Beauty Pageant Parody in “The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino”

Writing and performing a show that satirizes beauty pageants and Toddlers and Tiaras is almost like shooting sexy baby fish in a barrel. Many comedians and actors, including Tom Hanks, have jumped on the satirical bandwagon and mocked these horrifying beauty queens and their even more horrifying stage parents. There’s not much more ground a person can cover on the subject of these living dolls.

So if you’re part of a comedy troupe that wants to do a show about the life and death of a beauty queen, what do you do? How do you satirize a subject that’s been done so many times before?

Well, if you’re Leah Rudick and Katie Hartman of the New York City-based comedy duo Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting, you do just one thing: you go balls out. Except they’re women, so maybe…boobs out? Vaginas out? Whatever piece of female anatomy you want to use in that metaphor, these performers expose said ladybits (again, metaphorically), in their Fringe Festival show, The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino.

The show chronicles the life of Deena Domino, a failed child star who grows up in the spotlight and spends all of her time clinging to fame, or trying to recapture it when she loses it. When she’s very young, she transforms from a sweet little girl into a monster almost immediately, after her mother throws pixie stix laced with Adderall into her face and then bites her arm. And that tells you almost everything you need to know about the type of comedy to expect from the women at Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting.

But why stop there? The pixie stix/biting incident only happens in the first five minutes of the show, and that moment is probably the high point of Deena Domino’s life. Everything is downhill from there, as we get a glimpse into Deena’s origins with her grandmother and much younger boyfriend who seem to enjoy adult diaper play as part of their sex life, or as we watch her become a contestant on reality shows like Bitches in a House. We see what happens when Deena crawls back to the “top” (if you can call it that) after having an inspiring dream in which Joan of Arc and Snooki make appearances.

The show is both supremely silly and vulgar, filled with sequences (both filmed and staged) that make scenes from The Book of Mormon look tame by comparison. The duo of Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting are committed (with two capital Ts) as both writers and performers, pushing the envelope with the multiple characters they play. Leah Rudick uses her elastic face and large eyes to her advantage, switching from the overeager “nice” judge on America’s Best and Brightest to a manic cellmate of Deena’s with one quick costume change. Katie Hartman plays Deena with a lunatic energy that makes you horrified to watch this girl, but not horrified enough to hate her. I wouldn’t say that the show extends much empathy to Deena or people like her, but there’s also no malice in the writing or portrayal of her, and that’s a very difficult balance to maintain.

Even among all of the satire and sequences of ten-year-olds demanding breast milk from their mothers wearing neckbraces, the show manages to raise a very important question about Deena Domino and other child stars: is Deena a nightmare because of her choices, or because society made her that way? By the end of the show, we see that the answer to that question is “yes.”

The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino is one of the most inappropriate, off-the-wall shows I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to Hell after watching it, and I mean that in the best possible way.

The Underdeveloped and Overexposed Life and Death of Deena Domino played at the Kraine Theater at the New York International Fringe Festival at 85 East 4th Street from August 11 to August 21st.