One Of Kaitlin Olson's Favorite Always Sunny Moments Involved A Lot Of Vomit
Here's a really strange random fact about me: I grew up with emetophobia, the intense fear of vomit and vomiting. The very idea of blowing chunks got my anxiety going, which is what makes my deep, abiding love for "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" kind of hilarious. You see, there is a lot of vomiting, gagging, and spitting up on "It's Always Sunny." There are some amazing puke-filled moments, of course, like Charlie (Charlie Day) spewing all over his date because he swallowed fake blood capsules, or Dennis (Glenn Howerton) barfing while dancing because he did a bunch of shots rapid-fire. It turns out that in the right circumstances, vomit can be really funny, and in the case of "It's Always Sunny," the funniest yakking usually comes courtesy of Sweet Dee, played by Kaitlin Olson.
Dee is often the one put through the grossest of gags, like getting stuck in a bog or covered head-to-toe in fake blood, but in season 13, there's a puke-filled moment that apparently really tickled Olson's funny bone. In an FX promo video for the season, the actor revealed one of her favorite sequences, and despite it being really gross, it is in fact ferociously funny.
A favorite moment when the It's Always Sunny ladies beat Boggs
In "The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot," the main female characters of "Always Sunny" decide to do their take on the season 10 episode "The Gang Beats Boggs," in which the gang tried to beat baseball player Wade Boggs' beer drinking record while on a cross-country flight. The episode is a hilarious commentary on female reboots of male properties and on women's comedy in general, and it all ends when Artemis (Artemis Pebdani) gets everyone high on ayahuasca and they start violently vomiting all over one another. Olson explained that it wasn't exactly a fun shoot, but in the end it was totally worth it, saying:
"One of my favorite scenes from season 13 is when we do a ladies' Boggs reboot. I mean that was like a whole week stuck on an airplane with a lot of hot, sweaty women and it just ends up in a giant vomit fest, because vomit is funny."
It doesn't sound particularly fun being stuck on an airplane set for a week, but at least she got to spend it with some of the funniest ladies in television, like Pebdani, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and Mary Lynn Rajskub. Danny DeVito was also along for the ride as his character Frank, who posted up on the feminist flight to try and get laid, which means that plane was as full of laughs as it was (fake) puke.
The dangers of being Dee
It takes a lot of guts to play Sweet Dee. Olson has to go through a lot of grossness, from the aforementioned puke to her character's hair-trigger gag reflex to being covered in fish guts. It's not a glamorous role by any means, with Olson at one point even eating an entire cake because Dee was going through a downward spiral in the aptly named "The Gang Broke Dee," but it's one of the most impressive in all of comedy television. It was important to Olson that Dee is never the voice of reason amongst the wild boys of the gang and she gets to go just as hard as the guys, which can sometimes be a real feat.
Being a woman in comedy is difficult for a lot of reasons, some of which are detailed in the Boggs ladies reboot episode. Women's comedy is often reduced to a feminine remake of male franchises or simple gross-out humor because, like Artemis says, "you don't expect that from women," but Olson gets to do a wide range of things on "Sunny," from basic gross-outs to more complex humor. No matter what, she's always an incredible physical comedian. If anyone can make barf funny, it's Kaitlin Olson. Thanks for helping cure this emetophobe, at least a little bit.