“Who asked her to turn down the farts,” I quizzed a colleague, annoyed. It was a warm day in May at Pioneer Works, where I edit and curate. Dynasty Handbag—the acerbic, potty-mouthed alter ego of artist Jibz Cameron—was rehearsing her newest video-based performance spectacle, Titanic Depression. I was organizing its world premiere, and Cameron was testing out some foot sensors on stage. One of them triggered the sound of particularly juicy flatulence that started out slow and high-pitched, then piled up deep and low at the end. Amplified through a massive array of speakers designed for arenas, the sound practically shook the building. She hit the sensor several times, sending farts far and wide and offending a group of donors on a building tour.

Cameron’s sensibility has always flown in the face of decorum and good taste, but there’s more to her funniness than potty humor. Over her long career performing at venues high and low—from Paris’ Centre Pompidou to the cramped quarters of the West Village gay bar Duplex—she’s reminded us, again and again, what comedy may be best for: as a disarming way to critique what’s unfunny about one’s self and one’s audience. Cameron’s targets tend to be people with whom she shares much: liberal, coastal elites who are highly educated, politically correct to a fault, and so devoted to their causes they slip into virtue-signaling. Her performances vary in scale and scope, from simple, vaudevillian stand-up routines to scripted, hour-long narratives in which she performs in front of a massive video screen, onto which are projected characters of her own creation: cautionary tales all, to whom she sings and talks in Dynasty Handbag’s manic, over-the-top style.

Among her best-known creations are the aging ballet dancer who refuses to quit despite age, alcoholism, and a nasty cocaine habit, and a gigantic, hairy woman’s crotch whose vagina talks from beneath a pair of too-tight white panties. In Titanic Depression, Cameron plays Rose, a narcissistic daughter of privilege who texts her therapist from the Titanic’s deck via a rotting banana and meets Jack, an octopus disguised as a ladies’ hat who is also, it seems, an artist. He uses all seven of his tentacles to draw her “like one of his French girls,” creating seven terrible portraits. After the ship hits a giant trash pile in lieu of the infamous iceberg, which melted before the ship’s arrival, Rose spends the rest of her days trying to sort the pile’s contents. Doomed to the Sisyphean task of determining whether a spork is paper or plastic, Rose’s plight illustrates the apocalyptic consequences of collective, environmental malfeasance. While Cameron’s work has always had a dark edge, Titanic Depression deepens her satire—and darkens its thrust—in ways we haven’t seen before.

The week before Titanic Depression debuted to a packed house, Cameron and I sat down on the second Sunday in May to discuss the origins of Dynasty Handbag, coming to terms with death, and the continued relevance of the Titanic.

Happy Mother's Day, everyone.

Happy Mother's Day.

Are you ever going to have babies with your partner, Mariah [Garnett]? Incidentally, she’s an amazing artist in her own right.

If I can slip a fucking Chihuahua past the goalie up there, I will do it. By the way, you have a voice and face for radio!

Do I? Thank you. I always thought I sounded very gay. I still do. I also look gay today.

Yep. It's so weird that you're not and that you have a wife and kids.

I can't wait to go back to my wife and child after this interview.

I know. Me too. It's so hard.

So I wanted to start by asking you about the beginnings of Dynasty Handbag. She came out of a band called Dynasty, right?

I was writing songs, some for my solo career and some for that band. And then the solo thing just started to develop a different vibe, with a lot of voice-over and disembodied voices that I would interact with.

You said once that Dynasty Handbag came from this idea of a woman who just did it all wrong, so the idea of failure is a big part of her, right?

