One day this past summer when I knew I would have a little free time, I thought I would meet up with Cameron Esposito, who seems to have very little free time anymore. A few years ago she had been a fixture on the Chicago comedy scene but decided the Midwest wasn’t stable ground for a female comic with ambition: “I didn’t want to be 48, still renting an apartment and having to go out and perform every night, just to barely live.”
So in 2012, at 30, she moved to LA, and within a year she became a headliner. By late summer she had turned into that rarest of commodities, a buzzed-about young comedian with a rising broad national appeal, one who has made her experience as a gay woman the centerpiece of her act.
We made plans, but on the afternoon we were set to meet, I heard nothing.
An hour passed, and another.
Then I received a text: Esposito had been asked to perform on Conan O’Brien’s talk show. She had gathered clothes together and made a beeline for Burbank. A little while later, she texted a photo of herself getting comfortable, post-show, behind O’Brien’s desk; in Andy Richter’s sidekick chair sat comic Rhea Butcher, her partner and fiance. In the photo, they’re mugging. The thing is, Esposito pictures herself hosting a late-night show — catch her homecoming Tuesday at Lincoln Hall (Butcher opens) and you’ll likely picture it, too. She’s a bubbly, effortless charmer, a natural kibitzer who actually welcomes the chance to go off-script.
In that picture, Esposito and Butcher were having a moment, a vision of their future.
A few hours later, after Butcher was gone (having driven 90 minutes to her own show that night, opening for Maria Bamford), a town car deposited Esposito back at their apartment in the hipster enclave of Los Feliz. This is where we met. She was in stage makeup and wearing her stage clothes (denim jacket, vest), and, as the car drove off, she realized that she didn’t have her keys. She was locked out. And so, waiting for her landlord, she sat in the driveway, picking from a complementary tin of Garrett popcorn that the “Conan” show had given her as swag.
After a bit, she knocked on the door of her 19-year-old neighbors: We don’t know each other well, she said, but she had locked herself out, and could she leave her stuff with them because she wants to get a burrito?
Down the street, eating her burrito, she went over her day, took stock of herself.
Long story short, she’s overbooked: She’s doing two weekly podcasts (“Put Your Hands Together,” the action-sci-fi-based “Wham Bam Pow”), one produced before an audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre here. She’s writing for Vice and LGBT magazine The Advocate. She’s putting together a book proposal. She and Butcher are developing a TV show.
In the year since appearing on Craig Ferguson’s show — a night when fellow guest Jay Leno called her the “future of comedy” — her stand-up schedule accelerated. And her fall tour is to support her new album, “Same Sex Symbol,” which needs promoting. Esposito has become so busy that, the day we met up, she was booked to perform at two stand-up showcases. But her landlord took so long to open her apartment, she missed the first show. She made it to the second.
In true Los Angeles underground style, this second show was in an unmarked space above a Chinese restaurant. She was one of nine comics; like many stand-ups, she does showcases to work out new material. The restaurant was clearing out. It was late, a few customers were paying checks. Esposito tiptoed past and up a narrow staircase and stood in back of a dark party room, jotting notes in a Field Notes notebook and waiting for her turn to go on. A bad Jack Black knock-off stepped off stage and a woman who whined about Instagram stepped on. The emcee greeted Esposito, who whispered: “I’m on ‘Conan’ in 55 minutes, so …”
She went next.
For 10 minutes, on a bill of mostly wannabes, it seemed unfair: she was the real deal. She didn’t tell jokes so much as the story of her day, stopping to talk directly to some of the 40 or so people before her, slipping in a nod to her fiance, pausing to explain herself, the way she often does onstage: “As you can tell by my haircut, I am a ThunderCat … And also, a giant lesbian. Of course, I am. Of course, I am. I have a side mullet!” She said her look reflects her gender identity: “I have a Joan-from-‘Mad Men’ body but a Don Draper attitude …. I can wear any number of skirt-suits but I want to wear a skinny tie.”
Esposito told me later she recognized early in her career that she was talking to people who vote. Simply by discussing her life she could use her job subtly to sway opinions: “I am an outspoken feminist and think gay people should be treated well and I have a lot of anger, but it all comes from this small smiley woman, which is fortunate.”
Her sister Allyson Esposito, director of cultural grants programs for Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, said she remembered sometimes baking cupcakes for Cameron’s first shows in Chicago and handing treats to strangers: “A gesture of good will. Sometimes I’d be in the audience hiding in my turtleneck when it was an unfriendly crowd. But Cameron, with this energy, was figuring out how to make everyone comfortable.”
Anthony Jeselnik has seen this charm offensive. The comedian — whose material walks, and at times gleefully steps over, the line between thoughtful and provocatively offensive — hired Esposito to be the opening act for his entire fall tour last year, explaining that he did so because: “I’m not so thrilled with some of my audience who are there to laugh for the wrong reasons. I want to test those people. I want someone who is the opposite of me. So Cameron was nervous early on, and I could see, after I would introduce her, the audience going through stages of acceptance and trying to figure her out. Which is right about when that thing in Boston happened.”
“That thing:” Esposito was greeted by a row of young guys mocking her.
