When Cameron Esposito decided to tape Marriage Material, her first televised special, two days before her wedding, she knew it wouldn’t be easy.
“Was it a bad idea? Yes,” she admits.
For the special, which debuts on NBC’s Seeso platform on March 24, Esposito first secured permission from her fiancé, now wife, Rhea Butcher, who understood her desire to capture a moment she saw as a culminating event not only in her comedy career, but in her life as a gay woman. From the outset, stand-up has always offered Esposito a form of protection to be her true self.
“I really didn’t have a lot of safety in my coming out process,” she says, “so it was really a way of getting safety in numbers by just standing up on stage and being so out about it that there wasn’t really anything anybody could say.”
Esposito’s rise as a comic has come on the strength of her material, which manages to mine comedy from vibrant observations on our often contradictory society and her personal recollections of growing up as a gay woman. Appearances on The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Conan, Comedy Central’s Drunk History, and a long-running column for The AV Club have all served to help place Esposito at the forefront of the stand-up comedy scene. In some ways, the timing of Marriage Material is just the latest example in Esposito’s life of her work as a comic and her personal lesbian identity crossing paths.
When Esposito matriculated to a conservative Catholic college in Massachusetts, she learned that sexual orientation wasn’t covered under their non-discrimination policy, meaning the institution had the right to kick out gay students or fire gay faculty if they so desired. By the time she was a senior, Esposito was at the steps of the State House watching the first married couples emerge after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same sex marriage. Thus Marriage Material is Esposito’s effort to document a moment in time that she says may never happen again.
“To be a gay person is to now live in a completely different country than we used to. I had a moment to capture what it feels like right now for somebody who is gay and about to get married, and in a decade, that might not feel the same. It just felt like a really important thing to record.”
While the special does draw significantly on Esposito’s experiences as a gay woman, the material spans a multitude of topics, including gun control and a hilarious take down of the inane stigma that female comics shouldn’t discuss their menstrual cycle on stage.
That bit was first incubated at “Put Your Hands Together,” the weekly live podcast show Esposito hosts with Butcher at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles. At that point the joke was in its nascent form, but once Esposito had honed it on stage she allowed the show’s photographer to shoot a video, which was subsequently uploaded to the internet.
“That bit went viral. I can’t believe I have to say that—I’m so sorry I have to say that—but it did.”
Landing on sites like Upworthy, the video attracted many viewers, which meant that when Esposito decided to bring the bit to a taping of The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail for Comedy Central, she knew she needed something to heighten the joke. She decided to buy jelly donuts for the audience, which she later had dispersed in mock-concern that the crowd might be growing hungry from the long shoot.