Queer comedy is a device for survival. Particularly through the holidays.
“Comedy helps people access our right to joy,” BenDeLaCreme (DeLa for brief) says. She believes laughing breaks down the partitions folks construct to guard their hearts from a hostile world from which “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show,” her annual extravaganza with finest good friend Jinkx Monsoon, offers a reprieve for performers and followers alike. Laughter was what DeLa desperately wanted as a younger school pupil who needed to create a gig to keep away from going house for the vacations, a conundrum many queer followers can relate to.
“I disliked the holidays so much,” DeLa says, explaining the difficult household dynamics she’d escaped by shifting to Seattle from Litchfield, Conn., to check high-quality artwork within the late aughts. Impressed by “Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special,” she realized she might join together with her neighborhood and chosen household by means of performing outrageous drag numbers that revered and ridiculed the season. Her previous present, “Homo for the Holidays,” ran for practically a decade at West Corridor in Seattle, turning into a vacation custom for the Capitol Hill neighborhood of artists and queer youngsters who wanted an area for pleasure and connection.
Now drag superstars of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” fame, DeLa and Jinkx are a selected household who cultivated their “cosmic” friendship years earlier than breaking by means of. They met at a free afternoon drag present in a Seattle Starbucks when Jinkx carried out together with her musical companions the Vaudevillians to a room of associates seated on steel folding chairs, the place she had to make use of a code-protected public toilet as a dressing room. DeLa remembers this as “one of the best drag performances” she’s ever seen, however admits she was initially intimidated by Jinkx. “I was scared of myself. When you’re a queer kid who’s weird, and some people see you as special for those weird reasons, even though most people don’t, what gets you through feeling like a freak is the idea that you are special and unique. To meet somebody like you is a little threatening. Then you realize, ‘Oh! I’m not alone.’”
DeLa and Jinkx are a selected household who cultivated their “cosmic” friendship years earlier than breaking by means of.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Instances)
“I like to say it’s like if Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had decided to be friends rather than enemies,” Jinkx jokes. “We could have had the Joan Crawford and Bette Davis holiday happy hour, but we had to wait until Jinkx and DeLa took it on.”
In 2018, Gus Lanza (now co-producer at BenDeLaCreme Presents who performs Hunky the Elf) inspired DeLa to ask Jinkx to co-create a brand new vacation revue since their co-hosted “RuPaul’s Drag Race” viewing events had been so profitable; the present did assist launch each of their careers. “It all started with the idea of just sticking DeLa and I on stage with two microphones and the topic of Christmas and letting us go wild,” Jinkx laughs. The plan for an improvisational, conversational, simple, breezy vacation cabaret lasted about two weeks earlier than morphing into what Jinkx describes as a “two-act variety show, musicale, theatrical spectacular.” The primary “Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” bought out Seattle’s historic Neptune Theatre and has steadily grown, turning into a significant tour, a tv particular, and Jinkx and DeLa’s child.
During the last eight years, Jinkx and DeLa have made followers snicker at one of the best and worst issues the yuletide brings. They’ve been seduced by Krampus in a model of “Santa Baby” match for the Folsom Road Honest, shimmied and line danced with horny elves to muscle up sufficient Christmas spirit to revive cowboy Santa, and gossiped with the sentient Egg Nog earlier than breaking into their unique track, “A Passive Aggressive Christmas.” “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” guarantees to fight the world’s devastation with campy magic and mirth that solely a queer interpretation of Christmas can present.
“I have never believed more in comedy and its divine purpose than I do now,” Jinkx says as her small orange kitten fights for her consideration, shielded by the sculptural ruffle neck of her emerald prime. For Jinkx and DeLa, comedy — from Ren and Stimpy to Sonny and Cher to Shakespeare — is a sacred artwork to be taken simply as critically as drama.
Jinkx and DeLa have been unstoppable forces in comedy and drag this yr. Jinkx’s clapback to J.Okay. Rowling (“Who is he?”) in her interview with Ziwe Fumudoh went viral for calling out the hypocrisy of the TERF motion within the shortest punchline identified to YouTube. She’s damaged field workplace information with roles in Broadway reveals like “Chicago,” “Little Shop of Horrors,” “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” and, most lately, Cole Escola’s absurdist historic comedy “Oh, Mary,” the place for 2 sold-out months she twirled and stomped throughout the Lyceum stage, taking part in a model of Mary Todd Lincoln that may solely be described as Lucille Ball meets the Tasmanian Satan, two of her greatest inspirations.
