Two tapings at the same comedy club a year apart show how Rosebud Baker anticipated motherhood at eight months pregnant, versus how she felt as a new mother 11 months after giving birth to her first daughter. Have her opinions changed at all? Could you even tell if the editing was slick enough?
The Gist: Texas-raised but NYC-based comedian Rosebud Baker is a writer for Saturday Night Live whose debut stand-up special showed up on Comedy Central’s YouTube channel in 2021. In addition to SNL, she has written for That Damn Michael Che and Inside Amy Schumer, and appeared onscreen as Meri in Hulu’s Life & Beth.
For her first Netflix hour, Baker filmed herself performing at The Comedy Cellar in New York City twice; once while she was eight months pregnant, then again 11 months into motherhood. Sometimes telling the same jokes, while at other times offering her perspective from that distinct moment in time.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: The way it’s edited, jumping back and forth in time, is a nod to Chris Rock’s 2008 special, Kill The Messenger, which blended three of Rock’s shows in three different tour stops.
Memorable Jokes: At first, Baker plays off of the idea that motherhood represents an end to joyful childless bliss. In that respect, being pregnant is a way to quit smoking. Becoming a parent, by contrast, means losing ambition. “I’m not striving for excellence. I want to decay.” she jokes.
But what else were she and her then-newlywed husband (fellow comic Andy Haynes) supposed to do in the pandemic lockdown? “I was too embarrassed to dance on TikTok,” she quips. And once you hit a certain demographic, Baker claims you’ve aged out of Planned Parenthood just as you would Coachella.
She makes fun of all aspects of pregnancy, from undergoing IVF to snubbing breastfeeding, and even some darkly funny jokes about miscarriage in between.
And she finds gold, too, in contrasting her husband’s liberal upbringing in Seattle with her very conservative Republican roots in Texas; the latter of which has helped her not just in finding the perfect nanny, but also in learning how to deal with thorny situations such as your hairdresser falling down the Q-Anon rabbit hole. On the latter situation, Baker jokingly describes the beliefs of MAGA Republicans and their relation to the truth as if they’d gone to a public restroom only to discover no toilet paper. “I’ve got to get real creative real f—ing quick,” she quips. But she stops well short of agreeing with any of it. Why? “I was raised by rich people, and you sound poor.”
Our Take: A lesser comedian might’ve simply shot a before-and-after childbirth special and slapped two disparate half-hours together. But by cutting back and forth, seamlessly juxtaposing specific jokes at times, Baker lets us see how much she has changed and just how much she’s the same no matter the circumstance.
That’s nowhere clearer than when she delivers some darkly funny jokes about her experiences with miscarriage, with lines such as “guess I’d had enough abortions where this one was on the house,” “God never gives you more than you can handle,” and “I never wanted kids until kids started playing hard to get.”
She also draws a rich contrast between herself and several male stand-ups who have recently put out specials in which their spouses underwent IVF, underscoring just how fundamentally more painful and complex that process is for the would-be mother. “He should have to jerk off to me getting the surgery,” she joked about her husband. “We both have to walk away a little scarred.”
Our Call: STREAM IT. Baker’s point of view may come across as more than a bit blunt, but that just makes her punchlines hit that much harder.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.