Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In her first full hour special for Netflix, stand-up comedian Fortune Feimster reveals that she almost missed competing in her first swim meet as a 12-year-old because she literally was too consumed by the concessions stand’s offerings of Fun Dip and nachos. Hence, the title for her special: Sweet & Salty. If you want to know more about Feimster’s upbringing in North Carolina and what happened when she went Hollywood, now’s your chance…
FORTUNE FEIMSTER: SWEET & SALTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Feimster, a North Carolina native, goes home, with her mother introducing to the stage in Charlotte where she’ll regale her audience with tales about her childhood, including the aforementioned swimming misadventure, joining the Girl Scouts, her relationships with church, Chili’s and Hooters, and how she didn’t realize she was a lesbian until after attending a women’s college.
If you saw her half-hour contribution to the first season of The Standups on Netflix in 2017, then you’ll already know what you’re in for. If you’re not familiar with Feimster, then you probably just didn’t realize it yet. Because she has become increasingly visible in the decade since she first appeared on the scene as a contestant on Last Comic Standing, graduating from a writer to regular onscreen presence on Chelsea Lately, to main character on The Mindy Project during its later seasons on Hulu, and now seen on Showtime’s The L Word: Generation Q and heard on FOX’s animated Bless The Harts.
Not that you need to have seen any of that to enjoy this.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: In showing how comfortably she is sharing her vulnerability about her weight and her sexuality, she’s a lot like Amy Schumer, even if their issues may come across very differently. In terms of an eminently likable comedian who exhibits Southern pride without resorting to stereotypes, she’s of a piece with Nate Bargatze. Or Ellen DeGeneres.
Memorable Jokes: The hour is full of memorable anecdotes, as she recounts her slow evolution from tomboy to out lesbian, and how she skipped the closeted part by not understanding her sexuality until her mid-20s.
Which makes her act-outs even funnier in retrospect due to her naivety, whether it was how her mother tried dressing her in more feminine clothing and submitting her to the debutante ball, or how her family loved going to Hooters so much they took Feimster there for her 18th birthday, or how she only realizes now how creepily she acted in college, or how she tried to fit in on the red-carpet conducting celebrity interviews in a velour tracksuit straight out of school.
Our Take: Feimster maintains she was a virgin throughout college, in part, because she was born before YouTube tutorials could have taught her differently. She says: “Back then there was no YouTube. There was no Will and Grace. No Frozen. Nothing I could relate to. Turns out representation matters. It does!” But this also weirdly omits DeGeneres, whose coming-out sitcom episode aired in 1997, when Feimster was a 16-year-old high-schooler (and Ellen’s daytime show debuted in 2003, still two years before Feimster came out).
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Instead, she points to a Lifetime movie as her revelatory moment, and has fun both with that fact, as well as how conservatives who argue against promoting homosexuality in culture may have a point.
And Feimster imagines what her life might have looked like without the revelation, living as a frustrated housewife. This bit elicits big reactions from the crowd, and if you’re unsure why, it’s because you haven’t followed her social media vlogs where she portrays a housewife named Brenda always talking about her husband Tim.
In real life, Feimster’s story is full of happy endings, even if she’s still got more to write to it at 39.
Our Call: STREAM IT. As Feimster relates midway through her hour: “I look back at that time in college, and I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t out. But honestly, it wasn’t like I was in the closet and I was hiding. I just didn’t see myself represented in the world.” Now she gets to be that representation. And her presence is positively inspirational.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
