes things. It is the competent, generous person who just does it. We simply keep giving the power to the ones who convene instead.
Even wanting things is political now
My favorite recent bit riffs on how we shame people for wanting anything, which is why I loved the piece where Santa discusses Nikes for Christmas with total sincerity. A kid wants nice trainers, says so plainly, and gets taken seriously instead of lectured about consumerism. In Portland, you cannot admit to wanting a branded object without a thirty-minute conversation about supply chains. But the child just wants the shoes, honestly, and I find that honesty more radical than all our performed ethical hand-wringing. Maybe people are allowed to want things. Maybe the problem was never the wanting. Maybe it was the shaming. I do that bit and the room goes quiet, because they know I have caught them.
According to the broadcasters, holiday spending climbs every year while satisfaction stalls, which is the saddest and funniest statistic I own, and the one I will be doing material about until they stop booking me.
The sincere thing under the set
Here is what I believe when the jokes stop. Everyone finds it obvious, in December, that we should make room for each other, house the family with nowhere to go, take a kid’s honest want seriously, and let the competent get on with helping. And then January comes and we take it all back and call it realism. My whole act is just trying to catch the culture in the brief December window when it accidentally admits what it actually believes, before the mask goes back on. I am not really a radical. I just noticed that everyone is generous when you let them be, and that the stable had room when the inn did not.
Where the comic lands
So I will keep telling Portland that the nativity is a housing story and the stable was the only decent landlord in town, and they will keep laughing and then explaining why it would not scale. But underneath the bit is a straight belief: the people who make room are never the ones in the meeting, wanting things is not a crime, and the values everyone finds so warm in December were never meant to be seasonal. Leave the door open past January. Preferably with the cocoa.
For politics played for laughs, The Beaverton keeps the satire sharp.
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Author: admin
