SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 25, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — Fortune Feimster is coming to Salt Lake City in a way she never has before.
“I’m excited to be getting back to Salt Lake,” the comedian, actor and writer told Gephardt Daily. “This is my first time doing theater there. Normally I’m over at Wiseguys. So this is exciting.”
Not that she doesn’t love a more intimate comedy club setting. But Kingsbury Hall, where Feimster performs Friday, seats 1,992. And besides, she’s made a lot of Wiseguys friends who have promised to come to her latest Utah gig. (For 7 p.m. tickets, click here. To add an 8:30 p.m. meet and greet, click here.)
“I started touring Salt Lake very early on in my career,” Feimster said. “Wiseguys was one of the first clubs that had me headline, and I really connected with that crowd right away.”
She has accomplished a lot since her early days, and is well known for her innovative, inclusive humor and her skill at storytelling.
In her career of more than 20 years, she has been a writer and panelist on E’s “Chelsea Lately,” and has entertained as a series regular on Hulu’s “The Mindy Project.” Besides numerous TV guest appearances, she has had recurring roles on Showtime’s “The L Word: Generation Q” and CBS’s “Life In Pieces.”
Her talk show gigs have taken her to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and “Conan.” And then there are the comedy specials, including “Good Fortune” and “Sweet and Salty” for Netflix.
And watch the clip below of “FUBAR,” coming next month to Netflix, to see Feimster as one of the few actors to ever gain an upper hand over Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Asked where she finds her material, Feimster says it’s definitely not the headlines.
“Yeah, just because, you know, these days, the headlines change every two seconds. To try to do anything relevant to current events would be hard to keep up.”
So she focuses on things closer to home, like her family, now and when she was a child in North Carolina, and her engagement and subsequent marriage to wife Jax. Much of her comedy is unflinching and confessional, about episodes from her own life. She describes her act as “clean, but not squeaky clean.”
“I’m a storyteller. I tell a lot of stories about my wife and my family in this current hour that I’m doing, that people will see. I’m talking a lot more about my mom and that relationship. So yeah, I definitely draw from things from my own life. I like to dig into childhood and tell some of those stories and just, you know, try to find the stories that I think are funny and hopefully are relatable to other people.”
It also helped Feimster to grow up in a family good at mining for humor.
“I was a part of a family who always saw the funniest things, you know, even when things were hard or there was a difficult situation that we were going through,” she said.
“Everybody in my family always found the way to laugh about things and to make light of things. So I think I got that perspective from my family. I’m sure both of my parents would like to take credit for my actually being a comedian. But I think I’m a comedian because of their kookiness. You know, I had comedy all around me, even if it wasn’t meant to be funny.”
After college, Feimster moved west.
“I didn’t start comedy until I moved to Los Angeles, and that’s where I took improv classes and really grew to love that which opened the door to all of this… It was brave, I guess, moving 3,000 miles away from home, not having very much money, and not really knowing what I was doing, just kind of making that like a life decision. Thinking, ‘I’m just going to do this and see what happens.'”
The comedy also was born out of a desire to make friends, she said.
“Just trying to make friends, it was very difficult living in LA, you know, it’s hard to meet people. And I was used to being from a small town, and I went to a small college where everybody talked to each other and knew each other. And out here, you were kind of left to your own devices like, you know, no one really checking on you or asking you to do things. So I joined the Groundlings to just try to make friends. It was more of a life thing. Like I want to have something fun to do and a way to meet people and, luckily, it was, you know, something that was a positive experience, and my teachers kept encouraging me to continue, and that’s how this all started to grow.”
Feimster said the part of her career that’s the most fun is “going on the road and meeting people… I’m on planes and in airports, hotels, you know, local restaurants, you’re meeting people first-hand constantly. I love that part. I love making people laugh and getting that immediate feedback.”
Acting is a close second, she said.
“There’s something so cool about stepping to the side and trying a new character and learning lines and just getting to be a whole different person. I really like that, too. So there’s a good balance.”
Her current show is more interactive, she said, “getting to know people more, trying to weave that into the set. And just, yeah, there’s a very positive fun vibe… the energy is really light and airy, and you can feel sort of this camaraderie. It’s a really neat experience. So if people are free that night, come, because I think you’re gonna have a really good time.”
