Riki Lindhome

Riki Lindhome sits with an acoustic guitar and plays bright, plucky folk music about physical failure and clinical despair. She maintains a stance of sunny optimism, singing sweet melodies about invasive medical procedures and using a literal smiley-face and frowny-face emoji scale to rate her own tragedies. She will deliver a devastating update from a fertility doctor in the exact same cheerful register she uses to tune her instrument.

For years, she was half of the musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates, playing satirical, expletive-heavy pop songs about modern indignities. Her solo work, anchored by her stage show Dead Inside and the album No Worries If Not, narrows that focus to her own decade-long fertility struggle. While many solo shows lean into harrowing trauma confessions, Lindhome actively works against the form. She designs her hour to let the audience know early on that her story ends happily, granting them permission to laugh without guilt at the string of miscarriages and failed IVF cycles that follow.

She treats jokes not as a way to access sadness, but as a rigid shield against it. The songs are dense with medical specifics and unsentimental observations about aging, but she never slows the tempo to ask for sympathy. Instead, she relies on her natural sweetness, grinning through the darkest stretches of her life and daring the room to keep the beat. Her television acting brings people to the theater, but on stage she operates strictly as a musician determined to get to the next chorus.