Queer Joy Crushes in Fortune Feimster’s ‘Crushing It’

Sometimes, a comic will cultivate a stage persona that’s angry and dark (Marc Maron) so you’ll be impressed by their depth. Others are so virtuosic (Eddie Izzard) that you’re struck by the elegance of their writing. As for Fortune Feimster? She’s an adorable goof whose recurring motifs include her mom’s quirky dating life, her own love for chain restaurants and her preferred bathing costume: a huge T-shirt and cutoff sweatpants, aka her “lesbian swimsuit.” In Feimster’s latest special — Crushing It, out today on Netflix — politics come closer to the fore than they have in the past, but not in a way that makes it seem like she’s straining for profundity. Her craft and skill are so finely honed that you might mainly remember her having a good time all the time, and only notice long after her set is over how much it actually affected you. 

Feimster’s previous two specials (both of which are also streaming on Netflix) touched on politics too, but in a more implicit way. In 2020’s Sweet & Salty, Feimster describes how growing up chubby kept her from getting kidnapped as a child, since “snatchers” have a “type,” which isn’t girls who look like the kid from The Sandlot. She ribs the younger self whose main motivations for joining the Girl Scouts were access to cookies and uninterrupted time with other girls; back then, Feimster’s mother Ginger called her a “tomboy,” an acceptable euphemism for “future lesbian.” Good Fortune, from 2022, lets Feimster mock her adult self for learning, during COVID, that she lacks survival skills, knowing a positive stereotype about lesbians is that they have them. Stories about the men Ginger dated after her divorce from Feimster’s father hint at financial challenges for the family that Ginger was trying to solve by locking down some strange old man or other who could look after them. But we’re also assured that, even though Feimster wouldn’t figure out she was queer until many years later, there was enough money to celebrate her 18th birthday at Hooters.

Growing up in the South in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Feimster has a lot of stories about the heteronormative performances she had to put on. She made her formal society début in a wedding-like ceremony (“It looked and felt like I was marrying my brother, which is just a little too on-the-nose for North Carolina”). She attended an all-girls’ college, where what passed for intimacy for Feimster was when her friends let her moisturize their forearms. She let Ginger dress her in either power suits or the kind of infantile “sister-wife” floral dresses Lane Bryant sold at the time. So one of the true delights of Feimster’s trio of Netflix specials is watching the progression of her relationship with Jacquelyn Smith — Jax, as Feimster calls her on stage. In Sweet & Salty, Feimster and Jax are engaged. In Good Fortune, we hear the hilarious story of Feimster’s proposal at a Big Sur hotel, assisted by a staffer named Craig who reminds Feimster of the candlestick in Beauty and the Beast. Feimster talks about Jax’s much more butch ex-girlfriends, several of whom were cops, and how easily deciding to spend an exorbitant amount of money treating their dog Biggie (don’t worry, he came through it fine!) was how Feimster out-butched them all. 

After their quiet COVID wedding, Feimster and Jax want to blow things out for their honeymoon, and Crushing It — which Feimster performs in a Barbie pink power suit of the kind she gently roasted Ginger, back in Sweet & Salty, for buying her — opens with the story of their trip to the Maldives. What Feimster doesn’t know before agreeing to Jax’s choice of destination is that sex between same-sex partners is illegal there; it’s also illegal in Qatar, where they have a layover on the way. 

Feimster wrings as much material out of the situation as she can: pretending, at the hotel in Qatar, that she and Jax are cousins on their way to meet their husbands; cracking that only one of them can pass as straight and the other sometimes gets called “sir” in public bathrooms; that she won’t risk drinking a bottle of beer since it could be a trap to catch lesbians. But when she gets to a bit about only having one photo of themselves on the trip, seven feet apart and with a random family between them, the story’s barbs get a lot more palpable. Feimster’s rising career success coinciding with her marriage have opened up the world for her in ways that would have been unthinkable to the young Feimster we heard about in Sweet & Salty, looking down from her birthday stool at a ring of Hooters waitresses jumping up and down for her. But there are dangers from which Feimster’s wealth and privilege can’t insulate her. 

The magic of Feimster’s comedy, though, is her facility for shaping dark stories without preaching or self-pity. The Maldives story reminds her fans — at least some of whom probably haven’t thought very much about it — that Feimster and her wife still face not just discrimination but potential legal consequences, depending where in the world they try to be in love. 

But Feimster slides out of that story into a lighter one, about an early trip to Italy with Jax and how each of them learned how the other deals with travel stress. She jokes about Ginger having made Feimster her “husband” before Jax was in the picture, and the nightmare of Ginger and Jax’s birthdays being five days apart knowing Ginger is going to be jealous of anything Feimster gives Jax. (Feimster clarifies that Ginger loves Jax; she just thinks Jax stole her man: “My wife is Jolene.”) Recounting the purchase of her first house with Jax leads Feimster into a big chunk about haunted houses she has known, and why you certainly should ask a realtor if the house they’re showing you has ghosts. Feimster glides easily from being the fool in a chunk about racing to her hometown Hardee’s before they stopped serving biscuits (it’s the timer her biological clock is set to) to one in which Ginger is the fool for getting herself into enough trouble at a cemetery for the fire department to have gotten involved.

Longtime followers of Feimster’s social media accounts will know one of her recurring bits is to shoot herself giddily dancing with ice cream. It’s Feimster in a butter pecan nutshell: not just treating herself but reveling in celebrating a tiny pleasure. Feimster has made a lot of great bits out of her early disappointments, as comics do. Feimster’s also celebrating the big pleasures of her life — happiness, love, the chance to see the world — and meeting hate and horror with queer joy. 

That defiance may be Crushing It’s most political statement of all.