“Who goes to a party and doesn’t know it’s a party? Come on, queen,” barks Roy Haylock, the drag queen insult comic better known as Bianca Del Rio. “Now that is a shit excuse!”
She’s talking, of course, about Boris Johnson and his “fucked up garden parties”. The 46-year-old Louisiana native, best known for winning season six of RuPaul’s Drag Race in 2014, is currently prepping to take her fifth comedy tour Unsanitized out on the road, and Britain’s current affairs are providing a lot of potential content.
Whether she’s reflecting on the Queen and her recent Covid-19 diagnosis (“She’s fishing for sympathy now!”) or Piers Morgan’s general existence (“That bitter bitch!”), Bianca’s cutting remarks are laid on thick and always delivered without a second’s deliberation. It’s part of the Bianca Del Rio experience: where there is a towering wig and half a dozen pairs of stacked eyelashes, there is that caustic laugh and acid tongue.
It’s a brand that has seen Bianca become one of Drag Race’s most successful alumni—pick a medium and she’s likely conquered it. She’s just finished touring the Everybody’s Talking About Jamie stage show in Los Angeles, where she lives. She has starred in her own films, Hurricane Bianca, written a book, and started a podcast. Her last comedy tour in 2019 saw her become the first drag queen to headline Wembley Arena. After 26 years of working in drag, she is clearly doing something right.
“There’s been peaks and valleys,” Bianca says. “Sometimes I’m doing a show for two people. Sometimes we’re doing a show for 13,000. The trick is, if people are there to see you, I love nothing more.”
Bianca doesn’t forget the grind it took to get her to where she is today, and she’ll never take an audience for granted—even the difficult ones. “I just like an audience, period,” she says. “I just like people breathing. I mean, I’ve been known to have a couple of dead people in the audience. That doesn’t bother me either, as long as they pay for the seat.”
As an insult comic, her shows are in part driven by audience participation and reaction. The hecklers and disruptors keep her on her toes. “Bring on the drunk person, bring on the loud person, bring on the person that goes to sleep,” she says. “I love all of that. To me, it makes for a better show. But nobody is safe. I must say no one is safe.”
She means it. Her specific brand of comedic vitriol has drawn condemnation as well as adoration. After her last tour, 2019’s It’s Jester Joke tour, The Guardian branded her “unspeakably vicious” for jokes aimed at everyone from Asians to lesbians to people with Down’s Syndrome. You can love Bianca’s unapologetic take on the world, or you can hate it. She really doesn’t care either way.
“I’m a man in a wig, I’m not curing cancer, for fuck sake,” she says, stressing that the joke is always on her as much as it is other people. “Drag is problematic. Drag was always problematic. That’s where drag came from. It’s not this homogenised fuckery, where everybody has to be liked.”
It’s a hot and undying topic. Just this month, comedian Jimmy Carr came under intense scrutiny following staggering remarks in his Netflix stand-up show about the deaths of thousands of Gypsies during the Holocaust. Countless other comedians—including Ricky Gervais, Shappi Khorsandi, and Maureen Lipman—have recently expressed concerns that comedy is being ‘cancelled’. There is a line, and some are worried about crossing it. Is Bianca?
“How do you do [comedy] in a PC world? Fuck the PC world,” she says. “I truly don’t cater to the people that want to put me on a pedestal and say, “Well, you can’t say that”—fuck you. I can say whatever I want. You can not like it. And that’s okay.
“You’re never gonna hear me say ‘everybody say love’. Nope!”
Thankfully for Bianca, many people do like it. When she comes to the UK in May, she’ll perform 15 dates, including two at London’s 3,300-capacity Eventim Apollo.
She’s looking forward to coming back to the UK, for the shows of course, but there’s one other thing on her mind: Primark. “I love everything at Primark,” she says. “I don’t know what the fuck it is about Primark. Primark has got me.” It’s a regular haunt not just for Bianca, but for another Drag Race icon, too. “I believe there’s only one other person that loves Primark more than me, and that would be Michelle Visage,” Bianca says. When the pair are in the UK together, a Primarni shopping spree is always on the cards.
Bianca is partial to another British staple, too. “My friend [and fellow drag star] Myra DuBois took me to Greggs. She said: “I’m gonna treat you to a sausage roll.” And so I had a vegan sausage roll, which was actually quite tasty.” She’s shocked to learn that during her next visit to the UK she’ll be able to combine the two, with Greggs opening its biggest outlet yet in Birmingham’s Primark. “Can I do the ribbon-cutting ceremony?” she bellows. “Let’s make this happen!”
With all the chaos of the past two years, Bianca feels her upcoming tour is particularly special, as it’s a chance to find the humour in life again. “We have to get out and fucking laugh,” she says. She’s not necessarily feeling the pressure, though. “It’s kind of like anal sex, you know, I’m used to it.”
Eight years on from Drag Race, and Hurricane Bianca season isn’t coming to an end. She is grateful to be booked and busy. “How lucky that anybody gives a shit. How lucky that I’ve got a place to be, you know?” she says. “So you’re not going to hear me complain.”
Bianca Del Rio’s Unsanitized tour comes to the UK in May. Tickets are available here.
Words by Marcus Wratten
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