Kate Berlant and John Early’s Escape from Comic Realism

The comics Kate Berlant and John Early, both twenty-nine years old, are connoisseurs of passive aggression. Recently, on the first of four consecutive sold-out nights to promote their new video project, “555,” at the Public Theatre, the pair sniped at each other as only frenemies can. “Your face just screams ‘colonialist,’ ” Berlant said, as if she were giving him a compliment. She is petite, with an oversized mop of dark-brown curls framing what she has described as “violently Hasidic” features. Early—blond, baby-faced, all-American—shot her a look and replied, smiling tightly, “But I’m gay, so . . . still marginalized.”