What It’s Like to Become the Most Loathed Comic on Fox News

When it comes to conservative media, hell hath no fury like a fictional fetus scorned.

Laurie Kilmartin is a veteran stand-up and TV writer best known for being a finalist on Season Seven of Last Comic Standing and for her prolific writing work on Conan, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and The Bonnie Hunt Show — or, at least, that’s what her bio would have read before May 2022. At that time, the conservative-led Supreme Court was preparing to finally overturn Roe v. Wade and usher in an era of abortion restrictions and bans as a leaked draft of the court’s decision sparked outrage and panic among the womb-possessing population of America. Among the incensed was Kilmartin, who agreed to appear on a panel discussion for MSNBC where she unleashed some triggering abortion jokes that shook the fragility of Fox News and its ilk. 

In her newest special, cheekily titled, Cis Woke Grief Slut, Kilmartin confronts the cancel-mob that came after her following the infamous MSNBC appearance as they attacked her with death threats, doxxings and scathing segments on Hannity and Louder with Crowder. Speaking with the Last Laugh podcast, Kilmartin detailed the fallout from her “dumb little abortion joke.”

“I would like to find out who the leaker is so I can make sweet love to that person,” Kilmartin said of the Supreme Court leak on that fateful May afternoon. “Because that person is a hero to me. And if I get pregnant during our love-making, I will joyfully abort our fetus and let them know.” Following the MSNBC appearance, Kilmartin, who, at the time, was a 48-year-old single mother and unlikely to add another dependent, quickly found herself with the dubious title of “the main character of the conservative internet.” 

Kilmartin said that, almost immediately following the broadcast, the snippet of her snarky comment “got clipped out by Steven Crowder and that entire insane, viral, right-wing Facebook clan. And by the next morning, someone had posted my address on Facebook.” In her stand-up special, Kilmartin clarified that the “someone” was her conservative brother.

Following the explosion of outrage over the joke on social media, Kilmartin was the subject of an hysterical Hannity segment featuring former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Lara Trump, wife of Eric, in a legendary lineup of crackpots whose hilarious indignation left Kilmartin incredulous. “Just these three absolutely pointless people discussing me was unbelievable,” she said of the segment.

“It was really kind of overwhelming,” Kilmartin said of the ensuing weeks when her joke was front-page rage-bait across conservative media, social and otherwise. “For a while, I felt like someone’s going to come kill me. Somebody sent me pictures of my house, which was weird. And then after like three days, it just sort of dissipated and went away.” As the conservative crybabies' attention waned, Kilmartin thought, “That’s what happens, is they’re just this swarm of bees and they’re directed by their dumb Facebook leaders to go after this person. And that can only last for so long, and then they move on to another thing to be enraged about. But it was pretty intense.”

Now, almost two years after the biggest contraceptive controversy of Kilmartin’s career, she doesn’t have any regrets about triggering the reactionaries, but she has learned some lessons. “I don’t think comedy and dunking on people fixes things at all. It just keeps people where they are, angry,” Kilmartin reflected. “So even just being part of that back-and-forth ecosystem is not good for a comic or comedy.”

In other words, triggering conservatives is like an ectopic pregnancy — at a certain point, you just gotta cut it out.