Confessions of a Homeschooler

Cortney Warner opens Confessions of a Homeschooler by noting that she never has to announce how she grew up because the awkwardness gives it away, and once people find out, they talk to her the way someone talks to a dog at an animal shelter, congratulating her on being well socialized and having all her vaccines. She uses that premise to frame a set built on dry resentment about growing up adopted and Asian in rural 1990s Ohio. Even her first name carries a minor grievance: her parents dropped the U from Cortney so she would stand out, a decision she points out was redundant in her corner of Ohio.

The special was recorded on May 2, 2025, at The Blue Room at Third Man Records in Nashville, where Warner produces and runs the venue’s comedy nights. Ahead of the taping, Nashville Scene noted that her parents were not invited to hear the material about growing up in their household. Burn This Records, the DIY comedy label founded by Brandie Posey, released both the full video on YouTube and the audio album on February 27, 2026. By then, Warner was a decade into stand-up after moving to Nashville at 21 to work as a session guitarist, realizing she hated it, and pivoting to comedy in 2016 while keeping a day job in hedge funds. It serves as her follow-up to her 2022 self-produced debut, Pointy Boys.

Her strongest stretches focus on the heavy adult baggage churchgoers and neighbors dumped on her when she was still a kid. She recalls church ladies interrupting her while she ate Goldfish crackers to remind her how lucky she was to be adopted instead of being prostituted or sent to a Nike factory. That thread pays off in a story about two older girls from the Christmas pageant choir dragging her into a supply closet; Warner punched one hard enough to break her glasses, all while wondering if three cents a year at the Nike factory sounded better than getting beaten up by a girl in bifocals. Elsewhere, she digs into the cultural limbo of eating white-people food at home while fitting in with neither white peers nor Asian kids raised in Asian households, and moving to Nashville only to enthusiastically misunderstand what a guy at a bar meant when he asked if she was into BBC.