“Sorry I’m dressed like this—I just came from work,” Cole Escola said recently, from the stage of Joe’s Pub. He was nude but for a pair of candy-red undies. Behind him, a row of women’s wigs lined a piano. Escola, a star of the alt-cabaret scene, is thirty, but he could pass for a cherubic grade schooler, which makes his comedic knife even sharper. (In Bridget Everett’s show “Rock Bottom,” he played a fetus pleading not to be aborted.) In his new act, “Help! I’m Stuck,” which continues on Sept. 18 and other dates this fall, he tells the audience that his father played the trumpet, adding, “It’s so neat what you can learn about a person from reading their obituary.”
Despite his impish look, Escola has the soul of an old-school variety-show hostess, or, at least, that’s one of the personae he conjures. His ace card is his ability to inhabit pop-culture types—like the clueless bystanders on true-crime shows who say, “Something about him just didn’t sit right”—without winking through the mask. In one of his viral YouTube sketches, he plays a suburban mom in an orange-juice commercial, whose chirpy spiel on nutrition morphs into a surreal backstory involving dog fighting and death metal. His ear for the cadences of generic TV moms (“Boys! Breakfast!”) is uncanny. In “Help! I’m Stuck,” he works, wig by wig, through a menagerie of kitschy characters, among them an ingénue in a Southern melodrama, a commuter from Hoboken who happens to be a goblin, the gay inventor of the raisin, and Bernadette Peters.
Raised in Clatskanie, Oregon, Escola spent his first few years living in a trailer, and he’s as good at channelling laconic jocks as he is Broadway divas. He moved to New York when he was eighteen, a dead ringer for Bud Cort in “Harold and Maude.” With Jeffery Self, he formed the comedy duo VGL Gay Boys (for “Very Good Looking”), and their videos grew into the appealingly lo-fi sketch series “Jeffery & Cole Casserole,” on Logo. Nowadays, he plays the flamboyant foil to Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner on the Hulu sitcom “Difficult People”—in a recent episode, he and Vanessa Williams shared the world’s most unlikely sex scene. At Joe’s Pub, he donned a “Golden Girls”-esque gray bob, but was still unsure who the character should be. “I think she maybe authored a book in the eighties about eating right for your star sign,” he wondered aloud. “Either that or a clarinet player.” ♦