After her success, Jinkx introduced a restricted return to her function as Mary, beginning Jan. 8. This yr, DeLa has directed Monét X Change’s one-woman present “Life Be Lifin’” and Jinkx’s sold-out Valentine’s Day present at Carnegie Corridor, and has stepped up as head author and director for “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show.” She simply introduced a European tour with Dita Von Teese set to start out instantly after the vacation season. As in-demand solo artists, Jinkx and DeLa love to come back house to “The Jinkx & Dela Holiday Show” annually; it was what helped them each forge the careers they’ve right now.
“I do think it’s a sign of progress that younger drag queens don’t all have to crawl on their hands and knees through the dive bar experience. However, DeLa and I learned so much of what we use today with large audiences by honing those skills,” Jinkx Monsoon says.
(Dutch Doscher / For The Instances)
DeLa and Jinkx credit score their DIY roots to the success of their present. The queens reduce their enamel performing in bars, burlesque theaters, punk venues and even a circus, the place they realized to entertain by pulling collectively subversive and mainstream references. “We come from the underground. But so did any drag queen old enough to have started before there was a TV show dedicated to it,” Jinkx says, emphasizing how within the early 2000s drag queens had been nearly all the time underdogs and barely financially profitable. Embracing her genuine freakiness and outsider qualities made her completely satisfied and a profitable performer many relate to due to her honesty.
“I do think it’s a sign of progress that younger drag queens don’t all have to crawl on their hands and knees through the dive bar experience. However, DeLa and I learned so much of what we use today with large audiences by honing those skills with itty-bitty audiences locally. We’ve just trained ourselves to turn the dial up.”
On Dec. 14, the pair will flip the dial method up on the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, a 2,000-seat venue well-known for internet hosting the Oscars. They’re amping up the laughs, incorporating sci-fi, horror and even a Freaky Friday act the place Jinkx and DeLa discover themselves body-swapped, one thing Jinkx has begged to do for years. The pair will incorporate references from “The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror,” “Twilight Zone” and “Tales From the Crypt,” together with new over-the-top drag vacation content material that followers love and have come to count on. Produced and directed by DeLa and co-written by DeLa and Jinkx, the present could make them really feel they “have to go wild with crazy ideas,” as a result of “how do you continue to have a new take on Santa Claus?” As Jinkx says, “Drag is just taking everything you love and putting it into human form.”
Jinkx jokes that DeLa “writes like a scientist,” working scripts right down to particular person phrase decisions like equations. They meticulously plan, however typically issues change. Like final yr, when their most historically structured present needed to pivot on election night time. “We thought long and hard about whether we wanted to address what was going on in the world or if we wanted to just give people a break,” DeLa informed me, pleased with how the staff discovered a solution to do each by creating “the stupidest allegory possible.” To reflect the true world, the Land of Sweets was not spared from an evil nutcracker tyrant. The crew wrote a brand new scene on the spot to offer a method ahead for followers. “We always knew that no matter what, the sentiment had to be the same,” DeLa says. “It is about the fight, and the fact that the fight is never over. We’re all here, we’re doing this and we’re not going anywhere. As a community, we keep moving forward with the power of each other.”
“We always knew that no matter what, the sentiment had to be the same,” DeLa says of the vacation present. “It is about the fight, and the fact that the fight is never over.”
(Dutch Doscher / For The Instances)
Regardless of the modern mass attraction of queer artists and the immense success of reveals like “The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” there are nonetheless few roles for avant-garde transgender and gender transgressive performers in main productions, with alternatives dwindling. Final week, Deadline and GLAAD reported that 41% of LGBTQ+ characters is not going to return to tv reveals in 2026, a devastating blow that researchers argue is because of hateful and largely unchecked rhetoric from politicians and the media. This has severe repercussions for queer and trans actors, in addition to the general public. GLAAD’s analysis means that audiences have develop into extra accepting over the past 20 years as a result of watching numerous casts and tales.
“The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show” has been a solution to write queer and trans characters and actors onto phases that they in any other case wouldn’t have been on, as DeLa stated, “because nobody else is going to do this for us.” Stay reveals are an essential a part of queer efficiency historical past, and one of the vital essential methods drag queens have traditionally fought again towards oppressive situations and helped queer communities make sense of their lives by means of humor. “The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show” builds on this historical past and refuses to be pushed into the shadows.
“We don’t have to try to force ourselves into things that don’t feel happy or good for us,” DeLa says. “I still get to have a holiday with my family and a sense of homecoming, but we get to define family. We get to define home, we get to create our own traditions and they get to be as valid as a tradition that was passed on to us.”
Regardless of 2025’s challenges, Jinkx and DeLa keep pleasure and hope, a few of the most essential classes the vacation season can train everybody. In case you’re questioning what’s included of their letters to Santa this yr, Jinkx is asking for the dismantling of the patriarchy, the rise of female rule and unabashed freedom for androgynous folks. DeLa needs a sweet cane.
