Rachel Bradley
Stand-up specials
A loud Southern storyteller who treats her wild past as the punchline.
Rachel Bradley hits the stage in five-inch heels and immediately starts talking about her relatives like she’s holding court in a crowded booth. Her cadence is pure Southern storyteller, leaning hard into her drawl when a punchline needs an extra beat to land. She doesn’t just describe her parents; she acts out their bad advice. She’ll recall her mother using battlefield medical photos to explain childbirth, delivering the memory with the flat, conversational tone of someone reading a grocery list.
She frequently tours theaters as the opener for Christopher Titus, and co-hosts his podcast. Her job in those massive rooms is to grab a cold crowd and shake them awake, which she handles by launching straight into direct crowd work and blunt personal stories.
Her 2022 special Alpha Chick is built around her upbringing and her wilder years. She talks about the friction of being raised by a hippie mother and a Marine father, letting the stark facts of her childhood do the work. She relies heavily on the weird specifics of her past, describing her grandmother’s crooked tattooed eyebrows or comparing a Xanax habit to white-out for bad relationships.
When she zooms out to broader complaints about modern men, she leans into familiar battle-of-the-sexes tropes. But she always pulls the set back to her own poor choices. She’ll detail a disastrous romance or a massive mistake, shrug her shoulders, and wait for the room to laugh at the wreckage.