Yeah. I would've never categorized it that way when I started out. But upon reflection, I was looking at models of femininity, and they didn't sit right with me. I had the sense that they were kind of a farce. Part of it was my upbringing, as my dad would take down everything, tinfoil hat style. But he was also really smart. And then my mom, who was a hippie, was mentally unwell and couldn't get it together, ever. I didn't have any idea of how to wear makeup, or how a girl should behave, or any of that. Instead, I just had to figure it out. My mom also just really looked weird. She had weird clothes. And she was off in the brain. And I'm glad for it. When I saw how women were represented in the world, I was just like, “What is this? Who are these people? Are these people real?” I just always had this sense that it wasn't for me. And I don't really know why that was the case. But the straight model, the contemporary model, the heterosexual model, never seemed right at all. And so I guess a lot of Dynasty Handbag was me reflecting on my inability to understand or fit into the model: the language, clothing, sound. How you're supposed to move, walk, act, feel, and think.

And so Dynasty Handbag's signature look is pretty spectacular: lipstick going everywhere, ill-fitting clothes, swimsuits over pantyhose...

I think it's just a little bit off, but it's almost right. There is a world in which that look, done correctly, is supposed to be something. And that to me is the essence of where things are really wrong. Not that Dynasty didn’t nail it, but that the thing she was trying to achieve even existed in the first place.

We start load-in for Titanic Depression tomorrow, so I wanted to ask you, because I don’t think I ever did: why the Titanic?

The idea came from wanting to write a show that took place on a cruise ship, and then it twisted itself into the Titanic. I think I've always really been fascinated by cruise ships. I just think that they're emblematic of so much; they’re insane, micro-ecosystems of...

White Lotus...

Yeah, whiteness? I grew up in that baroque, Trump vibration of the eighties, watching Love Boat, with that idea of a decadent vacation.

Have you been on a cruise before?

Yes, I have been.

Me too. I've been on a few with my parents. I'm a cruiser.

I'm sure you've been on a few different “cruises”... Well, my grandmother bought my family cruise tickets. I think I was 12. This was not the kind of family we were at all. At all. My dad had just gotten sober, gotten out of rehab—I think the whole thing was an attempt to normalize us in some way.

Did it work?

We actually had a lot of fun. It was the best time for me to go because I wasn't a full-blown, terrorizing, druggy punk asshole alcoholic—that was the next year. We had a blast because we were just running free. My dad was trying to hit it with this Italian lady the whole time. She was actually the owner or the heir to the Sebastian hair product company.

No shit!

He was going to these A.A. meetings, and he would give us money to go play slots and get out of his hair. And there was a discothèque. But I also knew that it was completely fucked up and crazy and awful. And the passengers were awful. But we had fun making fun of everybody and just doing whatever we wanted.

Making fun of everyone is half the fun. And cruises are kind of hard to dislike. I mean, you hate yourself, but you also enjoy it simultaneously.

Yeah. It’s just like being alive in the United States of America; all the horrible conveniences are the nightmare and the joy. There's a really good documentary—the beginning of Titanic Depression uses some of its footage—called The Secret Life of the Biggest Cruise Ship in the World. It's like an exposé of the facts: "This ship uses 70,000 eggs per day. These people work from 1:00 am to whatever, blah, blah, blah."

Performance still of Dynasty Handbag, "Titanic Depression," at Pioneer Works, May 21, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk

And of course, this all comes into your performance. How much of it is taken from the James Cameron film?

It began with just the Titanic story, not the movie. We all know about the gratuitous wealth and the captains of industry and the whole thing going down—too big to fail, blah, blah. So that idea has always really captivated the world, and it is a captivating story. People are obsessed with it.

It's the story of human hubris.

It's the story of houma hubbas. People love to watch that shit not succeed because we all know inside that we can never be sure it will. And I also think it's a story about mortality. Everybody knows that there are people that die and there are people who don't. It’s human to want to watch that play out, that moment of, "Oh, they don't know what's coming." We don't have any control over when we die or how it’ll happen, so it’s very satisfying to watch a narrative where you do.

It's such a parable too, because the Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats, so everyone in steerage was fucked.

The lack of lifeboats was an aesthetic decision, because the people who designed the ship didn't think [lifeboats] looked good; they appeared too crowded. There were other weird issues too. Fake news hit New York, saying everybody was fine, that they were saved and were going to arrive the next day.

