“I’m feeling a little loopy today, I think I should eat something,” says Catherine Cohen, fluttering a menu with all the camp drama of a burlesque dancer wielding a feathered fan. Best known in the UK for her 2022 Netflix stand-up special, The Twist..? She’s Gorgeous – which sees her prancing about in a flouncy pink frock while singing “Boys never wanted to kiss me / So now I do comedy” – the 32-year-old Texan offers a beguiling combination of old-school glamour and messy, millennial anxiety.
She’s certainly thrown on the vintage chic for me today, reclining on a banquette in the Soho Theatre dressed in a snakeskin-print jumpsuit, bold licks of kohl framing her big green eyes. Cohen has the buzz of a starlet on the make as she falls over herself trying to tell me about being cast in the popular television comedy Only Murders in the Building alongside her comedy idols Martin Short and Steve Martin (“the only celebrity I ever asked for a selfie with!”), her book of poems, God I Feel Modern Tonight, and her imminent return to Edinburgh Fringe, having in 2019 won the festival’s Best Newcomer award – the coveted prize that launched the careers of Tim Minchin, Harry Hill and the Mighty Boosh.
But she has cause to take a “loopy” turn when I ask about the stroke she suffered this time last year. “Even the thought of talking about it is giving me a panic attack,” she says. “But don’t worry, I do need to talk about it because I think I kind of shoved it aside after it happened and I’m only just starting to process it. This can be part of my therapy. Shall we get cheese toasties? Will that help? Will you help?” Cohen’s sentences have a tendency to cascade like this, as if skittering along in high heels to keep up with her hectic trains of thought.
Once she’s got the toastie in her fuchsia-nailed hands, Cohen talks me through the events of last July. “I was in my apartment in New York, packing to come over for the [Edinburgh] Fringe,” she says. “Standing over my suitcase, I came over kind of weird, like…,” she wobbles her head and her eyes flicker. “But I’ve always had migraines, so I thought that’s what it must be.” Within seconds, Cohen was feeling so faint she had to sit down, so she picked up the phone to call her boyfriend.
“As the phone started to ring, I realised I needed to pause the television to talk to him. Then I was annoyed. I thought: why isn’t the TV pausing? It was because my arm wasn’t moving. I thought: holy f---. Then, something in my brain felt like it’d short-circuited and I thought: I think I just had a stroke. It felt very obvious.”
Uncertain about the status of her medical insurance, she took a taxi to the hospital, where the news was good and bad. “They told me that usually when a person as young as me has a stroke it’s because they have a hole in the heart. Which I did. But it was fixable, so that was good… I guess.” Cohen cancelled her tour and found herself on the operating table, beneath the scalpel of a surgeon named Dr Love. “When Dr Love fixes the hole in your heart,” she notes wryly, “you know your next show is writing itself.”
She bites into her toastie and admits she was a “terrible, demanding patient, the worst” during her convalescence. “I had a million questions, a million panic attacks every five seconds, I needed everybody’s attention and I needed to make the doctors and nurses laugh at all times…”
Was Cohen always this much of a diva? “Oh, yeah,” she laughs. “I was born ready for my close-up. When I was putting together the Netflix special, I dug out some old home movies of me as a child, and there I was in my pink fluffy dressing gown, waiting to be a star.” She sighs. “I realise that everything I’ve done in my creative career has been an attempt to get back to being that happy, funny, confident little girl. Because life wants to knock some of that out of you, doesn’t it?”
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1991, Cohen is the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother who met while studying at Princeton. She was waving jazz hands in her cot and by the age of five was constantly dancing, singing and mimicking TV commercials. But as she grew up, she struggled with “mean” high-school girls and the conservative Christian culture of the Bible Belt. “At school and in church groups, I was taught that my thoughts were disgusting, that my body was disgusting and I should cover it up, so as not to tempt the boys. It seemed funny at the time and it took me a while to realise how damaging it was.”
Although she rejoiced in the “sheer bouncy fun” of the pop charts of the era, she realised she was absorbing “equally damaging” ideas about the acceptability of female bodies by watching her favourite stars Britney Spears and the Spice Girls. Not feeling she was as skinny as her heroines, she went on her first diet at the age of 15; a decision that “f---ed me up for life”, as she puts it. “Those ideas of what is allowed, what is attractive, sink in so deeply. I’m 32. I’ve been with a lovely supportive boyfriend for five years and I’m doing well in showbiz. But I still think about my weight every day.”
Cohen initially set her sights on a career in musical theatre. “I saw my first Broadway show, Hairspray, when I was 12 and skipped back to Houston singing Good Morning Baltimore. I sang that in the school talent show and came second – I’ll never forgive the judges for that. But I also learnt: use your haters for motivation, right?”
Cohen followed her parents to Princeton, where she studied English and theatre: she played a lead role in a concert staging of Kiss Me, Kate and wrote about “the poetry of nostalgia” for her thesis. Returning in 2013 to deliver a graduation day speech, she gave a shout out to her thesis adviser, quipping that “my poetry analysis quickly became a 90-page book about my feelings, and you had to read it”.
Today, she notes that while older generations knock the narcissism of millennials, humans have always been self-involved. “Maybe I am self-centred,” she shrugs, “but what else would I be? At least I am aware of it…” The author Leslie Jamison has argued that the rise of confessional memoirs, so often identified as evidence of our increasingly narcissistic culture, may actually prove the opposite; the fact that they sell so well suggesting that millions of readers are, in fact, acutely interested in the interior lives of others.
“That’s a beautiful thought,” beams Cohen. “I’ve always loved personal, confessional books, poems, comedy… I am obsessed with knowing everybody else’s secrets; that’s what you get at the Edinburgh Fringe. Every hour, somebody is spilling their guts, revealing their anxieties, tackling all of life’s traumas, getting up in front of an audience and asking all the weird, dark, 3am questions – bringing those fears into the spotlight and making them less lonely.”
Cohen tells me she was left with little choice but to write her own material after “feeling so out of place in musical theatre. There are often only two types of women in Broadway shows and I didn’t look like either of them... Even now, I catch myself thinking about the roles I might have got if I’d looked different. Then I think: who f---ing cares? I’ve written myself the best role and, of course, I wrote it the perfect, sexy size and shape for me!” The collision of her vintage style and turn of phrase (“gee whizz!”) and 21st-century frankness is what makes the sparks fly – earning her an enthusiastic following on TikTok, where her videos have had 3.7m likes.
Timing played its part in Cohen’s success. She arrived in New York just as the actor Alan Cumming opened his East Village cabaret venue, Club Cumming, in 2017. There, she built her act, belting out comic songs. In her 2022 number What Are You Running From?, she flips her pity onto the toned gym bunnies who tell her she should work out to lose weight and improve her mental health. “I do suffer from depression / Or as I like to call it: / ‘Crying because outside smells like the past’,” she sings, before adding, “If you’re someone who uses and cleans a blender every day / It’s like… what’s really going on? […] Why’d you post on Facebook that you’re running a marathon? / Why do you think we all want to know? / What are you running from?”
As Cohen finishes her sandwich – leaving the crusts – she tells me excitedly about her new spangly stage costumes and the full live band she is taking up to Edinburgh. “I do feel comedy is more valued in the UK,” she says. “In America, it’s more like a step you have to climb before you get a TV writing or acting job.” She shakes her head. “I want all of it – writing, acting, directing, singing, dancing – and still to carry on with my comedy career…” She catches her breath and laughs. “What I’d really like is something like Cher’s 1970s TV variety show. Where she got to do a bit of everything – and in feathers!”
Catherine Cohen: Come for Me is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh (edfringe.com), Aug 1-25
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