Politics & Power Quote by Kate Clinton

Kate Clinton frames her comedy as a newspaper not because she wants to sound orderly, but because she wants to claim jurisdiction. A newspaper is the everyday delivery system for public life: it shows up whether you asked for it or not, it mixes the consequential with the petty, and it pretends its categories are neutral. By borrowing that structure, Clinton slyly argues that lesbian/feminist comedy belongs in the same civic space as politics and sports, not tucked into a “lifestyle” sidebar.

The line works because it’s an act of aesthetic self-defense against marginalization. “All the sections you would expect” is a wink at expectation itself: audiences are trained to see women comics (and especially queer women) as “talking about relationships,” full stop. Clinton expands the beat list, then smuggles in the kicker: “wonderful religion things.” That adjective, “wonderful,” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not piety; it’s comedic appropriation, taking an institution that has often policed sexuality and turning it into usable material. She’s signaling a refusal to cede the sacred to the scolds.

Context matters: Clinton emerged in an era when mainstream media treated queer life as either scandal or punchline, and when political backlash made “family values” a weaponized phrase. Her newspaper metaphor insists that the personal isn’t a niche; it’s news. The subtext is both playful and sharp: if culture is a daily paper, then Clinton is on staff, writing across sections, refusing the assignment to stay in one column.