Since first getting what she thought was her big break on Last Comic Standing almost 15 years ago, comedian Rachel Feinstein has been waiting for something to come along and help her achieve the next level of success. “By the time this comes out, I’m going to be a star,” Feinstein says. “Hopefully after this interview, I’ll at least get a Clorox commercial or something.”
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast—recorded just after she taped her latest Tonight Show appearance and right before her debut Netflix special Big Guy premiered—Feinstein reveals that she may never have gotten this breakthrough moment in her career had she not done the thing that “scared” her the most: getting married to the New York firefighter husband she spends much of her special mocking, and then having a daughter. She also shares stories about mentoring Lil Jon in stand-up comedy on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, roasting Gilbert Gottfried’s Hitler as Anne Frank on Netflix’s Historical Roasts, and more.
On the eve of her Netflix special premiere, Feinstein is feeling a combination of “excited” and “a little nervous,” saying with straightforward sincerity, “Hopefully this will change some things for me.”
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Feinstein came up in the comedy world right around the same time as her good friend and collaborator Amy Schumer; they premiered their first Comedy Central half-hours at the same time. Schumer has given Feinstein bit parts in nearly all of her TV shows (Inside Amy Schumer, Life & Beth) and movies (Trainwreck, I Feel Pretty) and even “presented” her previous one-hour special for Comedy Central called Only Whores Wear Purple.
“That was huge having her produce that,” Feinstein says, acknowledging how helpful it was to get support from friends who were becoming major stars before she was. “A lot of my friends got really famous very quickly. Amy got really famous quickly. Nikki [Glaser] got famous relatively quickly. So I was pretty used to that. Everybody always thinks I’m somebody’s assistant. They, like, pile coats on me.”
“I am not above jealousy and do get jealous, and anybody who says they don’t get jealous is lying,” Feinstein adds, before offering up what she says might be the “dumbest answer” to my question about feeling competitive with comedians who shot past her to stardom. “I tend to be more jealous of people that look like me,” she says. “So if there’s some mousy-haired brunette, I’m tracking her. What’s she doing next?”
Stories about raising a young daughter and Feinstein’s impression of her husband (and his crypto-obsessed firehouse buddies) form the heart of Big Guy, which refers to his unfortunate pet name for her. “Strangely, those were the two things I was most scared to do,” she admits. “I was very excited to have a kid, but also very scared about how I would manage this career and a kid. I lost control in a lot of ways, getting married to somebody that’s opposite of me in every way and having a child. My life was just upended in every way, but I got a lot more material. It got me a Netflix special, the things that I was most scared would disrupt my career.”
At least before the Netflix special dropped, Feinstein says she has not had to deal with either the benefits or downsides of fame. “Nobody is stopping me on the street, I roam pretty free,” she says. “It’s not a problem I have, so I can’t be like, ‘I love that I’m not super famous.’ I would like to make a lot more money so that I can bring my daughter everywhere.”
There was a time not too long ago when female comedians became mothers and then just stopped performing. “And I feel like it’s beginning to change now,” Feinstein says. “We’re helping each other and giving each other little tips and stuff like that. So that’s what I really hope that this special could do for me, so that I can have a little more choice over what I do.”
Her husband, meanwhile, will seemingly never stop providing her with hilarious material. After her recent Tonight Show taping, Feinstein says Jimmy Fallon was kind enough to spend some time chatting with them—something she acknowledges may have been a mistake. “He said a lot of crazy things,” Feinstein says of her husband, including that the host “could use the bathroom at the firehouse anytime.”
“God knows what he said to Jimmy Fallon,” Feinstein adds, before breaking into her Staten Island-inflected impression: “Anytime you want to stop by and take a piss, you’re very welcome.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
