Three Busy Debras Are the Bizarre Bourgeoisie Queens of Quarantine

As surreal as our lives currently are, they come nowhere close to the Stepford Wives strangeness of Lemoncurd, Connecticut, the charming town filled with charming people where Adult Swim’s new show Three Busy Debras takes place. The titular characters, clad in pristine white, plaster deranged smiles on their faces as they try out for Cartwheel Club, kill an innocent pool boy and survive a nightmarish sleepover. They’re June Cleaver clones on Quaaludes.

Debras don’t simply appear at brunch, though, ready to trade competing anecdotes. The show is the brainchild of comedians Sandy Honig (Debra), Mitra Jouhari (Debra) and Alyssa Stonoha (Debra).

“We met doing comedy in New York,” Stonoha tells me over the phone (social distancing, folks). “Mutual friends of each of us told us, ‘Oh you’d love Mitra, you would love Sandy, you would love Alyssa!’ And um, we finally got together and we did improv together the first night we hung out and actually improvised a scene where all of the characters were named Debra, and we haven’t had a single new idea since!”

The decision was an accident—one of them named their character Debra and the others forgot which names they’d chosen for themselves—but a fateful one. The comedy collective cycled through several different monikers before settling on the Three Busy Debras.

“Well the first night we did improv we called ourselves Babies in Charge… because we were the youngest people that we knew doing comedy and pursuing comedy and everyone was very condescending to us about our age and we were like ‘We’re babies but we’re in charge,’ ” Honig explains.

Then there was the Not 27s Club and the Triplet Towers, before the group realized they were destined to be the Debras. From the start they knew that they wanted to do a TV show, and when Adult Swim took their pitch, Stonoha says it just felt like a “natural fit.” The comics imagined the show as a “live-action cartoon,” with Betty Boop and Spongebob Squarepants among their key influences. Like cartoons, they’re always dressed in the same outfits: Honig in a stereotypical ‘50s housewife’s dress, Jouhari in a sleek belted romper and Stonoha in a killer pantsuit.

Though their characters share the same name, they’re just as distinct as the creators.

“We kind of have a joke among the three of us that one’s a bitch, one’s a cunt and one’s an idiot,” Stonoha says.

Honig’s Debra is the self-declared leader of the group and “also very big and garish and attention-seeking,” Stonoha states, “And my Debra is rigid and cold and um, psychotic and very seemingly uncaring.”

“And somehow is the only one with a child,” Honig interjects, before they devolve into laughter.

Stonoha continues, “And Mitra’s Debra is desperately craving our love and… has the hardest time sticking to the, uh, theoretical rules that I would say Sandy’s Debra has probably created and I enforce.”