Ashley Gavin

Lincoln Laboratory to the Lantern

Gavin was born on 17 November 1987. Her father died of lung cancer when she was 11, the same year she joined a theatre club — a pairing she has returned to repeatedly on stage since. She read computer science at Bryn Mawr College from 2006 to 2010, graduating magna cum laude with honours in the subject and a minor in philosophy.

The decade that followed looked like an engineering career rather than a comedy one. She spent roughly two years as a software engineer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory working on national-security research, then moved into computer-science education, serving four years as founding curriculum director at Girls Who Code and teaching as adjunct faculty at Wesleyan University.

The switch came in 2014. She took a class with the comedian Veronica Mosey and did her first open mic at The Lantern in New York, and within a few years was headlining Carolines on Broadway. Between 2019 and 2020 she worked as Carnival Cruise Line's first openly gay comedian, playing daily to rooms of up to 500 people — a brutal but efficient way to learn how to hold a non-specialist crowd, and audible in the way she now handles a room that has not come in already converted.

A podcast, an algorithm and a self-released hour

The pandemic produced the thing that made her a name. We're Having Gay Sex, an interview show about queer dating and relationships, launched while live work was impossible and was named by Paste among the best comedy podcasts of 2020, with Women's Health and BuzzFeed putting it on LGBTQ+ podcast lists. It has gone on to chart internationally. She also co-hosts Chosen Family with the creators Alayna Joy and Mak Ingemi, and What's News With You with the comedian Josh Johnson.

Alongside that came the clips. Gavin's crowd work — sustained, adversarial, usually built around one audience member who becomes the evening's running character — travelled on TikTok in a way her written material initially did not, and it remains the format most new ticket-buyers arrive expecting.

The engineering background shows in how she published. Rather than chase a streaming deal, she put out Ashley Gavin: Live In Chicago herself, uploading the hour to YouTube in April 2023, where it has passed a million views. Her broadcast credits — Netflix Is a Joke, Hulu, Comedy Central, Just For Laughs — sit alongside that self-distributed hour rather than above it.

Indianapolis, and the year after

In 2023 the crowd work turned on her. During a show in Indianapolis she picked on an audience member, Olivia Neely, who had been cheering loudly, called her the most annoying fan in the room and repeatedly told her to kill herself; when Neely said she had already tried, Gavin told her she had not tried hard enough. Neely left in tears. What followed ran the full course — boycott calls on Reddit, an apology video from Gavin, doxxing threats against her, and fundraising by Neely for suicide-awareness organisations.

She did not go quiet for long. A review in The Sophian of a roughly two-hour set at the Academy of Music in Northampton on 1 October 2023 described her working the episode into new material: the room was loud for the catcalling and oversharing jokes and for an audience member named Matthew installed as the night's designated straight man, then fell silent when she turned to the death threats and the cyberbullying aimed at her, her girlfriend and her family.

The Washington Blade covered her return to a major stage at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington on 16 November 2023. Her assistant screened interview questions beforehand. She opened by speaking directly to the online audience — "I'm not going to trick you tonight. The person you came to see, the person you think I am, I am that person" — and held the line that art is not a safe space. Informal surveys of people leaving the theatre found they had either not heard about Indianapolis or did not care.

Edinburgh, and a harder kind of hour

Britain took to her quickly. A spring 2024 run promoted by Show And Tell played Fairfield Social Club in Manchester on 9 April, Monkey Barrel in Edinburgh on 10 April, Brighton Corn Exchange on 13 April and four shows at the Leicester Square Theatre in London on 16 and 17 April, with tickets at £22.50 to £28.

Her Edinburgh Fringe debut followed that August: My Therapist Is Dying ran at Pleasance Courtyard's Upstairs room from 9 to 25 August 2024 at 18.50, sold out, and sold out the extra shows added on top. It was a deliberate move away from the crowd-work reputation — closer to a one-woman show than a club set, built around the cancer diagnosis of the therapist she had seen since childhood, her father's death, and a theory of attachment illustrated through her two cats, Fulton and Fletcher. The Guardian gave it four stars and called it a superb set with big laughs and twisty logic; Entertainment Now also gave four stars; British Comedy Guide put it on its best-reviewed list for 2024.

Not everyone was persuaded. Reviewing on 15 August 2024 for Theatre Travels, Lucy Holz called Gavin a captivating storyteller with queues to meet her afterwards, but argued she undercut herself by analysing the room in real time and telling audiences they were not laughing enough — a perfectionism problem rather than a material one.

Big Momma

The current hour is Big Momma, about her fertility journey and getting pregnant as a masculine lesbian. It played a UK and European run in May 2026: The Glee Club in Glasgow on the 5th, The Glee in Leeds on the 6th, New Century in Manchester on the 7th, Hackney Empire in London on the 9th, Komedia in Brighton on the 11th and the Hen & Chicken in Bristol on the 12th. Most shows started at 7.30pm, with Glasgow and Leeds at 7.45pm and Bristol at 8pm, and each ran around 90 minutes including an interval and a support act.

Alongside the touring hour she has also been listing work-in-progress dates at the Edinburgh Fringe — five shows only, brand-new material, strictly 14 and over — which is where the next hour is being assembled rather than performed.

Where things stand

The North American diary through 2026 and into 2027 is the clearest signal of where her career has got to. Cobb's Comedy Club in San Francisco has her on 16 and 17 October 2026, and Comedy Works Downtown at Larimer Square in Denver runs five shows across 12 to 14 November 2026, tickets $35 to $55. The venue's own listing tells ticket-buyers that the Denver run will be primarily written material, with her edge intact — an explicit correction of the expectation the viral clips create.

From there the rooms get bigger. Blue Note Hawaii in Honolulu on 8 January 2027 is followed by club weekends at San Jose Improv on 4 and 5 March, Irvine Improv on 6 and 7 March and Pittsburgh Improv on 19 and 20 March, then a theatre stretch: The Wilbur in Boston on 26 March, the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto on 27 March and the Neptune Theatre in Seattle on 2 April, before Houston Improv from 30 April to 2 May 2027. The mix of 200-seat clubs and 1,000-plus-seat theatres in the same routing is the shape of a comic still converting an online audience into a ticketed one, market by market.