He Never Stood a Chance

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: Amelia Dimoldenberg via YouTube

Well, it happened. Andrew Garfield stopped by Chicken Shop Date, Amelia Dimoldenberg’s comedy interview show on YouTube where she subjects celebrity guests to a simulacra of awkward-first-date conversation and well-performed chiding. There’s been quite a bit of lore leading up to this encounter, with Garfield and Dimoldenberg sharing two fleeting public meet cutes so bursting with chemistry — he’s a fan, she’s a fan; both exchange cat-and-mouse flirtations on red carpets where she’s a correspondent — that it made almost too much sense to actually get him on the show, especially now that he has a movie to promote. Build-up meets payoff as Garfield finally goes through the full Dimoldenberg experience, and, as one would expect, the resulting encounter is suitably charming. (Dimoldenberg: “I knew you would do this.” Garfield: “What, be aware of all your ‘moves’?”)

It’s clever spin on Garfield’s part, being an actor who’s currently doubling down on his vulnerable-beanpole reputation despite being fiercely private about his personal life since splitting with Emma Stone almost a decade ago. The actual date is uneventful (as are most Chicken Shops), and Garfield plays the whole “we could’ve actually went on a real date” card a bit too often for my taste. But the appearance does end up clarifying something about Dimoldenberg as a public figure. She is now ten years and almost 100 installments into Chicken Shop Date, and as this entire news cycle with Garfield indicates, she’s preternaturally good at creating narratives around the show. Whenever a Chicken Shop Date arc runs its course, she’s proven to be the kind of performer who can outlive it and, like some kind of rom-com Hydra, produce multitudes more in its place.

Dimoldenberg plays a specific game on Chicken Shop Date, which generally involves running guests through the gauntlet of questions you might expect on an actual first rendezvous (horoscope, pets, “what’s your type?,” etc.). Except, of course, everything about the date is designed to be a little off-center. Instead of a café or a restaurant, Dimoldenberg meets her guests in “chicken shops,” the distinctly British genre of low-rent greasy-food outlets, and instead of playing the interview straight, she assumes a heightened, spikier version of herself. What unfolds typically adheres to the rough shape of flirty banter, but Dimoldenberg’s gambit mostly lies in creating the conditions for uncomfortable moments that destabilize her guests. When she’s really on one, the effect is like the stab of a knife. That’s how you get that viral bit from the Jack Harlow spot where she responds to his banal statement of interest in little free libraries — “never done it, I just like walking past it” — with “Can you read?” It’s a delectable beat made funnier by the fact Harlow already comes across as a dude who’s really into himself.

Dimoldenberg’s approach works in extracting memorable beats from most kinds of guests by means of a persona that has been refined to a T: a dry, catlike interlocutor constantly weaving between seeming uninterested and desperate, enthusiastic and annoyed, curious and cutting. (To the babyfaced Manchester rapper Aitch, whom she actually ended up dating for a bit: “You look a bit like a prawn.”) Over the years, as Chicken Shop Date has grown in stature, so has the show’s development of Dimoldenberg as a character as it brings on guests who don’t necessarily fit the fantasy template of a date. When paired with Cher, Dimoldenberg instantly assumes the role of a younger person soliciting dating and life advice from an elder stateswoman. (Her: “I once had a really terrible kiss with a guy …” Cher: “English?” Her: “Yeah.”) When paired with Sabrina Carpenter and Jennifer Lawrence, she’s commiserating about the miseries of dating. But the show retains its true frisson when the guest does adhere to the generic fantasy template of a date; that is, straight, younger dudes. There’s an argument to be made about how “good” Chicken Shop guests are ones who can effectively challenge Dimoldenberg in terms of outspiking her character —or, in Eric André’s case, breaking the show outright. But I’ve always thought the best guests are the ones who get pounded into oblivion. The show truly pops when she towers over her guests, as in the case with Paul Mescal, the Irish hunk whose public disposition is defined by an eagerness to disappear. Mescal, who gives off a shy energy on-camera, doesn’t quite seem to know how to parry Dimoldenberg’s jabs all that effectively; we barely get a minute into the episode before he’s caught choking on his drink out of nervousness.

Dimoldenberg has spoken elsewhere about her influences, which are easy to discern within the show itself. Chicken Shop Date possesses the flat comedic aesthetic of mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show. Leslie Knope, Amy Poehler’s character in Parks & Recreation, is a major reference point, and you can see parts of it in how her persona is someone who’s in on the joke as much as the joke is on her. Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns is perhaps the most direct analog in terms of conceit, but there’s a notable difference in how Galifianakis is funniest as a sour troll swiping at the knees of others while Dimoldenberg is her most interesting when it’s hard to tell whether she’s sticking to the kayfabe or actually being herself. That porousness is all over the Garfield appearance, adding to the fantasy kick of the episode. He repeatedly tries to steer the conversation around to focus on Dimoldenberg’s experience with the show and her persona, to which she responds by alternating between answering in earnest and redirecting in character. All this further illustrates the extent to which Chicken Shop Date is somewhere in its late-stage era: there’s enough mythology within and around the show’s conceit such that the meta-show is as interesting as the show itself.

Garfield’s episode marks the end of this particular narrative arc for Dimoldenberg, one that has played out in venues well beyond Chicken Shop Date. It probably won’t be the last of its kind, but it does raise an interesting question about whether the YouTube show could run in perpetuity. On Chicken Shop Date, Dimoldenberg plays a character who’s unabashed and uncompromising in her hunt for a partner, and here we have Garfield emerging as one of many possible Mr. Bigs in the fictional sitcom universe she’s been cultivating for years, not quite rejected by the end but not quite promoted to primary love interest either. (“I think we should be friends,” Dimoldenberg says in the final minute. “Okay,” Garfield sheepishly replies.) The show can and will persist past this point, because there will always be more celebrity guests with projects to plug, but as far as the Dimoldenberg character goes, it’s fun to think about where else she can take it from here. It’s not that a fantastical thought experiment, since the line between Dimoldenberg as a person and as a persona is already fairly thin to begin with. In many senses, she reminds me of how Stephen Colbert played his faux-right-wing persona through The Colbert Report years: loosely, with a wink, but with determination. When he finally shed the guise to take over Late Night, it felt like a long time coming, but it also didn’t feel like that much of a stretch.

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