Cat Cohen Is Growing Up—But Not Too Fast (Thank God)

“Of course I want to get married for attention,” confesses Cat Cohen a whopping eight minutes into her new comedy special Come For Me, which hits the streaming service Veeps on October 17. She quickly follows up with a caveat that weddings are “humiliating.” (“If you want to dress up cool and have everyone look at you, try being interesting!” she suggests, with a gesture toward her glittering sequined jumpsuit.) But the joke hits particularly hard if you are in your early-to-mid-to-maybe-late-thirties and wondering if there’s any way to escape the predictability of the marriage plot while still…maybe wanting the conventional things? (One or two of them, at least.)

“Now that I have a boyfriend, I forget, but for so long, my entire life was ‘I have to get a boyfriend,’ and now I’m like, who was that person?” recalls Cohen as we sit outside Katz’s Deli, eating bagels. Cohen recently moved in with her boyfriend of five years, actor Brian Muller, which is allowing her to see a whole new side of him: “He acts like a little boy now that I’m living with him. It’s like, You are so emotionally intelligent, but you eat candy in the morning. He’s perfect.”

Cohen’s tolerance for (ugh) romance may have increased in recent years, but onstage, her persona is much the same as it was back at the start of her career, when she was singing about how “boys never wanted to kiss me, so now I do comedy”; the Houston-raised, Princeton-alum comic and a group of her friend—including Patti Harrison, Mitra Jouhari and Lolly Adefope—have long functioned as the de facto “it girls” of an almost deliberately untrendy alt-comedy scene. Take Cohen’s musical numbers, for example, with their glittering jumpsuits (sourced by stylist Kelsey Randall) and swooning, intentionally affected punchlines, that would come off as anachronistic if she wasn’t so clearly in on the joke.

Some comedians might have trouble making a special about growing up coexist with a host of less-than-demure revelations. (Cohen on recently performing oral sex on a woman for the first time: “It was like putting eyeliner on someone else.”) But Cohen is uniquely gifted at establishing and maintaining a party vibe no matter how tonally dark her material gets, a gift she’s had ample opportunity to hone during her years’ worth of cabaret shows at the East Village gay bar Club Cumming. Cohen, who cohosts the podcast Seek Treatment with fellow comedian Pat Regan, is skilled at referencing her physical form for laughs without muddying the comedic waters with unexamined fatphobia. In Cohen’s world, the joke is always that the world can’t accept a big ass, not on the big-ass haver herself. (“My boyfriend loves my body, because he’s a fucking pervert,” Cohen confides coyly to her Come For Me audience.)

I’m curious about how it feels to turn toward the traditional markers of adulthood after spending one’s defining years in the comedy-bro-dominated Never-Never Land that is stand-up. When I ask Cohen what’s changed about her comedy since she got into a serious relationship, she’s thoughtful: “I think I’m more stable now, and less of a wreck. When I started, it was so easy to tell these crazy stories about me being an idiot, and now it’s like, ‘Wait, what do I find funny now that I’m not creating chaos interpersonally?’” (As it turns out, writing throwaway jokes about random guys you’ve hooked up with is easier than mining comedy out of a serious, long-term relationship. Who would have guessed?)

It might feel borderline cliche to be 32 and mulling “the future,” but Cohen has more reason to do so than most of us. She’s been through some big stuff over the past few years, including a stroke and ensuing surgery last year, and she speaks unflinchingly in Come For Me about the process of freezing her eggs. (To hear Cohen tell it: “They suck out your eggs with a Dyson AirWrap or whatever, and then you come to and you’re kind of a bitch for a week, and your panties look like a Rothko painting, but otherwise it’s fine.”) “While the stroke stuff was happening, everyone was like, ‘Are you so grateful to be okay?’ and I was like ‘No, I’m actually really annoyed right now,’ but now I look back and realize how crazy it was, and I actually am so grateful,” Cohen tells me.

Gratitude aside, Cohen isn’t ready to give up her unfettered freedom just yet. “I’m definitely not ready to be a mom. I am, however, ready to be a dad. Dads are just like, Pizza! See you in two weeks! Boop! Briefcase!” Cohen jokes in her special, and in real life, she is conflicted about the whole kid thing. “I met this really glamorous woman recently and asked her if I should have kids, and she was like, ‘Obviously, it’s the most interesting thing you can do.’ I was like, ‘Is it? Because it seems like a lot of it is boring,” Cohen tells me.

Marriage and parenthood may well be in Cohen’s future, even if she harbors complex yet relatable feelings about wanting those things in the first place. (“If you want to be with me, there’s just one thing to know // even if I want to say no, I still want you to propose,” she croons at the end of Come For Me.) But for now, she’s got more than enough going on to fill her plate—in addition to her soon-to-be-released special, she’s also releasing her debut comedy album in November, which is rumored to contain more than one holiday number. Watch out, warring ‘queens of Christmas’; Cat Cohen is coming for you, and she’s got some Hanukkah numbers up her deftly embellished sleeve, too.