Mandee Johnson
After studying social work and improv, Esposito chose standup.
As 2015 winds down, Cameron Esposito’s life is about to change forever. She has a role in the upcoming Garry Marshall film, Mother’s Day, where she’ll appear alongside Julia Roberts and Jennifer Aniston. She’ll soon be releasing a new standup comedy special, and her first book will hit the bookstores.
Madisonians have a chance to see Esposito up close and personal at the Comedy Club on State Dec. 3-5 before she becomes a huge star. After that, fans might have to settle for an expensive seat in the rear balcony.
The 34-year-old is a comedic dynamo. She’s got a side mullet that could make Justin Bieber jealous, and her signature look is a crisp jean jacket that she says “would only look good on a lesbian or a matador.” In her standup act, Esposito is equal parts witty, sharp and energetic. She has a self-confidence on stage and off that didn’t materialize until she embraced who she is: a talented comedian and a strong, openly gay woman.
She’s even able to turn an awkward heckle from an audience member — “You look like a woman who doesn’t sleep with men” — into comedy gold: “As if I didn’t know?” she threw back at him. “He yelled that at me like I grew up on a gay island with a gay volleyball and I’d never seen a straight person.”
Esposito grew up in a suburb outside of Chicago and attended a conservative Catholic high school. She went to Boston College, where she officially entered the comedy scene, joining the famed campus improvisational troupe, My Mother’s Flea Bag, because she dreamed (like many fellow comedy nerds) of attaining the superwoman status of alum Amy Poehler.
After a short post-graduation stint at a Boston improv theater, Esposito returned home to Chicago, where she studied social work at the University of Chicago while honing her improvisational skills at the celebrated Second City Conservatory. After six months of doing both, she realized neither institution was right for her.
Esposito understood that in order to find fulfillment, she had to speak her comedic truth, something she wasn’t really able to do in the improv scene. “There would be five dudes and me on stage. They wanted to go one direction because they all had similar life experiences, and I wanted to go another,” says Esposito. She made the shift to standup, where she perfected the art of being herself, openly and hilariously.
In the past 10 years, Esposito has honed her craft touring around the country and doing her own weekly show at the famed Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. She’s found love with fiancé and fellow kick-ass comic Rhea Butcher. She’s appeared on Conan, @midnight and Chelsea Lately.
In the same way that fellow comedian Aziz Ansari addresses race and Amy Schumer discusses feminism, Esposito has the power to get people thinking, talking and laughing about sexuality in a positive way. She has also used comedy as a platform to educate people about her sexuality. In “Ask a Lesbian with Cameron Esposito,” a BuzzFeed Yellow video that garnered more than 2 million views, she gamely answers questions about sex and, of course, the age-old question, “Are you afraid of going to eternal hell?”
“First of all, I don’t believe in hell,” says Esposito, smiling. “But I was a theology student in college. That passage [Lev. 18:22] is actually widely debated. Some people think it’s an anti-rape passage. Others think it’s a pro-procreation passage — you know, when we really needed to make babies to keep the human race going. Either way, there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible that is no longer culturally appropriate. For example, I don’t stone people to death or...own slaves. But hey, thanks for asking.”
