Kristal Adams Does Comedy on Her Own Terms with Ain’t I a Wombat?
Image courtesy of Kristal Adams
Kristal Adams’ comedy album Ain’t I a Wombat? is a first introduction to the performer for some, and she does right by these newcomers (myself included) by showing us who she is right from the start. For one, Adams is not a political comedian—“I just have this face,” she clarifies. What she is is very, very funny. Adams, who’s worked as a consulting producer for Netflix’s The Circle, comes across as silly and self-aware from the very beginning, immediately putting the audience at ease. She regularly laughs at her own jokes, but in a way that’s endearing because, like I said, she’s very, very funny. Once Adams gets going, there’s no stopping her.
The album follows a standard stand-up format, as Adams uses graceful transitions to hop between various bits and stories. Though these jokes may seem unrelated on the surface, the main through-line of Ain’t I a Wombat? is Black womanhood. Adams speaks to her own experiences wearing her hair naturally, having the only Black American Girl Doll at the time (Addy, who was, predictably, a formerly enslaved girl), and being perplexed by Soul Cycle. The primary motif should come as no surprise considering the album title’s allusion to abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” As Adams writes on her Bandcamp page, that well-known phrase and apocryphal title was “added when [Truth’s] speech was reprinted by people who wanted to sell an idea of Sojourner.”