Comedy Crush: Sara Benincasa, Comedian and Author

Sara Benincasa is an award-winning comedian and author. Her memoir, “Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom”, recount her battles with agoraphobia and depression. In “Great“, her modern retelling of “The Great Gatsby“, Naomi Rye finds herself drawn to her next-door neighbor and becomes entangled in the romance and drama of a Hamptons social circle. To cut to the chase, it’s a gender swapped queered out version of “Gatsby.” When Benincasa isn’t churning out jokes, books or one-woman shows, she travels to colleges to talk to students about mental health awareness. If you wanna get the vibe of her stylings before you get your hands on the book, her piece “High School is Forever” is over on Medium now.

60s selfie again

Let’s say you have a record player and someone you have a crush on is at your house but they’re not being super chatty. What record do you put on to fuel conversation?

I would put on the “Superbowl Shuffle” by the 1985 Chicago Bears. It is legendary and brings to mind many important questions about life, love and the nature of being. We would gently hold each other and discuss the music industry in the mid-80s.

What’s your favorite recently invented word?

My favorite invented word is “dickmatize.” My friend Carolyn Castiglia is the first person who ever told me about this word. It concerns the state in which one is so fascinated by dick (real, synthetic or otherwise) that one makes bad choices.

saratweet

Have you ever confused obsession for love?

I have certainly confused obsession for love. Absolutely. And confused love for obsession, as well.

great

If there was a $5,000 level for your Kickstarter, what would the prize be?

Oh, the $5000 level would be that we hold hands on a Ferris wheel and talk about Murphy Brown, a really fantastic show that doesn’t get enough worship these days.

What’s one of your favorite dreams that you can remember?

I loooooove dreams of flying. I think that’s probably actually about sex? But then again, I have dreams about fucking, too. Maybe I just literally really want to fly and there’s no subtext there.

@SaraJBenincasa
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feature image by Lauren Goldberg

As you probably know by now, comedy and women are about the extent of my interests. So why not combine these two things? Comedy Crush will highlight the work of current comedy writers and/or performers in hopes of encouraging a queer lady following so they’ll pander to us for the rest of their careers. Hey, at least I’m trying.

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Brittani

Brittani Nichols is a Los Angeles based comedy person. When she's not tweeting about white people or watching television, she's probably eating pizza. Actually, she's probably doing all three of those things concurrently and when she's not doing THAT, she's sleeping. Brittani also went to Yale and feels weird about mentioning it but wants you to know.

Brittani has written 328 articles for us.

15 Comments

  1. This “Great” book sounds amazing!

    I would talk about Murphy Brown with this human on a ferris wheel any day.

    • Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t really like the original Great Gatsby all that much… This sounds better!

  3. I have had a comedy crush on this woman since the legendary Sarah Palin vlogs of 2008 and NOW HERE SHE IS ON THIS SITE it is a glorious day

  7. I… actually was Not A Fan of the way “Great” handled queerness. Like, in a big way. And I feel kind of like an asshole saying this everywhere I see anything written about the book’s queerness, but it bothers me that people might pick up this book expecting some sweet queer YA offering and walk away feeling potentially really invalidated by the way the book portrayed the queerness of its characters (SPOILER: it’s basically heavily implied that the central queer relationship doesn’t count for anything–doesn’t count as queer, doesn’t count for the characters, etc). As far as I’m concerned, we already have enough media portraying lesbianism as nothing more than a sexual manifestation of one woman’s slavish obsession with another.

    • I see what you’re saying– there need to be more sweet and realistic stories about queer relationships– but I wouldn’t expect a retelling of The Great Gatsby to be sweet. The original is a tragedy about obsessive love and the excess of the upper class. A retelling should have the same themes.

      • Oh, sure, I agree with that. But even with all the fucked-up dynamics of the relationship it was based on, I could have done without the constant “lol but remember they’re not REAL lesbians!”

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