Here are some things the comedian Michelle Wolf won’t do. Wear shorts on stage. “Because I don’t want people to look at my legs, I want them to listen to my jokes,” she says. Wear heels on stage. “I don’t know how other women do it. I’m so busy thinking about my feet that I’m, like, disconnected.” Tell Trump jokes. Tell political jokes. Tell easy jokes. Tell people what they want to hear. Describe any material from the new special due out later this year. “I don’t want to give anything away,” she says. Not even a tease, not even a tag, not even a deleted punchline? “No,” she says. “I don’t want to!”

Which is to say that Wolf, a Daily Show veteran who broke out with the blistering HBO special Nice Lady in 2017 and a burn-it-down turn at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2018, is not particularly accommodating or nice. Because there are things that are better than that. Like being funny.

“I don’t even think about people liking or not liking me,” she says. “I think about making people laugh.”

Play Video 2:36 Comedian Michelle Wolf stuns media with attack on Trump's team - video

It’s a weekday afternoon and Wolf has arrived – in a headscarf, workout top and shorts (I didn’t notice her legs) – at a Manhattan cafe just a few blocks away from the Comedy Cellar, where she tries out her new material. “The Cellar’s my most productive place,” she says. “It’s also kind of my home.” It’s a home she has sometimes had to share with the disgraced comedian Louis CK, for whom she used to open, but she doesn’t plan to leave. “I don’t think it’s a woman’s responsibility to give up her spot,” she says.

She grew up with two older brothers and spent her post-college years in finance before breaking into standup, a move from one boys’ club to another. But her humour – spiky, shrewd, wrong-footing, with fart jokes – is very much embedded, tampon string attached, in the female body. “Because so much of comedy comes from your life experience, and so much of my life experience happens to be being a woman,” she says. She has already cornered the market in period jokes.

Here’s an old one: “The only thing you ever really ask about periods is, ‘When is it gonna be over?’ And we always give you the same answer, ‘Soon.’ Cause we have no fucking clue. It could be over in 20 minutes, it could be over in 10 days. It can be over in three days and then take a break for two days, and then come back for a day. It can be gone, and then we just put on clean underwear and it’s like, ‘I smell white.’”

Wolf says: “I’m really lucky because I get all these premises that haven’t been thoroughly explored before.” Being a girl in a boys’ club has its privileges. Not that she settles for clapter or you-go-girl woo-hooing. “I’m not, like, a buy-my-own-drinks kind of feminist,” she says at the start of her last special. “We all have our lines. Mine is at the bar.” She won’t be drawn on the overwhelming maleness of comedy nor the lack of diversity in late night. (She had a brief talkshow foray with The Break, which Netflix commissioned for 10 episodes.) “It’s just going to take time,” she says matter-of-factly. And while she waits she’ll keep telling jokes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michelle Wolf attends the celebration after the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2018. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Netflix

Though best known for the correspondents’ dinner, a no-quarter routine that ultimately confronted the press corps, she doesn’t see herself as a political comedian and she doesn’t do Trump jokes any more. “All that guy wants is for people to talk about him, whether it’s positive or negative, so I try to not give him that,” she says.

When she thinks of a joke, she bounces it around in her head for a while, then writes it down or records it as a voice memo, maybe texting it to a friend or two. She often dreams up new tags, new phrasing while she runs. (Her hobby: ultramarathons, though she has recently started pilates. “Really exploring my whole white woman-ness,” she says.) Before she films a special, she’ll try it out over 100 or so hour-long sets, plus all those Comedy Cellar slots.

She shows me a picture on her phone of her setlist after a weekend of shows. I can’t read the jokes for all the arrows and addendums. “It does make me look like a crazy person,” she says. Her devotion to her work is total. She joined Raya (Tinder for celebs) in hopes of matching with some athletes, but has never returned a message. “I rarely meet a guy that I’m actually interested in enough that I’d want to take time away to even go out,” she says.

Michelle Wolf: the unstoppable rise of America's provocative political comic Read more

After we’ve chatted for an hour and a half, the cafe refusing any money – “American heroes don’t pay for tea here,” the waitress says – Wolf finally divulges one detail of her new show. There’s another period joke, a different one. “It’s particularly for men and they surprisingly love it so far,” she says. “Part of the plan to convert them to being on board with periods.

“It’s a long game. But I’m in it.”

• Michelle Wolf is on tour in the UK from 19 to 24 July, including Latitude festival on 20 July



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