Per Variety, Alanis Morissette told the crowd at her "Butterfly With a Machete" residency at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood on Nov. 11, "I've even had a guy ask me why I didn't lead with my sexuality. Thank you, Ben Affleck." Then the show played a clip of her Dogma co-star's head exploding.
We'll call the residency the Butterfly With a Machete, because that is literally the name of the show, a rock traumedy Morissette produces, performs and co-writes. Songs, sketches, monologues, and, per Variety's review, "a woman spending a good deal of time standing at a whiteboard explaining her theories about the patriarchy."
The Affleck bit landed five days after she casually came out as pansexual on the Handsome podcast, the moment USA Today reported on Nov. 8. The timing is not an accident. The timing is a release window.
For the uninitiated: in 1999's Kevin Smith film Dogma, Affleck played cop Bartleby, whose head blew up in one of the most famous scenes of 90s cinema. Morissette played God. So when "Thank you, Ben Affleck" landed, the show did not cut to a still photo. It cut to the explosion. No statement. No holding pattern. The clip just played and the room did the math. One fan comment said it all: God doesn't have sexuality, Ben.
The PR read: the monologue was nominally about the "harsh judgments" of the public eye, but the crowd heard the name before the theme. Fan video hit social before the press did, and the Butterfly With a Machete brand now has a second product line: 27-year-old grudges.
YOUR TURN: If a 1999 bit part is still fresh enough to detonate at a 2026 residency, what does that do to the careers of the people who made the joke back then?
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