A few months ago, as I was leaving the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles, I noticed something unusual. When a comedy set is over, I’m used to seeing audiences file out of the venue looking mildly relieved to be free. But the people at Trans-It Girls, a show put on by Hayden Johnson and Nori Reed, were red-faced and keening with laughter, repeating favorite jokes from the night’s performance to one another as they headed home.
That’s for good reason: Johnson and Reed’s comedic collaboration is perfectly pitched, their rotating cast of special guests (which has included , , and ) always delivers, and their shiny, often scanty onstage looks never fail to inject a bit of capital-F Fashion into the proceedings. spoke to Johnson and Reed about performing with “allies,” their rented-clothing sponsorship dreams, and their at the Bell House in Brooklyn on July 13. Well, I think it all came together because Nori wanted to take an acting class, and I was like, “Oh, I would love to take an acting class with you.
” And from there, we sort of realized that we had a little bit of chemistry and wanted to work on something together. Yeah, it was a trans acting class, and we really bonded because on the very first day of class, they sent us to the wrong location. We kind of trauma-bonded over that as we had to Nancy Drew our way over to the right place and be like, “What’s going on?” We were the only two comedians in the class, and they were very much like, “You two are fun.