Catherine Cohen (Brief Breasts) in High Maintenance [S3E2]

Catherine Cohen is a comedian and voice over artist living in Brooklyn. She was named by Time Out New York as one of five comedians to watch for in 2018. She hosts a weekly show at Alan Cumming’s new East Village cabaret, as well as the monthly variety show “It’s A Guy Thing,” which was listed as one of Paste Magazine’s “10 Best Alt Comedy Shows in New York City.”

Catherine appeared in the last season of DIFFICULT PEOPLE on Hulu, and starred in an episode of Comedy Central’s digital series, SOMEONE’S IN HERE. Her work has been featured on Splitsider, The New Yorker, The Huffington Post and New York Mag’s The Cut.

Catherine grew up in Houston, Texas and did musical theater from a young age. After graduating from Princeton with an English and Theater degree, she moved to New York and started doing sketch comedy, standup, and improv all at once.

Her parents work in business but have always been supportive of Catherine creative aspirations. Like any fresh-out-of-college New York transplant with comedic aspirations, Catherine took classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade. But she found her creative footing by being herself. She did some characters — she first hooked up with Koperski a couple years ago to write an original song for a character she was trying out, Imogen Dragons, a ukulele-sporting singer with a “yogurt-y indie girl voice” — and had precisely one straight musical-theater audition when she first arrived in the city.
“I went to one audition and I was like, kill me, end my one life,” Catherine recalls. “It was forty women who looked like me in a room wearing the same outfit, waiting for twelve hours to sing one second of ‘Gimme Gimme’ from Thoroughly Modern Millie. I was like, this is not my scene.”

Instead, she’s created her own scene, producing and hosting a weekly comedy show called Cabernet Cabaret at Club Cumming, the East Village hangout that actor/singer Alan Cumming opened last fall. It was there that she work-shopped the songs that make up her one-woman show, which she also performed at Caroline’s on Broadway in the spring as part of their breakout artists series. Cumming, who calls himself a “major fan,” describes Catherine’s humor as “a sort of hybrid of character and confession which cuts a raw, deep, side-splitting incision into the vein of urban contemporary existence.”

Catherine pays the bills doing voiceover work in “commercials for female-oriented products,” as she puts it — past stints include Olay, Schick razors, and Special K; basically any product for which a woman in a flowing white dress might appear in an ad, beckoning the prospective customer with promises of youth, beauty, and a tight ass. Her act befits a woman who is the voice of feminine consumerism but knows deep down that it’s a con job. In her songs, Catherine plays a heightened version of herself — “a total cartoon of this glamorous woman I dreamed of being.” Her songs go down surprisingly winding roads; one breezy number about the magic of springtime devolves into an extended fantasy about murdering a guy who once touched her lower back at a party and made a joke about raping her.

Like Dunham, and Schumer, and so many other comedians Catherine admires, she’s determined to create a space for herself. Maybe she’ll land a role in a TV show, or, more likely, write one herself. If she “books,” she may travel to Los Angeles. Catherine list of faves and inspo includes Jenny Slate: ”
I’m so obsessed with her. Insecure is so fucking good. Fleabag, are you serious? I Love Dick, amazing. I want to make something like that, just showing different kinds of women, how fucking cool they all are. And how funny and smart and human they are.”

Things Dudes Have Said to Me After Sex

• Is my Apple Watch under the bed?
• You’re, like, Amy Schumer hot.
• You were, like, really into it.
• Do you know Bon Iver?
• Do you know what Bon Iver means though?
• I’m considering an MFA.
• Your butt looks like an old painting.
• You look like a combination of Zooey Deschanel and Katy Perry.
• You’ve gotten better at that.
• What day is it?
• Do you have a ‘Droid charger?
• I’m 19.
• I can’t drive you home, I’m on ‘shrooms.
• My brother is a Vine star.
• You seemed more like a Virgo online.
• Those are oak trees.
• Cigarettes are cartoonish.
• Oh, I’ve been in jail.
• Are you still doing improv?
• Want to come to my karate class?
• I have a boat.
• See you around.
• Do I look like Hozier?
• Let’s go to Whole Foods.
• Boobs are cool.
• I have to go work on my sound collage.
• I’m 6’3″, so…
• I’m starting a web series when I get back in town.
• Me and my boss are musicians.
• I have the best sound system in lower Manhattan.
• Squirt comes out the pee-hole.
• Do you know how to make a private Facebook event public?
• Have you seen Master of None?
• Was that so bad?