This story is taken from the autumn 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy here.
Quenlin Blackwell is entering her “bad bitch era”. She’s on a break from a shoot – not ours, but that’s OK – when she dials in and makes the revelation. Her hair is hidden underneath a wig cap, so her face, which I must say is drop-dead gorgeous, is the centre of attention. “For a moment, I was on my funny, joke-joke-joke era, but I know there’s a balance you have to [strike] being a comedian and also being beautiful,” she says. “Comedians have to have a little grit for the joke to land properly. If I’m bad as fuck, with my edges laid telling you a joke, you’re looking at how pretty I am and not what’s coming out of my mouth. So I have to give it in doses. I give jokes then I say, I’ve given you enough jokes to feed y’all – let me be bad. So I’m entering my hot girl era once again.”
If feeding her audience a balanced diet of sarcastic humour and glamorous slays is how the 22-year-old comedian, internet superstar and budding model has kept us engaged for just shy of a decade, then her peers should take note. At just 13, Blackwell came into our lives and had us wheezing with laughter on Vine, posting under the username @quensadilla on the now-defunct video platform. A natural-born humorist, Blackwell’s Vines found the perfect balance between relatable and unhinged. Standouts include: her aggressively popping and locking to the Law & Order theme tune, thrashing her neck around at a whiplash-inducing velocity to strum a guitar with her braids or, my favourite, when she righteously unleashed a hose on a vulture that had the audacity to perch on her chimney and screamed, “THIS IS NOT YOUR LAND!”
A southern girl through and through, Blackwell spent most of her adolescence in Dallas, Texas, having moved there with her family when her father was incarcerated. “I grew up in a middle-class suburban town, and I was a…
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