Hacks Season 3's five best put downs and pranks

Seventy-year-old comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) comes fully loaded to every battle of wits in Hacks Season 3. Whether she’s getting her housekeeper and estate manager Josephina (Rose Abdoo) to insult her writing partner Ava’s (Hannah Einbinder) appearance, playing the long game to torment her sister Kathy (J Smith-Cameron), turning her daughter DJ’s (Kaitlin Olson) AA meeting into an impromptu stand-up set, or just clapping back with the most soul-scouring insult we’ve ever gasped at, Deborah has her fists up and the gloves off. So set aside your Smooth Brain meditation app, and come for the fun as we look at our five favourite Vance pranks and quips this season.

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Binge Hacks Season 1-3 now.

1. Episode 3: Love that for you

At first, Deborah seems taken with young up-and-coming comedian Jack Danby (Luke Cook) and his old-school manners, charm and suits. But the tables turn the moment that she finds out that he’s in the lead to snatch up Deborah’s dream job: taking over the hosting gig on Late Night, a network comedy talk show. 

As she’s pointed out to her writers, it’s easier for a woman to get elected president than land a late night hosting gig! Instantly hiding her fury with a smile, she congratulates him in the meanest way possible telling him, “You’re perfect for it. You’re generically funny.” That would haunt us like the ghost of Jacob Marley!

2. Episode 4: Toilet humour

This episode centres around Deborah finally making it into the ultimate boys’ club: the old school comedians’ inner circle. With everyone getting on in years, their Vegas meetings these days revolve around preparing for their annual colonoscopies. As we get deluged with a three-day-concert porta potty’s worth of scatalogical humour, Deborah gets the royal flush. 

When their tiresome “jokes” about queer people gives her the ick, and she overhears the old farts moaning about her taking offence, Deborah steals every single roll of toilet paper in the fancy house they’ve hired for the weekend and sneaks off into the night giggling wildly – just as everyone’s butt is preparing for blast-off. 

3. Episode 5: What, this old thing?

Nobody can roast Deborah Vance harder than she can herself. During a medical checkup that the network needs for insurance purposes – if they’re going to give her the Late Night gig, Deborah goes all-out to stack the odds in her favour. 

Before she gets weighed, she takes off her entire home shopping network’s worth of heavy jewellery, along with her wig. And when she gets blood drawn afterwards, she quips, “Well, next time do it before you weigh me.” 

4. Episode 7: “Christmas is my holiday, she can have 9/11.”

Deborah has a long-standing feud with her sister Kathy, thanks to Kathy’s affair with and then marriage to Deborah’s husband, Frank. This episode is crammed with the visual insanity of Christmas at Deborah’s Vegas mansion, including a mini mansion replica made of gingerbread – nibble at it and Deborah will act like the witch in Hansel and Gretel! 

But our favourite gifts from Santa come in what we don’t get to see, as we find out how Deborah’s taken revenge against Kathy over the years, including having Josephina scratch Kathy’s eyes out of all their childhood photos, and training her corgis to attack Kathy on sight. 

During the sisters’ “snowball” fight, Kathy complains: “Billboards for all your specials on my street. You told (news show host) Katie Couric I can’t read. You had missing person posters with my picture on it made up and put all over Monterey with my phone number. I got phone calls for months from people saying they’d seen me in the supermarket, and I looked horrible….”

5. Episode 8: Is anyone really ever cancelled?

In a canny episode that spotlights famous comedians’ post-cancellation careers (wildly successful, mostly), Deborah stands to lose everything she’s worked for when footage of her old standup sets surface just as she’s gearing up to get an honorary degree. She digs her heels in at first, moaning about the “liberal mob” and insisting, “I can’t be woke; I’m exhausted!” 

Unlike her male contemporaries from episode 4 – who refuse to acknowledge the very basic rule that comedy must change as the audience changes – Deborah eventually takes in what Ava’s trying to tell her. And she hosts a sit-down meeting with students, sincerely inviting them to critique her past work. It turns out she’s been here before. Deborah wryly explains, “I was cancelled before there was even a name for it. They only gave it a name after it started happening to powerful men.”

6. Episode 3: Honourable mention

Of course, with episode 3 featuring the comedy roast of Deborah Vance, it’s a gold mine of insult comedy. Our favourite might come from Jack Danby: “Deborah is so old she still calls movies ‘the talkies.’ It’s not her fault, though. You don’t know what they are if you can’t get cast in them.” 

What makes this extra delicious is that just one episode ago, we saw an outraged tech dinosaur Deborah printing out a giant wodge of Etsy pages to show Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), the COO of her management company, that people were profiting from knock-off Deborah Vance merch! She truly is “the queen of people who can’t figure out their internet.”

Binge Hacks Season 1-3 now.