Makeup Oct 12, 2026

Kate Berlant’s ‘Parmesan’ Turns Phone Rage Into Personal Comedy

Emily Sandstrom 846 views

In her HBO special Parmesan, Kate Berlant riffs on scrolling, small talk and family dynamics, with Cole Escola on the absurdities of life online.

Kate Berlant’s ‘Parmesan’ Turns Phone Rage Into Personal Comedy

Kate Berlant wears Jacket, Skirt, Tights, and Shoes Valentino.

Kate Berlant’s new HBO special, Parmesan, finds comic material in a habit that’s become too ordinary to notice: reaching for the phone whenever reality asks for patience. In conversation with fellow comedian Cole Escola, Berlant describes the impulse as a losing fight for attention, and turns that frustration into a set that’s personal without becoming a familiar confessional.

The special follows Berlant’s theatrical one-woman show Kate, her podcast Poog with Jacqueline Novak, and a run of film and television roles. After spending a couple of years performing Kate and stepping away from stand-up, she returned to the form with a different subject: herself. The shift, she says, meant letting go of material built around the act of performing while finding a way to talk about a changed life in her own voice.

Phone habits as everyday comedy

Escola had seen a screener of Parmesan and singled out its phone material. The subject can feel overworked, he says, but Berlant approaches it without simply repeating the familiar complaint that everyone spends too much time online. The habit remains common enough to deserve another look. Berlant likens talking about phones to talking about the weather: an observation about the surroundings, so constant it can seem empty, even as it shapes how people spend their days.

Her own account is less a lecture than a portrait of impatience. She recalls accepting every cookie on the Kotn website while browsing shirts, even as her younger partner watched over her shoulder and wondered why. Berlant’s answer is that phone addiction comes from wanting to escape the discomfort of being present. The joke lands because the behavior is so small and automatic: a click made to avoid waiting, repeated until the screen fills the gaps in the day.

Escola brings up a phone study he watched on YouTube channel Howtown. As he recounts it, participants were split into three groups: one sat quietly for 30 minutes, another scrolled freely for the same period, and a third watched a video on a phone without scrolling. The people who sat in silence and those who watched the full video reportedly maintained focus and memory, while the freely scrolling group did not. Berlant is surprised, then says the result makes sense to her. Their exchange points to the distinction at the heart of the bit: the restless switching matters more than simply looking at a screen.

Neither comedian presents a neat cure. Berlant describes the struggle in dramatic terms, as a battle already lost and now reduced to moments of resistance. Escola agrees that the loss has happened. Their exaggeration gives the subject its comic scale, but the underlying frustration is recognizable: time slips away in tiny pieces, and it’s hard to feel in control once the habit takes hold.

Kate Berlant leans against a white car in a green dress and brown hat

Dress Valentino. Hat Binata Millinery. Tights Falke.

Logging off, and landing somewhere darker

Berlant says she’s in the middle of a two-week Instagram break and owns a Light Phone, which she plans to use for four days. She expects to have access mainly to emergency numbers during that stretch. The appeal is clear: she likes being offline. Yet her description of what happens when she does use her phone complicates the idea that a break automatically resets the habit. She still has a Twitter account, which she refuses to call X, and says she rarely checks it deliberately. When she does, she can end up watching car chases, fights and “Karen” videos.

One sequence she describes takes her from those clips to a disturbing body camera video involving children in an unsafe home. Berlant is on the couch, unable to decide what to order for dinner, watching an upsetting scene and struggling to name the feeling. Escola offers a word: powerless. That short exchange gives the phone discussion a sharper edge. The feed can deliver a stream of distressing images while leaving the viewer stuck, hungry and unsure what to do with what they’ve seen.

Escola says YouTube is the only platform they use and has blocked YouTube Shorts, despite finding the Shorts algorithm so poor that it fails to hold their attention. Berlant recognizes the difference: it isn’t capturing Escola. Their joking comparison gets at how each person’s feed can pull them in differently, and why a single rule about screen time doesn’t describe everyone’s experience.

Escola has also faced a stranger problem while staying off Instagram. Three people have impersonated them there, and one person from Brazil believed they were speaking with the comedian. The impersonator offered the supposed rights to Escola’s show; the person later arrived at a performance expecting to meet the real Escola. Berlant jokes that this is a sign of having made it, then learns the person paid through PayPal. The story turns online impersonation into an absurd face-to-face encounter, with a real person left to discover that an account they trusted wasn’t who it claimed to be.

