Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Celeste Barber: Fine, Thanks’ On Netflix, The Star Of ‘Wellmania’ Explores Her Social Anxiety

At the opening of the taping for her new stand-up hour, Celeste Barber cannot conceal her excitement, welcoming the audience at Sydney Opera House to “my Netflix special.” Because even though the Australian comedian, actress and influencer has 9.5 million Instagram followers, and a Showtime comedy special under belt already, Showtime just doesn’t hold the same cache globally as Netflix, well, doesn’t it?

CELESTE BARBER: FINE, THANKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: So, yes, Barber released her first stand-up comedy special, Challenge Accepted, in 2019 on Showtime, pulling back the curtain on her Instagram fame and using her body to mimic and parody Instamodels (hence: #ChallengeAccepted). In the process, Barber has become a bit of an influencer herself. With it has come more fame and fortune, including a Netflix deal for this special, plus her starring turn in the new dramedy series, Wellmania, based on the nonfiction book about the difficulties in keeping up with nutrition and fitness trends.

For this hour of stand-up, though, Barber focuses on how her marital and parenting skills were tested by the pandemic, how she deals with her social anxiety, how fame means receiving multiple celebrity-branded sex toys, and how starring in Wellmania meant filming her first sex scene, a completely different type of social anxiety.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: Arriving on Netflix a day after Leanne Morgan’s debut on the platform, Barber’s hour immediately evokes some comparisons in how they reacted (both similarly and differently) in the pandemic as wives and mothers; Barber’s elder millennial perspective slightly different from Morgan’s elder Gen X viewpoint. But both have enjoyed massive upswings in fame in the past five years.

Memorable Jokes: It’s one thing to be funny on Instagram, and quite another to be funny and graceful in real-life social situations. And Barber delights in revealing how woefully underprepared and under-skilled she is for it, now that people want to hang out with her at dinner parties or wherever. “I’m great for five minutes,” she says. Her husband, on the other hand, is so good with strangers that he eagerly and willingly sits in the front seat of an Uber to talk to their driver. Which only frustrates her more. “Someone who looks that good should also be good at life. Pick a lane!”

She doesn’t seem to fit in with any of the many people she sees walking at 6 a.m., either.

Retreating back home and online isn’t much help, as Barber has found that social media has turned everyone into an entrepreneur, even though there’s only one Rihanna.

Other celebrities, however, are more than willing to send her their products along with other companies seeking online endorsements from Barber, via an unboxing video. Why she received eight different vibrators in two months, she’ll never quite figure out. “I am not the most sexual person. I barely put out.” Although she can tell us all about what makes Lily Allen’s sex toy special compared to Gwyneth Paltrow’s. “Things got very intense very quickly,” Barber says, before acting it all out onstage. She’ll also describe and re-enact filming her first love scenes for Wellmania, and it turns out, even having an intimacy coordinator on set doesn’t mean you’ll wind up looking sexy while pretending to have sex.

Our Take: Much like Leanne Morgan’s Netflix special out this week, Barber wants married women everywhere to know that suddenly having their husbands in the home 24/7 only adds complications.

Whereas Barber has learned from the experience how to manage her man, as it were, it’s what she has learned about self-care that feels more significant, both to her, and to how she raises her two young sons.

She had been diagnosed with ADHD as a teenager, back when she says there was a lot of shame surrounding it. While her older sister leaned into Pearl Jam and angst, “I was all like Spice Girls and ritalin sandwiches.”

She compares weaning herself off of anti-depressants to “a bag of flaccid dicks,” and has harsher words for everyone these days who says they’re neurodivergent as an excuse for anything. “People just throw these terms around now willy-nilly to justify shitty behavior.” That’s not Barber’s style. Rather, her style is to make fun of herself while calling out more famous figures for being bad role models, whether it’s in life or in their Instagrams.

Our Call: If you’re enjoying Wellmania, then I don’t need to tell you to STREAM IT already. But if you haven’t, then perhaps streaming Barber’s comedy will be enough to nudge you into giving Wellmania a chance. Because when you watch her stand-up, then you’ll realize just how sincerely silly she is.

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.