How Fortune Feimster Found Hope in Her Troll’s ‘Nasty’ Hate
Comedian Fortune Feimster has had an incredibly busy two years. And she put as much of it as she could fit in her new Netflix stand-up special, Good Fortune.
In this bonus episode, Feimster returns to the The Last Laugh podcast to discuss moving past her coming-out story in her second Netflix hour, explain why she decided to respond to a particularly “nasty” Instagram message on stage, and share stories from the set of the upcoming action series in which she co-stars with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If Feimster’s first special, Sweet and Salty, was “very much a story of me figuring out who I was and my journey into being more comfortable in my skin and coming out,” as she puts it, Good Fortune is about who that person has become as an adult, including her decision to propose to her then-girlfriend Jax and ultimately get married during the pandemic.
The comedian’s openness about her relationship has been met with overwhelming support from her fans. But there will always be social media haters, and she decided to address one specific Instagram troll on stage.
On the day her wedding was announced in the press, she received this Instagram message from a man named Gary: “How long have you and your wife been mentally ill, taco-licking lesbians who should be put in Alcatraz?”
As you can see in the exclusive clip from the special below, she spends several minutes hilariously unpacking exactly what might drive someone to send a stranger that kind of message, before arriving at an unexpectedly hopeful conclusion.
“You don’t want to reward that behavior in any way or encourage it, people using their social media to spread hate,” Feimster tells me. “Normally, I ignore it. I don’t pay much attention to it. But this one was so specific that it just stood out to me. And what I liked about it was that I did feel this sense of, there is some progress here, even though he did not intend that in any way, shape, form, or fashion. That is the reality of the situation.”
She adds, “I like the idea of turning something negative into something positive, and that’s the only reason why I decided to include it. Because you can’t choose what people send to you, or how they choose to behave towards you, but you can choose how you receive it.”
In the bit, Feimster ultimately zeroes in on Gary’s use of the word “wife,” saying, “Gary just recognized my marriage… and that is called progress!”
“He says some really nasty things, but he does refer to Jax as my ‘wife,’” she explains in our conversation. “And there was a time when people who felt like him did not want us to be married, refused to recognize marriages, would not use a term like ‘wife.’ And he did it so quickly and casually that I was like, that is progress. The people sending in hate mail five years ago, 10 years ago, would never have said that word, because to them that word was so sacred. We weren’t allowed to have it.”
Comedian Fortune Feimster Finally Gets the Breakout Year She Deserves
When Feimster and I talked in January 2020 around the release of her first Netflix special, she lamented the fact that there was little to no LGBTQ representation in pop culture when she was growing up. If she had been able to see people like herself on screen, she said, “I think I probably would have come out sooner. Once a mirror is being held up to you, you can see yourself better.”
Now, more and more, she is becoming that representation for the people who watch her comedy, whether they are young queer kids searching for someone who looks like them or presumably straight adults like Gary who are inching toward acceptance even if they don’t realize it yet.
“I just try to tell stories that are are authentic to me in my life as a lesbian, as a gay person,” Feimster says. “Here’s my relationship, here’s my wife, here’s our life together. So hopefully somebody out there can take something from that and relate to it as well.”
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to ‘The Last Laugh’ on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
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