Mary Beth Barone stars in one of Prime Video‘s hot new young-adult shows, Overcompensating (season two coming soon). But for Barone’s first hourlong stand-up special, she’s debuting it on Netflix, and not Amazon. Was that a “Galaxy Brain” decision? Or merely the shrewdest way to grow her fan base? Probably both!
The Gist: Most people recognize Mary Beth Barone from her associations with Benito Skinner, the creator/star of Overcompensating as well as Barone’s co-host on two podcasts, “Obsessed” (2021-2023) and “Ride” (2023-present).
As a stand-up, she self-released her first comedy special, Thought Provoking, on YouTube (generating 419,000+ views since March 2024) and performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. And in the past year, she used her social-media profile to help stump for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with events such as “Politics for Hot People.”
In this hour, she jokes about how Republicans have so many bad plans, Democrats don’t seem to have a plan, and so-called moderates are merely Republicans in disguise. She jokingly urges women to woo them. “We have to radicalize these moderates!”
What Comedy Special Will It Remind You Of? Barone talks about how it’s still kinda rare to see a woman on Netflix with her own comedy special, but you can see how she fits in somewhere between past Netflix specials by Taylor Tomlinson, Rosebud Baker, and Michelle Wolf.
Memorable Jokes: When Barone does crowd work, she really wants to listen, handing over a mic to a young woman in the audience to share her own story about falling out with a longtime friend.
When she reveals she had a great relationship with her father, who died in the past year, she remarks that her grief should allow her a year of acting out. But she’s not about to make this a dead-dad special.
Instead, she’d rather let us know why it’d make sense for her, if she were NYC mayor, to reopen the Triangle Shirtwaist factory as a gay club. Or why it’s imperative for her to have funny bits to perform during sex. Or how mortified she felt when her puppy pooped inside the airport.
Plenty of bits come back to what it feels like to be a woman in a society dominated by men who may not have women’s best interests at heart. Which lends more weight to her movie pitch where her boyfriend and her dog swap places.
“I’m not a gay guy trapped in a woman’s body,” Barone says. “I’m a woman trapped in a woman’s body.”
Our Take: She claims she’d like to write sillier, lighter jokes, but her dark brain just won’t let her. And the idea of facing the comments section keeps her from wanting to share her thoughts online about Oppenheimer or Chris D’Elia, both of whom get name-dropped here. “It’s still very rare for women to get Netflix specials,” Barone says, before not only denigrating the idea of having to debase herself into sex with Netflix executives (and perhaps even Warner Bros. execs) to win professional favors, but also reminding us how the male comedians in her industry are, on the whole, horrible. “It’s narcissists with depression,” she laments, before asking them: “Do you hate yourself or not? Figure it out and let me know. … And all the comedians I loved growing up are either disgraced, or racist, or obsessed with trans people, or D) all of the above. Ever since Katy Perry went to space I have no heroes left.”
Barone finds herself needing to reflect on the state of the comedy industry, such that she’d feel compelled to find out everyone’s “body count” before getting to the rest of her jokes. Why? “I met with Netflix and they said that I have three minutes to win people over. The most amount of people that are gonna click away from the special will do so in the first three minutes.” She probably wouldn’t want those clickers to be her fans, anyhow.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Barone cracked that Netflix “said I had to be likable, accessible and non-controversial for three minutes.” I’m not sure Netflix even believes that. But it’d be a better world with more Barones in comedy and less of the disgraced racists who are obsessed with trans people and trolling the rest of us.
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.
