Catherine Cohen

She steps to the microphone in rhinestones and feathers and immediately demands undivided attention. A piano plays a slow, sparkly vamp while she sings about the indignity of answering emails, interrupting her own cabaret act to complain about a guy she met on an app. Her delivery is breathy, frantic, and entirely self-aware. She reads short poems from a notebook, belts out a Broadway-style run, and then asks the front row if anyone wants to buy her a salad.

As alternative comedy drifted toward subdued, deadpan storytelling in the late 2010s, she sprinted in the exact opposite direction. She built a following in New York by reviving cabaret for crowds that treat iced coffee as a personality trait. Her specific flavor of hyper-feminized, dramatic theater gave a whole wave of younger comics permission to stop wearing hoodies and start treating the stage like a spotlight.

The comedy relies on a piano accompanist to hold down a melody while she spins off on a tangent. She builds her act out of pure entitlement, describing a panic attack with the tone of someone reviewing a bad hotel room. The laughs don’t come from traditional misdirection. They emerge from the sheer volume of her grievances as she rattles off five distinct insecurities in a single breath. The routine only stalls if a crowd hesitates to indulge her constant need for validation. When a bit gets quiet, she usually just glares at the room and tells them they are wrong.

Her podcast Seek Treatment, co-hosted with comic Pat Regan, pipes the same boy-obsessed, neurotic persona directly into her fans’ earbuds.