“Of course I want to get married for attention,” confesses Cat Cohen a whopping eight minutes into her new comedy special Come For Me, which hits the streaming service Veeps on October 17. She quickly follows up with a caveat that weddings are “humiliating.” (“If you want to dress up cool and have everyone look at you, try being interesting!” she suggests, with a gesture toward her glittering sequined jumpsuit.) But the joke hits particularly hard if you are in your early-to-mid-to-maybe-late-thirties and wondering if there’s any way to escape the predictability of the marriage plot while still…maybe wanting the conventional things? (One or two of them, at least.)
“Now that I have a boyfriend, I forget, but for so long, my entire life was ‘I have to get a boyfriend,’ and now I’m like, who was that person?” recalls Cohen as we sit outside Katz’s Deli, eating bagels. Cohen recently moved in with her boyfriend of five years, actor Brian Muller, which is allowing her to see a whole new side of him: “He acts like a little boy now that I’m living with him. It’s like, You are so emotionally intelligent, but you eat candy in the morning. He’s perfect.”
Cohen’s tolerance for (ugh) romance may have increased in recent years, but onstage, her persona is much the same as it was back at the start of her career, when she was singing about how “boys never wanted to kiss me, so now I do comedy”; the Houston-raised, Princeton-alum comic and a group of her friend—including Patti Harrison, Mitra Jouhari and Lolly Adefope—have long functioned as the de facto “it girls” of an almost deliberately untrendy alt-comedy scene. Take Cohen’s musical numbers, for example, with their glittering jumpsuits (sourced by stylist Kelsey Randall) and swooning, intentionally affected punchlines, that would come off as anachronistic if she wasn’t so clearly in on the joke.
Some comedians might have trouble making a special about growing up coexist with a host of less-than-demure revelations. (Cohen on recently performing oral sex on a woman for the first time: “It was like putting eyeliner on someone else.”) But Cohen is uniquely gifted at establishing and maintaining a party vibe no matter how tonally dark her material gets, a gift she’s had ample opportunity to hone during her years’ worth of cabaret shows at the East Village gay bar Club Cumming. Cohen, who cohosts the podcast Seek Treatment with fellow comedian Pat Regan, is skilled at referencing her physical form for laughs without muddying the comedic waters with unexamined fatphobia. In Cohen’s world, the joke is always that the world can’t accept a big ass, not on the big-ass haver herself. (“My boyfriend loves my body, because he’s a fucking pervert,” Cohen confides coyly to her Come For Me audience.)