Rosebud Baker’s New Special Proves That Mother Knows Best

I’ve never seen a stand-up comedy special quite like Rosebud Baker’s The Mother Lode, which drops this week on Netflix. Baker, a writer for Saturday Night Live, That Damn Michael Che and Inside Amy Schumer, filmed the special in two parts — one while she was several months pregnant and the other after she had given birth to her daughter. The result is a both-sides look at motherhood that’s bitingly honest and honestly hilarious. 

I recently talked to Baker about her unconventional approach to filming a comedy special, co-parenting with another stand-up comic and surviving SNL50 hysteria.

“I was on the road while I was pregnant. Right before the beginning of the tour, I was like, ‘I want to shoot an hour by the end of this, but I don’t know if it’s going to be good enough to be a full hour.’ I was talking to Ryan Hamilton, who’s a great comic, and he was like, ‘Why don’t you just do half and half, like shoot half now and shoot half later? And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”

“Then I can kind of make it a ‘perspective from both sides’ kind of thing. Now what ended up happening is I shot that first hour and I felt like, ‘Oh, actually this is a full hour. But why not just see what happens if I stick with this plan?’ So then I shot the second hour and I was like, ‘I don’t even want to use both of them. I just want to use the second hour,’ because when you’re a comic, you like the last thing you did better than the thing before.” 

“I found an editor, Kelly Lyon, who is incredible. She got me two different cuts of the special. There’s one cut with both hours together, and there’s another cut of just the second hour. And I was so much more interested in the one that was both of them.”

“Truly from month to month, I didn’t know what this special was gonna look like. But finally, once I got to the other side of it, it ended up being what I set out for it to be.”

“Parenting is a challenge, no matter what way you cut it. I do think there are advantages to being two comics (Baker’s husband, Andy Haynes, is also a comedian), which is that we can go on the road together. There have been gigs where Andy will go up, and I’ll be backstage with the baby. And then we literally pass her off between sets.” 

“If I wasn’t married to a comic, that wouldn’t be possible. And I’d be on the road missing her. It’s cool to be able to travel so much with your kids. You get to show them everything. I didn’t travel that much as a baby. It’s really fun and exciting, and of course, there’s not a ton of people offering night care for babies, so there’s that.” 

“We have to carefully schedule everything, and both of us are so bad at that kind of thinking. I can’t tell you how many times there’s been like, ‘Oh shit, we both have a 9 p.m., spot and it’s today. What are we doing?’ But we’ve learned how to compromise. It’s pure chaos, but we’re figuring it out.”

“My dad has a kind of mean sense of humor. I think I got my sense of humor from him. It was this mean teasing that I always got a kick out of. We’d be in the car. He’d see somebody running weird, and he’d always point out, like, ‘Look at this guy run!’ Kind of a bully, if I look back on it, but he just cracked me up.” 

“My mom just had this very silly sense of humor at the same time.” 

“We didn’t watch comedy together, but I do remember specifically watching cartoons constantly and my dad would always say the punchline of the cartoon. Like if Bugs Bunny was gonna steal something, he’d always call it out before it happened. Some of my earliest fights with my dad surrounded him stealing Bugs Bunny’s punchlines.”

“When I started to write jokes, somebody suggested to me that I watch old specials — specials that I really liked or specials by really great writers. I’d sit down and write out the joke and then identify the premise and the punchline. I started there: ‘This kind of punchline is a misdirect. Some of them are just act-outs.’ Identifying the difference between those was really interesting to me. And after a while, you just start to think more in jokes.”

“Writing a sketch is so much harder than writing a joke. You can come in with a pitch for a sketch that’s just a great joke. Everybody looks at you and they go, ‘Okay, where does it go from there?’ And you’re like, ‘Oh, I just thought people would laugh for nine minutes.' You quickly realize that a sketch is a completely different thing.” 

“I’ve never assumed that something that I’ve written was going to do well.”

“This is the number one lesson I’ve learned at SNL: You think its funny, but wait until you’re in front of an audience because they’re the ones who are gonna decide. It’s not like I assume anything’s gonna go poorly, but I don’t assume that it’s gonna go well.” 

“It comes down to this: If you have so much fun writing it, then to me, that’s great. And if it does well in front of the other writers, that to me is the most fun. I used to love table read because if you wrote something that did really well at table and you got all those funny people laughing, that’s more important to me. It’s probably why I write on Weekend Update now.” 

“You learn at SNL that nothing’s guaranteed. And you’re gonna find out if your sketch is funny on Saturday.”

“SNL50 is certainly overwhelming. It’s certainly fun. It’s a really exciting time to be there. Just to be a part of comedy history.”

“Everybody that works there is a fan of the show. That’s the truth. When you’re growing up and you’re watching it every Saturday, that’s the dream. If you grew up wanting to be a comedian, SNL is the first thing that people ask you about. It’s a joke among comics that their family will be like, ‘Why don’t you audition for SNL?’”

“It feels like a real honor to be there. I don’t know if you can possibly be there without being a part of the hysteria, without getting swept up in it. Because if you don’t, it’s almost not worth it.”