E
verywhere she goes, Michelle Buteau has a rapt audience. On a Wednesday afternoon in January, we’re at a double-duty gay bar and gastropub in Brooklyn, talking over shoestring fries and coffee about her most recent stand-up special, which dropped New Year’s Eve on Netflix. Titled A Buteau-ful Mind, it was the first comedy show ever filmed by a woman at Radio City Music Hall. “It’s like going to church,” she’s saying of playing to the venue’s nearly 6,000 seats. “You gotta let the people in the back feel it.” But her eyes keep darting to a table nearby. A small dog is panting and straining at its lead to reach her. “He’s been staring at me this whole time,” Buteau says, blowing kisses his way. “Also a fan.”
She quickly pivots the conversation to the “big, black, beautiful bitches” she has waiting for her at home, a black Lab-mastiff mix named Lola Falana and a Lab-pit-greyhound named Whitney Houston. When I show her a pic of my own pup, Katsu, she coos, “I’m gonna breastfeed Su.” It’s trademark Buteau: whip-fast, unfiltered, and a little raunchy — exactly as she is onstage and in her Netflix original series Survival of the Thickest, which returns for a second season March 27.
The show is very loosely based on Buteau’s celebrated 2020 essay collection of the same name — a memoir of growing up in suburban New Jersey, her early jobs and comedy beginnings, dating, meeting her husband, and conceiving her kids, after much struggle, through IVF. In TV form, the story centers on Buteau’s Mavis Beaumont, a down-on-her-luck stylist who is forced to move to Brooklyn after a devastating breakup, only to find a wide breadth of friendship and community there (and also a lot of sex). Sex and the City it ain’t. This is real New York for and by real New Yorkers, all gentrification and shitty radiators and quirky roommates — something that Buteau says was top of mind when the series began production and filming on location in Brooklyn.
“I wanted to show what it’s like to say yes to a life that’s not really yours,” she says. “So, the hot guy that’s on the come-up in TriBeCa with 30-foot ceilings and shit? He cheats on you. What’s your money gonna get you? It’s the one-and-a-half-bedroom in Crown Heights.…
“Which is a lovely neighborhood!” she adds, an outstretched hand preempting my defense of my home base.
‘What is the work version of horny?’
Buteau’s comedy is rooted in self-empowerment with an eye toward silliness — relatability that never veers too far into self-deprecation. She often calls herself “Beyoncé for government workers.” When I ask if she considers her work self-help, she responds, “Brené Brown Titties?” referencing the renowned expert on feeling feelings. “Yes!”
While her comfortable perch on our Netflix menus may make Buteau seem like an overnight star to some, this moment has been years in the making. As Buteau puts it, “I’ve always been this freckle-faced bitch. It’s just that people are meeting me for the first time.”
Buteau, 47, never planned for a life onstage. Growing up with an extremely religious Haitian father and a Jamaican mother, she says she felt like she wasn’t allowed to have a voice at home. Creative expression was not encouraged. She calls her mother her “ride-or-die” now (“The garden ain’t gray yet, but we out here”), but there was conflict when she was young, including an unfortunate incident with a few facial piercings that she paid for with her mother’s emergency credit card.
She studied journalism in college at Florida International University, but it took less than three days working the overnight shift at a local news station in New York immediately following 9/11 for Buteau to pick up a microphone and try stand-up. She needed to feel something. The answer was making people laugh.
She took a class with the American Comedy Institute, where she learned how to write a joke. (Her first effort, as she recently told Stephen Colbert: “Lines at Disney World remind me of my ex-boyfriend. Three hours of waiting for a two-minute ride.”) Then she booked gigs wherever she could get them — including doing a set as the opening act at a male strip club.
“The beauty of comedy is that it was this ragtag motley crew of fuckery,” she says, almost wistfully. “In the back of the room of any comedy club, one [person] is a lawyer. One works at Chipotle. We’re from all different walks of life, and we all have this common goal of getting up there and trying to make our dreams come true.”
An onscreen career that started slowly, with credits on shows like Key & Peele, The Eric Andre Show, and Broad City, turned into a parade of sassy best-friend parts in rom-coms like Isn’t It Romantic, The Happiest Season, and Always Be My Maybe, with fellow comedian Ali Wong. Then there was the 2019 BET remake of First Wives Club; her first Netflix special, 2020’s Welcome to Buteaupia; a hosting gig on the pandemic-favorite reality series The Circle; and finally, Survival of the Thickest, which she produces, writes, and stars in. It’s a lot, mostly because Buteau really loves working.
“What is the work version of horny?” she says when I ask how she feels before it’s time for her to perform. “Excited — like, ‘Put me in, coach.’ It’s an eagerness, a productive anxiety, a second home.”
All that work also has to fit alongside Buteau’s family life uptown in a bucolic neighborhood in the Bronx. Her twins with husband Gijs van der Most, Otis and Hazel, just turned six, and she’s currently trying to plan a birthday party that makes them both happy — hence the stress-reducing massage and facial she got before we met up. (“I had my sixth birthday party at a McDonald’s in Jersey, where we all got to go into the kitchen and make fries,” she says. “You couldn’t tell me shit. I was like the Blue Ivy of my fucking school.”) Compared to that monumental task, showrunning and filming and developing new material and doing interviews all seem downright relaxing. In fact, Buteau says, if she’s home for more than four days in a row she turns into “a Puerto Rican Kathy Bates” — see Misery — “like, ‘I’ve been in overalls for four days now. I have to go.’”
So, as usual, Buteau’s eye is already on to the next thing. In fact, she’s focused so far ahead that she keeps starting to mention new projects during our chat, and then realizing they’re not announced yet. The most she can safely divulge is a hint about the new episodes of Survival of the Thickest, which, she says, will see “a lot of elevating” for Mavis. “It’s giving bougie dreams with a bodega budget.”
While audiences eat that up, she’ll have her head down on something else. “I love it,” she says of her frenzied multitasking. “There’s nothing better than working a 16- to 19-hour day. Well, they’re not 19 hours anymore — thank you, strikes. But the whole point is you don’t want to feel like you’ve given your soul away. You want to feel like it’s feeding you.”
Of course that doesn’t leave a lot of time for Buteau to process her success. But she doesn’t mind.
“The bitches at Target be like, ‘I see you.’ And I’m like, ‘I see you, too. Now where the Tide Pods at?’”
Production Credits
Styling by KEIA BOUNDS. Hair by KYRSTEN ORIOL. Makeup by DEJA SMITH at FIRST TEAM MANAGEMENT.
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