What’s going on, she said — confused but game.
“You look like the kind of woman who probably doesn’t sleep with men,” one of the guys said.
Telling me about the incident almost a year later, Jeselnik said Esposito looked shaken at the comment and stammered. And then she recovered: I am a lesbian, Esposito explained to her hecklers, and that not-sleeping-with-men part, “that’s the biggest part!” The way she looked, she explained to them, was all “on purpose.” And finally, she said, there was no chance that these guys were less into her than she was into them.
She left the stage. Behind the curtain, Jeselnik asked her where the guys were. She pointed.
“So I went out and basically I tore them apart,” Jeselnik recalled. “Because I do not like someone disrespecting my opener. But Cameron doesn’t need defending. It shook her but it never happened again. Cameron, she has a real thirst for power; she watches you, she is actively learning, so everything becomes this means to an end.”
Indeed, Boston was pivotal.
On her new album, her account of the show is a highlight; footage of her telling the story has been watched more than 500,000 times on YouTube. A few months later, in Las Vegas, when someone shouted “You are the devil,” Esposito was prepared. She shot back: First, work on your delivery. Second, the devil doesn’t exist. Third, “You’re in Vegas. I am the least demonic thing here — this isn’t the best place for you.”
A corner was turned.
And not a decade earlier, Esposito was still figuring out what it meant to be gay onstage. She is from Western Springs. She dated the captain of the football team in high school. She had crossed eyes as a kid and wore an eye patch for eight years.
“In the movie version, I was an outcast, but in truth, people were nice and I was always overcompensating with my personality,” she said.
Her father is a lawyer, her mother a teacher. Esposito went to college in Boston, studied theology, took improv classes and planned to become a social worker in Chicago. When she returned home, she took a semester of social work courses at the University of Chicago before realizing she didn’t want to do social work and she didn’t like improv.
“My parents were confused,” she said, “and probably imagined a life spent in bars doing stand-up. Plus, around 2006, when I started doing stand-up in Chicago, I was still coming out in a way and would talk about my sexuality. I was coming from a very conservative family and had a difficult time (coming out). It was bad for a while. But I was kind of also coming out to the world, and I think I needed to get onstage and talk though why that was OK. I remember getting off stage at the (now defunct) Lakeshore Theater and (comedian) Ted Alexandro said to me ‘That was great, but what do you believe?’ Because clearly, I was convincing myself to be the person I am.”
For a couple of years she made a living as a stand-up in Chicago, becoming confident enough to start a series of classes at the Lincoln Lodge for female comics. Inspired by the hubbub over Christopher Hitchens’ infamous 2007 “Why Women Aren’t Funny” essay for Vanity Fair, “I wondered if I could train women to develop five good minutes of stage time, and maybe those women would have the confidence to do a few open-mic nights.” The classes, named the “Feminine Comique,” became popular. Esposito taught collection officers and marketing professionals and female priests, and referred her students to the comedy night at Cole’s bar in Logan Square.
By the time she left Chicago, she had taught more than 100 women and the bar had a heathy female comedy presence. At least 300 have taken the class since Esposito left.
Comedian Kelsie Huff, who teaches the class now, was one of the first students. “Cameron wasn’t crazy-established when she started doing it; she was going places and her idea was good: ‘Here is what I have learned, so let’s grow together and stop apologizing for wanting to do this.’ I think her enthusiasm became a kind of jumping-off point for the community of female stand-up comedians that came out of those classes.”
At Cole’s, Esposito also met Butcher.
“I went to the open mic,” Butcher recalls, “and Cameron said, ‘You want to go up, don’t you? You should go up. Go, just go.’ And I did, and we were friends for a long time. There were so many people in the (stand-up scene), and Cameron was super helpful. I learned how to play a lousy room from her and how to play a great room, how to be nice to people who aren’t nice. I was kind of out, and mostly proud. I would use a word like ‘lesbian’ onstage and people are like, ‘ick.’ From her I learned, ‘Oh, this is how being out is a happy thing.'”
They didn’t become a couple until Cameron played a show in Peoria with Bobcat Goldthwait. They decided to date, and bonded with Goldthwait, who became a friend of the couple. Peoria “turned into this weirdly special place for us,” Esposito said. And so, early last month, when she returned to its Jukebox Comedy Club alone, the trip was melancholy. Butcher, whose grandmother was ill, had flown back home to Ohio and missed the first dates of their tour.
“I ended up driving around the South for about a week, playing shows alone,” Esposito said. “I wanted to be off the beaten path. I wanted to feel like my stuff could be good anywhere. In Peoria, the club is not downtown. It’s miles away, in the country, across from a dirt track where in warm months you can hear races from the stage. Rhea wasn’t there, so the club booked, like, five openers and I hit the stage an hour and a half after showtime. But I couldn’t help thinking, no, this is perfect.
“You can stay in LA and have a cushy writing job, or maybe, to be great, you need to play a club in the country, perform while cars are revving in the background, stay in a moderately murder-looking motel and play for 60 people who have been waiting hours. You get laughs and you know you’re going to take off.”
You play in Peoria.
Twitter @borrelli