Small talk, fathers and the joke that pushes back

When Escola asks about small talk, they admit to wanting to be better at making a casual connection with a stranger. Berlant says strangers are easier than people she knows: with someone unfamiliar, she can perform. The observation connects the conversation to her stage persona, where a bit can stretch and intensify well beyond its apparent destination.

Escola’s favorite section of Parmesan takes aim at the uneven roles fathers can play in family life. They paraphrase one line: “A father is a family friend. A dear, close, family friend.” It makes them think of holidays spent moving between a kitchen where women talked and a living room where men watched a game. Escola allows that watching together can be a form of bonding, but recalls the living room as cold.

Berlant says the material has drawn a strong reaction. During a performance in Ojai, she later learned that a man in the audience had flipped her off, thrown a glass of wine and stormed out with his partner. At the time, she heard some agitation but didn’t understand what was happening. She assumed the pair might have left because of a medical emergency or because they didn’t find her funny. Once someone told her what had happened, she took the response as evidence that the bit had struck a nerve.

Escola offers a family story of their own: when they were born, their father told their mother to care for the children until they were teenagers, then he would take over. Berlant jokes that the handoff might come when it was time to get drunk. She says she’s close to her father, but still wonders what closeness with a man looks like. Their playful test is whether a father might follow up on an emotional situation, ask how a breakup affected a friend, or suggest checking in with a struggling parent. The answer is affectionate and dry: fathers do what they can with what they have.

That mix of warmth and skepticism suits Berlant’s approach to autobiography. She says she’d resisted talking about herself in stand-up and worried she couldn’t simply return to the material she performed in 2019. After writing and performing Kate during the pandemic, too much had shifted for her to pick up where she left off. Parmesan marks her first stand-up set centered on herself, though Escola points out that the personal details stay deliberately ungrand: scrolling, sexual habits and mundane frustrations, rather than a broad account of mental health.

Kate Berlant standing in a long sleeve dress and boots and looking at the camera

Coat and Shoes McQueen. Gloves Hermès. Tights Falke.

Performance, Christmas and fear of being remembered

Escola calls the special’s tone straightforward and chic, and imagines other comedians feeling relieved by its lack of a complicated, self-conscious introduction. Berlant says she had been afraid of returning with the same material and of continuing to make the act itself the subject. Her new personal focus doesn’t abandon her theatricality; it gives it fresh everyday ground.

She also jokes about a fear she’s carried for years: appearing in a future comedy documentary as a figure the younger generation doesn’t recognize, represented by old sepia photographs of her eyes crossed. Escola counters that comedians know her work and that larger names have acknowledged taking from it. The exchange captures a familiar performer’s tension between wanting influence and worrying that recognition might arrive in an awkward, distant form.

The two briefly veer into Christmas. Berlant says she believed in Santa longer than anyone else in her school, eventually asking her parents to tell her the truth and crying when they did. Escola remembers catching their mother putting presents under the tree and feeling pleased to have figured it out. Both say Christmas carries complicated feelings, and Berlant admires Escola’s annual habit of traveling. Escola’s plan is to board a plane on December 24 and fly west over the International Date Line, landing on December 26 in an effort to skip the holiday. Berlant immediately spots a movie premise in the idea.

Another intimate tangent concerns jealousy. They recall nearly starting a podcast called Cuck Talk, a title tied to their joking self-description as “two cucks.” Escola says they enjoy jealousy as an emotion and describes deliberately imagining a partner having better sex with someone else, then discovering that the fantasy didn’t destroy them. Berlant connects the idea to advice from a former therapist: it can be okay to go to the darkest place. She says she’s been in Jungian analysis for several years and has missed sessions recently, despite enjoying the process. Her therapist texted to check in while Berlant was crying, an inconveniently timed message that becomes another comic scene.

As the conversation closes, Escola asks what might persuade people to watch Parmesan. They joke that some of its material could provoke a strong reaction, and Berlant suggests viewers need to see the full special to understand its context. The pitch is characteristically dry: “Watch if you dare.” What the conversation makes clear is that the special’s phone jokes belong to a wider portrait of daily life, where irritation, intimacy, performance and distraction keep colliding.