Fortune Feimster

You are ruining my day.

21 years. What were you doing before Chelsea Lely? I was a journalist. I was an entertainment journalist for eight years. That was my day job. And so I would write during the day and I started taking growlings like improv classes at night. And I started my own group. So we were doing shows around town. And then 2007, I started in the belly room at a comedy store.

Joe Coy had seen me do, I had this character, a Hooters waitress named Darlene Witherspoon.

Oh, that blew up. You were her.

So that was like, I put that on YouTube and it was like early days YouTube.

Yeah.

And he saw it and showed it to Chelsea. But nothing came of it for like a year. And then I submitted a writing packet when they were looking for a new writer. And she remembered me from that. Come on. Yeah. Well, I was trying to get on the round table. Oh, right. And they would... Oh. Darlene Witherspoon. Witherspoon, okay. Look at that grainy video. Feels like it... That's great.

I was trying to get on the roundtable back then before I was a writer and they said I was too low energy. So I was on the radar but not enough to be on the show.

Probably not. I was still pretty green. When I submitted the writing packet, I thought there's no way I'm going to get this. They had like 300 submissions. and they narrowed it down to like 10 of us, and they came, I was more of a sketch performer, even though I was doing standup. I had just done Last Comic Standing. They came to my grounding shows, and,

I didn't know when they hired me, they were kind of hiring me more for sketch. Because I had no, even though I was an entertainment journalist, I had no writer's room experience. So I felt pretty lacking in the writer's room for a while. It's a whole different animal. Yeah.

And then finally someone pulled me aside and said, we hired you more for your sketch comedy skills and to be on the show more than your writing skills.

They yell jokes over each other. And I don't, I like can't do that. I don't like competing for.

Even on the round table, I kind of would like sit, sit, sit, boom. I would always sort of time out the when to punch in and then I would kind of sit quiet again.

And sometimes you would say a joke and then a person would act it out and that was their whole thing was just acting out your jokes.

a person who didn't prepare at all.

And you're like, wait a second. You're just repeating my joke.

Oh, that's a fucking peeve.

yeah that was fun yes because i don't like them competing with other comics i'm like i want you to have your joke i'll have my joke you have your joke and then everybody you know instead of like the person that doesn't shut up i know i know and you ever had a i've been a few writers room you ever had a joke bomb in a writer's room yeah because you're amongst your peers everybody's like

Oh, I wasn't going there. That's what you were trying to say.

They're just excited to see you, yeah.