Fortune Feimster

Charlotte, Peace College and a very slow start

Emily Fortune Feimster was born on 1 July 1980 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has talked on this tour about growing up in a North Carolina town of about 12,000 people — a fact she still uses as the baseline for everything that happened afterwards. She studied communications at Peace College in Raleigh, was elected student body president and graduated summa cum laude in 2002.

A short stretch living in Spain came next, then Los Angeles in 2003. She did not arrive as a performer. For seven years she worked in entertainment journalism, and only in 2005 began taking improv and sketch classes at the Groundlings, the Los Angeles theatre that has fed sketch comedy for decades. Four years of classes later she was selected for the Groundlings Sunday Company. She came out as a lesbian in 2005, the same year she started at the school, and the two things — finding the stage and being honest on it — have been inseparable in her act ever since.

By April 2026 she had been touring for 17 years, and framed it to an interviewer as "slow and steady": "I've been able to enjoy the ride along the way." The Dallas progression is a fair map of the whole career — club sets at Hyenas early on, the 2,900-seat Music Hall at Fair Park two decades later.

158 episodes of Chelsea Lately, then a sitcom run

Her television debut came on NBC's Last Comic Standing in 2010, nine years after she left college. The job that actually built the name was the Chelsea Lately round table, where she was a regular from 2011 to 2014 across 158 episodes. She has described that period as being shot out of a cannon, because the programme itself was so popular.

Scripted work followed. She played Colette across 39 episodes of The Mindy Project between 2015 and 2017 as a main cast member, and has since turned up in Champions, Kenan, The L Word: Generation Q as Heather, and Netflix's FUBAR opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger. On film she has appeared in Office Christmas Party, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar and Family Switch, and in 2025 voiced Nibbles Maplestick in Zootopia 2. She has also guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The breadth matters to the live show mainly because none of it is the act. The screen credits buy the room; the material is still family, the South, money and her own ego taking small, deliberate hits.

Three Netflix hours, each one retired on schedule

The specials are the spine of the discography: Sweet & Salty in 2020, Good Fortune in 2022 and Crushing It, which premiered globally on Netflix on 3 December 2024 and runs under an hour. Kristian Mercado Figueroa, who has also directed specials for Michael Che, Taylor Tomlinson and Phoebe Robinson, directed it.

Crushing It is built out of her honeymoon with her then wife, her mother's reaction to no longer being the centre of her daughter's domestic life, and her own relationship with money and social media. The critical response was warm rather than noisy. The New York Times, scored at 80 on Metacritic, praised material that is "carefully observed and specific" and noted that the mother in it reads as eccentric without becoming a caricature, with Feimster herself most often the butt of the joke. Decider, also at 80, singled out the delivery of the line that gave the tour its name and the ovations it drew. The special's Metascore remained unresolved for want of a fourth review.

Her working rule is to burn the hour once it is filmed. "For people who watched my last special, this tour is all new material," she said in 2025. "Every time I start a new tour, I do a brand new hour." Audiences arriving on the strength of Crushing It will not hear a line of it.

Where things stand now

The life the last special documented has changed. Feimster married the kindergarten teacher Jacquelyn Smith on 23 October 2020; in June 2025 the couple announced they had separated after roughly a decade together and were divorcing. She has not made a public meal of it beyond saying she was doing all right, and the honeymoon stories that anchored Crushing It now sit in a different light.

Screen work has filled 2026. She is part of the ensemble of The Fifth Wheel, a Netflix comedy directed by Eva Longoria from a script by Paula Pell and Janine Brito, in which a group of friends reconnect over a Las Vegas weekend. Netflix won the project in November 2023, Longoria joined as director in May 2025, and Feimster's casting was announced in December 2025 alongside Brenda Song and Nikki Glaser, with Kim Kardashian leading and Jack Whitehall, Casey Wilson, Scott MacArthur and Will Ferrell — as a magician named Brad La Cadabra — also in the cast. Production was running in Los Angeles from January 2026, with set photographs in early March 2026; as of 6 August 2026 no release date had been set.

Away from acting she co-hosts two talk shows: Handsome, with Tig Notaro and Mae Martin, and What a Joke with Papa and Fortune on SiriusXM alongside Tom Papa, which she has co-hosted since July 2019. Both keep her conversational muscle in trim, which shows in how much of the live show is unscripted.

Takin' Care of Biscuits, on the road since 2025

The current tour takes its title from a line in Crushing It. Dates began going up in March 2025 — the Chicago Theatre show for 8 November 2025 was announced on 25 March 2025 and went on sale three days later — and the run has kept extending rather than resetting. The Smart Financial Centre in Sugar Land, Texas took it on 20 September 2025; the Music Hall at Fair Park in Dallas followed on 18 April 2026.

The 2026 autumn leg runs deep into the calendar. Keller Auditorium in Portland was booked for 12 September 2026, where the 8pm show sold out and a second performance at 5pm was added and put on sale on 7 August, with tickets from $42.25, reserved seating and no age restriction. Ryman Auditorium in Nashville has 20 November 2026 at 7pm, with a Ford Lounge upgrade that includes a commemorative Hatch Show Print poster.

Openers change by leg rather than by tour. On the April 2026 Dallas date the support was Zach Noe Towers, whom Feimster introduced to the local press as a very funny gay man — a small example of how she uses the slot.

The audience she built first

Feimster credits her LGBTQ+ audience with backing her from the beginning, and she has never treated that crowd as a side market: she still works Pride events and Olivia Cruises between theatre dates. The room on a Takin' Care of Biscuits night is accordingly mixed in a way many arena comics' are not — queer audiences who found her a decade ago sitting beside people who came via Netflix or a sitcom rerun.

That mix shapes the material. The new hour leans on silly stories drawn from her own life and returns to her childhood in a register closer to Sweet & Salty, and she has been explicit that the comedy does not work by punching down. The joke is almost always pointed inwards, which is why the laughs and the affection arrive at the same moment.