There was also this new telegraph machine on the ship called the Marconi, which stopped working, and things were coming in at weird times, like, "I didn't get your text.” “I didn't know there was a storm coming ahead.” “No, I texted you.” “No, but it came in weird."

And so for Titanic Depression you’re giving the story your Dynasty Handbag treatment, which is where you play all the different roles, or personas, and it's very over the top with pop cultural references.

Initially, I was really just thinking about environmental disaster, greed, capitalism, and Trump. But when I really started working on the story, I realized nobody gives a shit. No one's going to care about this story any more than they already do, because I'm preaching to the choir. I'm not telling anybody anything they don't already know. So I was like, okay, I really have to locate myself in all of it. And that is always the most horrible part of making a work, because it forces you to question why you’re doing it.

So how are you, Jibz Cameron, in Titanic Depression?

I had to look at my own fears of death, all the things that make me feel safe, and at what I thought being a good person was. How are you saving the climate? How are you helping people? But it's also very individualistic. We're being sold products to care for ourselves and the planet, but we keep buying stuff to feel like we're doing the right thing. But we don't get all of the information, nobody knows the answer, and it doesn't work. Everybody's going crazy and obsessing over, "Is this enough? Oh my God, I put this in the wrong bin." It'll drive you mad. But no one who can really do anything about it is taking that kind of responsibility. So, first, I had to locate myself in the lineage of captains of industry and privilege.

A great place to start was with Benjamin Guggenheim, because he was on the ship and I got a Guggenheim award. I started doing research about the men who’d invested in the ship or owned it. J.P. Morgan financed the Titanic. And I had to trace all of my relationships with J.P. Morgan—my lesbian lover banks with them. But then there's also my grandfather, who comes into the show because he was trying to be a big oil man. Even though my work's funny and absurd, if it's not somewhat vulnerable, it's a joke.

Do you always put yourself into the pieces you create?

That’s always the hardest part, but also it needs to happen. Otherwise it just feels like I'm taking a piss on someone else. And that's what I want to see other people do: ask questions about their lives and know how they grapple with things. When it's not really sincere, you can feel it. Otherwise you're like, "Oh, did someone just do a showboat thing for me..." You know what I mean? And that so easily can happen with any of my works, because I can make jokes. I can write and I can be funny very easily.

This is a dumb question, but how do you know something is funny?

You're so stupid, David. How do I know?

That was funny. How did you know that was going to land?

Experience. But also you don't always know. The thing about jokes and humor is that a joke is a closed system, whereas humor is an open thing. I can tell when I'm trying to get a laugh and that’s when I'm pretty sure it's not going to be funny. If I'm like, "Oh, this is a great joke," a lot of times people can see it coming. Surprise is such a big part of the funny thing. When I said, "You're so stupid, David," you laughed because it was not what I was supposed to say. A surprise brings you back to the moment. And normally we're not in the moment, we're somewhere else. And so that's why I think comedy is so powerful, because you really have to be there.

There’s a sequence in Titanic Depression where you address death directly. And it’s notable to me because it's not funny; I laughed uncomfortably. It felt like a total tonal change from a typical Dynasty Handbag show. I'm not saying you’ve never brought up death before, but this time felt different. Did this particular piece bring that out of you, or was it in the air, something related to COVID?

I wanted to unpack some of my own grief around a lot of loss and family death in my life. Both my parents died—my mom in a really tragic circumstance—and it's taken me a long time to access the sorrow around that. But one thing that has really helped is getting closer to my own relationship to dying. I started taking this death acceptance class. And there was a meditation in it that was really just about the facts: everyone will die. Your body cannot help you. All these things that sound really terrible, but for me were quite comforting. The meditation makes it into the show, and people can laugh, but I meant it to be a sincere moment. I always want, in my work, to be moved. I want to be in it. I want to have experiences that make me change through my work, not just be funny. ♦

This conversation aired on May 14th, 2023, during the Second Sundays Broadcast Live Hour on 8 Ball Radio. It has been edited for length and clarity.