A Jimmy Kimmel Live! street segment about men knowing very little about the female body has found an unlikely second life: as the opening number of a new Off-Broadway show.
I Became We, Mona Pirnot’s new “play for choir” at Atlantic Theater Company, opens with a 16-person classical ensemble singing about a January 2022 Kimmel segment titled “What Do You Know About the Female Body?”
“I saw a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the choir sings. “A woman on the street asks some men some questions on the female body.”
That woman was Kimmel staff writer Jamie Abrahams, who headed out onto Hollywood Boulevard with an anatomical chart and asked men to demonstrate their knowledge of female anatomy.
It did not go especially well.
“One man points to the cervix and calls it a uterus,” the choir recounts. “One man points to the bladder and calls it a vagina.”
Then comes the answer that gets the biggest musical treatment: “One man points to the rectum and says he’s pretty sure that it’s a baby. A baby.”
The original Kimmel bit also found men guessing that women have two uteruses and four fallopian tubes, among other answers. The show posted the segment to YouTube on Jan. 12, 2022, where it has since been viewed more than 1.3 million times.
The bit proved popular enough that Kimmel returned to the premise with a follow-up the following year.
For Pirnot, though, the segment became more than a punchline.
“I was laughing and not at all surprised by what was unknown to these full-grown children,” the choir sings later in the number.
From there, the Kimmel clip becomes a jumping-off point for the larger story Pirnot is telling about her own relationship to fertility, motherhood, and the assumption that children would not be part of her life.
Pirnot never appears onstage. Instead, the choir performs her first-person monologue in full, with composer Jack D. Coen setting its deliberately conversational language to classical choral music.
That gives the opening number its central joke: a stately ensemble in concert black singing the words “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and recounting bad answers from men stopped on the street.
New York Times theater critic Helen Shaw singled out the bit in her review of the show, noting that the syllables of “Jim-my Kim-mel Live!” run up a scale and that the choir’s delivery of “ba-by” turns the rectum answer into what she described as a kind of musical wince.
Abrahams, who conducted the original interviews, weighed in approvingly in the comments on an Instagram clip of the performance, which was reshared by Jimmy Kimmel Live! itself.
So yes: four years after a bunch of men on Hollywood Boulevard flunked a female anatomy quiz, their answers are being sung by a classical choir Off Broadway.
I Became We opened Oct. 27 at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater and has been extended through Nov. 22.
