Corporate Retreat (RECAP)

RuPaul's Drag Race S16E11 "Corporate Queens"

This episode, we’re doing stand up. Well… sorta kinda.

“This week, it’s Drag Awareness Month,” RuPaul announces paradoxically. To celebrate, the queens don their best corporate drag and give powerpoint presentations on various drag-related topics to an audience of white collar professionals. Character bits and powerpoint comedy? We’ve entered the Union Hall-ification of Drag Race challenges. Yes, the audience will be sitting on metal folding chairs and paying $17 for a glass of Gulp Pablo (pre-tip ❤️) And, of course, who better to coach these girls through breaking out of the Brooklyn alt comedy scene while looking hot than actor/writer, oomfie, and fellow Drag Race recapper veteran Joel Kim Booster? Let’s dive in:

Q and Plane Jane

The indisputably best team this week is Team Plane/Q. Or at least, that’s what I assumed, but turns out… that’s extremely disputed. First off, Plane and Q have the best chemistry and most consistent laughs of any other group by a wide margin. While both of the other teams feel like students the teacher paired together for a class project, Q and Plane feel like a seasoned comedy duo. They match each other’s energy perfectly, and have a funny running joke of academia-based horniness and sexual tension that they use to punctuate moments throughout the set. In my eyes, this performance should have sent them straight to the C Suite* (*Cuntress). And, of course, they also easily have the best joke of the episode. You know what I’m gonna say: the slides and the clips! Original comedy is hard, and original comedy with a punchline specific to the medium you’ve been assigned to tell it in (powerpoint presentation) is even harder. This is a perfect example of the latter.

I’m not a Q hater, but I was shocked to find out it was Q, and not Plane, who came up with that instant classic of a bit. I didn’t think she had it in her! Plane anchors the pair to be sure, but with that authorship debate settled combined with Q’s very cool Keith Haring dress (inspired by both the AIDS epidemic and her own HIV diagnosis), I really thought Q had this challenge in the bag. When she and Plane are called safe, you see their faces crack, as does mine. Sparking a beef that’s sure to get some screen time at the top of next week’s episode.

Dawn and Mhi’ya

If this corporate challenge were being judged in teams, Dawn and Mhi’ya would undoubtedly be the department laid off. It’s a tough watch: Mhi’ya struggling through her cards, Dawn valiantly trying to persevere but without the hosting chops and charisma necessary to counterbalance the pair’s downward spiral. Mhi’ya clutches onto her pointer prop for dear life while struggling to take cues off the flashcards in front of her. Dawn does a better job of getting words off the page, but relies on an affected voice to disguise the fact that neither the content nor the queens in front of us are all that funny. On several occasions there are achingly long pauses where Mhi’ya looks back and forth from the cards, to the screen to her partner, and all Dawn can do is look helplessly on, waiting for her to muddle through. Truly the blind leading the blind.

This week is curtains for Mhi’ya of course, but where does that leave Dawn? Zero challenge wins, and her odds of winning a challenge decrease with each passing week. Her biggest strength (design challenges) failed to net her a win three times in a row, and there’s likely no more of those coming her way. Recently, it’s a whole lot of “low safes,” hardly the late season trajectory of a Top 4 competitor. With Mhi’ya gone, and the remaining winless queen (Morphine) an official lip sync assassin killer, Dawn’s future might be in jeopardy.

Sapphira, Morphine and Nymphia

Not only was I unimpressed with this team’s comedic output, I was also downright confused by the editing. Surely, there was a more compelling way to convince me that Sapphira deserved to win this week than by going out of your way to show me a clip of her stumbling over her words? To Sapphira’s credit, she is undoubtedly the glue that held her team together. She has a rock solid stage presence that can’t be taught and a voice that’s somehow both commanding and soothing: clear and consistent without being piercing or overwhelming. But her comedy itself is nothing to write home about. Most of her laugh lines (her toast at the top of presentation, her Wesley Snipes joke) will probably sound very familiar to you if you’ve spent any time at a local drag establishment any time in the last five years. Of course, recycling or outright stealing jokes is nothing if not a Drag Race (and drag queen) staple, so the act itself is hardly disqualifying. But when juxtaposed with queens like Plane and Q who managed to be both more original and funnier, the win feels truly baffling. It speaks to the power and presence of Sapphira in this competition that the judges still felt compelled to reward her even in the face of other qualified candidates. With her third win in the late game, she’s now barreling towards the top four at terminal velocity, and her winning the whole damn season feels almost inevitable.

Nymphia makes use of another tried and true Drag Race gambit: generalized race-based accent work. Given that Nymphia’s jokes actually aren’t bad, it feels unnecessary to add the accent on top of the character, but I think the voice affords Nymphia a degree of distance from her performance: it seperates Nymphia the drag queen from her stand-up persona and allowing her to let loose and be less nervous than she otherwise might be. Notably – for the first time that I can recall – this choice is scrutinized by the judges. Michelle and Ru ask Nymphia why she chose to do an accent, which she does her best to justify. But the elephant in the room is that, well… because RuPaul always laughs when girls do an ethnic accent. I’m quite sure it wouldn’t be such a staple in the Drag Race canon if it wasn’t a hit with RuPaul every time.

That brings us to Morphine, the unfortunate last place finisher of the Sapphira/Nymphia/Morphine trio. She has neither the charisma of Sapphira, the gimmicks of Nymphia, nor any solid jokes to fall back on. Hitting zero of her quarterly targets? Management will be none too pleased. Her failure is enough to land her in the bottom 2 next to Mhi’ya.

The lip sync this week is to “Dim All the Lights” by Donna Summer, the perfect song for Morphine and Mhi’ya’s season-long increasingly rancorous rivalry to finally come to a head in a battle that I can only describe as violent. These girls throw everything they can into this lip sync. Literally. When they’re not throwing shade at each other on lyrics like “be my man” and “let myself go freely,” they’re throwing projectiles at each other, like gown trains and plastic titty inserts. It’s impossible to take your eyes off the ferocious pair. But when the dust settles and the rubble is cleared it’s Morphine who’s left standing, triumphantly victorious. And for once in this goddamn episode, RuPaul agrees with me and sends vanquished assassin Mhi’ya sashaying away.