Comedian Rosebud Baker has gone through intense tragedy, grief and addiction in her life. But for her, nothing has been more viscerally “traumatic” than the experience of becoming a mother.
Baker—who grew up traditionally conservative as the granddaughter of George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state James Baker—finds a way to turn that trauma into super dark comedy in her new Netflix special The Mother Lode, half of which she recorded while pregnant and the other half after giving birth.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Baker discusses how her political upbringing has influenced her approach to both parenting and comedy and how becoming a mother has only made her more ambitious to succeed as a comedian. She also discusses the unique challenges of her role as “Weekend Update” writer on Saturday Night Live, what makes a great joke for Colin Jost and Michael Che, why she thinks her viral comments about SNL host Travis Kelce “practicing reading” were misconstrued, and why she’s “dying” to perform at a celebrity roast.
At 4:30 a.m. this past Sunday night, Baker posted on her Instagram stories, “I’m about to go from the best night of my life to the ROUGHEST day of parenting I’ve ever had,” adding a crying laughing emoji for good measure. She was leaving the after-party for SNL’s 50th anniversary special and returning home to her toddler.
Despite the fact that Lorne Michaels has been gearing up for this milestone since a similar 40th anniversary special aired in 2015, Baker tells me the week before that it was all coming together at the last minute. “It’s like every other show at SNL where nothing’s really done until the week of the show,” she explains.
After joining SNL as a sketch writer during its 47th season in 2022, Baker now exclusively writes jokes for “Weekend Update,” a role she readily admits is much better suited to her skill set as a stand-up, even if it is “much more isolating where it’s just you and your computer and a bunch of headlines” that need punchlines. As opposed to having to come up with elaborate premises for the show’s celebrity hosts and then figure out how to logistically produce sketches, she says, “I really am happy just sitting in front of a computer and writing jokes.”
“It feels like a totally different game, and as a stand-up, it’s much closer to what I’m used to and the way that my brain works,” she adds. “So I’m a lot more comfortable in that.”
As for the secrets behind writing a successful “Update” joke, Baker says it’s all about “misdirection.” She cites one recent joke she wrote for Michael Che after reading a headline about the possibility that men could become extinct six million years from now. During the episode that aired less than two weeks after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the anchor paused for cheers from the women in the crowd before cutting them down to size with the punchline: “So ladies, hang in there, you’ll get your little president.”
Baker was particularly proud of that one, but adds, “You never really know until something is performed in front of a live audience if it’s going to get a laugh.”
The comedian’s ability to surprise audiences with punchlines they never see coming is on full display in her new special, which dropped on Netflix the Tuesday after SNL50. It’s her first new hour since releasing Whiskey Fists on Comedy Central in 2021, in which she somehow managed to find comedy in the tragic death of her younger sister, who drowned in a jacuzzi at just seven years old when Baker was a senior in high school. (Sample joke: “It’s like hearing someone got shot in the head with a t-shirt cannon—it makes it seem less sad.)
The Mother Lode is all about being pregnant, giving birth, and then raising a toddler. When I suggest that material about bringing her daughter into the world is not as “dark” as joking about her sister’s death, Baker scoffs.
“It’s so funny that you say that it’s less dark, because to me it’s so much darker,” she says. “Motherhood is so much darker—and pregnancy for sure is so much darker—than death, which is just a shock to the system and sort of the natural progression of life. Like, it all ends there. But bringing someone into the world is so much more of a violent, shocking, traumatic experience.”
Among the dark jokes about her decision to become a mother in the new special is one in which she compares Planned Parenthood to the Coachella festival: “I’ve got a right to be there, but I’ve aged out.”
Baker has mostly avoided getting feedback on jokes like that one from the more conservative members of her family. “We don’t really talk about it,” she says. “One thing that I love about WASPs is that even if something’s uncomfortable, they don’t address it. They’ll talk shit about you behind your back, but they won’t do it to your face, and that I’m very grateful for, because I don’t want to know what they think about it.”
“The kind of Republican that my granddad was, and that my father was, they’re, like, liberal now, compared to what’s going on,” Baker says as the second Trump term gets underway. “I mean George Bush almost seems like Mr. Bean, or something now. And he was like a devil when I was growing up. I mean, not to my parents, but to my friends, and to popular culture.”
But when I ask if that evolution makes her more sympathetic to her parents’ right-wing politics when she was growing up, Baker is quick to say no. “Not really because all of it did really kind of lay the groundwork for what’s happening now,” she says. “So I can’t say that I’m sympathetic to their politics.”
If she ever did find out that her parents disapproved of her comedy, she worries her gut instinct would just be to “lean further into it, to go further just to push buttons.”
“And I don’t really like comedy that pushes buttons just to push buttons, so I’m grateful that I don’t know how they feel about it,” she adds, “because I wouldn’t want it to mess with my voice.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
