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Mary Beth Barone knows exactly who will be offended by her new Netflix special. “JK Rowling, Republicans, establishment Democrats, the British, the Irish and Zionists,” she tells me, reading a list from her Notes app. Then there’s “Katy Kats – which is what Katy Perry calls her fans – and male comedians and one specific girl named Tatiana”. When informed that this encompasses over half of the population of the US, she beams.
Barone’s comedy is a delicate balance between sweetness and cynicism. In her stand-up she’ll adopt a ditzy pose while she tears down morally bankrupt politicians, sends up cis male entitlement or implores her audience to have sex with moderates in the hope of bringing them over to the left. In the past five years, she has edged her way closer to the mainstream with a Comedy Central web-series, a couple of stand-up spots on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show, and a podcast co-hosted with her friend Benito Skinner that is so popular it has its own merch line. The past 12 months have seen her career go into overdrive: now she is the co-lead of a wildly popular TV show (Overcompensating, created by Skinner), chats to the A-list on the Golden Globes’ red carpet and sits front row at New York fashion week.
She says that her Netflix special, Galaxy Brain, is one of the most meaningful milestones yet. “So many of the goalposts have changed [for comedians] with the internet, but the one constant is the hour-long special with an esteemed network or streamer,” Barone says, tucking into a plate of scrambled eggs at a Brooklyn cafe. “With the special, it feels like you’ve achieved something pretty rare and they’re betting on you.”
Galaxy Brain is a riot, 55 minutes of whip-smart laughs that tackle all the no-nos of polite dinner party conversation – sex and politics, bad men and good girls – with gusto. Barone describes the Israel-Palestine conflict as a “genocide” twice (“just in case you didn’t hear it the first time”), and later invites the audience to cheer if they like doggy style. In the most outrageous tonal shift, she caps off a critique of Maga amorality by conceding that the Trump-aligned draconian Project 2025 was at least focused in its aim to take from the poor and give to the rich. “That shit was airtight,” she says. “That shit was like a pussy in a denim romper.” She then launches into a manic impression of a vagina with its air supply cut off, clawing at fabric and screaming to be let out.
“It sounds cheesy to be like, ‘I want to make people think,’” she says. “But I feel that’s one of the core tenets of being a comedian. With the special it was like, ‘How can we look at darker, heavier themes in the dumbest way possible?’ The goal was that it’s so dumb that it comes back around to being smart.”
Her approach wasn’t so different when hosting the Golden Globes official red carpet livestream this year. Dressed to the nines, Barone teased out a looser side to celebrities with absurd questions that cut through media trained platitudes. It felt like many A-listers’ realest red carpet interview in memory: The Rock offered to pick up Barone with one arm, Tessa Thompson gamely played “pork, marry, kill” with fellow nominees – both human and Na’vi – and Hudson Williams of Heated Rivalry was forced to ponder whether it was tougher to be a gay male hockey player or a straight male flight attendant.
“I wanted to make everyone feel comfortable and feel like they didn’t have to do the hard work,” says Barone, who worked on the jokes with the comedian George Civeris. “I’ve been on the other side of it where I’ve been asked questions and everything I’ve ever known has escaped my brain and I can’t form a sentence … So I did not want to make people feel that way.”
Backlash was slight. “We got a couple of people whose publicists were like, ‘We don’t want that out there.’ I don’t want to say who, but if you walk me to my spray tan I’ll tell you off the record.” (Sadly, I can’t make it.)
She also made a last-minute edit to a moment in Galaxy Brain to avoid a moment that could be viewed as punching down, in a section where she discusses her personal battle with an eating disorder. “I had this joke where I said my goal weight is 1.5 Ariana Grandes,” Barone says. “And I go on to say that 1.5 Ariana Grandes is one Bella Hadid or two Troye Sivans. That’s really a joke about me and my mental illness. But I didn’t want people to hear it and think I was making a joke about Ariana Grande.”
Barone brings a similar thoughtfulness to her role in Overcompensating. As Grace, the uptight older sister to Skinner’s character of Benny, she adds a touching depth to a character that could be a caricature. After becoming a hit with both viewers and critics, it became one of the few recent LGBTQ+-focused shows to be renewed for a second season. How did it feel for her first big acting gig to be so warmly received? “I could get chills just thinking about it,” Barone says, running her hands up and down her bare arms.
Barone has been grinding in New York since she dropped out of Boston College and moved to the city in 2011. While working at a start-up, she took classes at the local improv-focused group Upright Citizens Brigade and soon after quit her job to focus on comedy full-time. “I’ve been in this industry for 10 years now, so it was a slow start,” she says.
Ride, Barone’s podcast with Skinner, shares space in the upper reaches of the comedy podcast chart with right-leaning shows from Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, hosts whose brashness and casual misogyny has led them to be grouped in with the manosphere.
“Comedy has become increasingly polarised,” Barone says. “There’s people who want to make a cash grab and there’s nothing they could do that would make their audience turn against them. It’s genius if you think about it. It’s creating a space where you can say anything and do anything and you’ll never be held accountable.”
She is particularly horrified by the rise of Schulz, the self-styled everyman doofus whose Flagrant podcast series cultivates a machismo-fueled atmosphere of casual racism and sexist views, and who invited Trump on for a cosy chat ahead of the 2024 election. “I would always see him at [New York’s] Comedy Cellar when I was starting out,” she says. “He was so funny – I literally thought he was hot. I think I slid into his DMs one time,” she recalls with a shudder.
“I’ve watched him create this space where I’m like, ‘You just want to perpetuate the bigotry and the systems that have benefited people that look like you for all of time.’ I guess if money is the most important thing to you, that makes sense,” she says tartly. “But I have integrity, so I could never do something like that. It’s just hard to stomach that those are my co-workers, technically.”
Audiences on the left do not give their entertainers the same freedom, she thinks, and especially not to women. “I love comedy,” she told the audience in her 2024 YouTube special Thought Provoking. “And being a woman in comedy is so fun because the goal is to get so successful that you become the most hated person on the planet.”
I think of Lena Dunham, who somehow became the most hated woman in America after the success of her hit TV show Girls. “And it goes back as far as Lucille Ball – she was accused of being a communist!” Barone adds, before reeling off a list of women comedians who have faced vicious backlash for minor perceived missteps. “Kathy Griffin, Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, Tiffany Haddish ... Tina Fey ate cake on SNL and people were mad.
“Pursuing [comedy] as a career is such a funny choice because I’m sort of setting myself up for that,” she says. “Unfortunately it is a sign that things are going pretty well when people start to turn on you.”
Not that it has stopped Barone from sticking her neck out for what she believes in. In early 2025, she DMed Zohran Mamdani and asked if he would guest at her stand-up show as part of a segment called Politics for Hot People. On stage at Brooklyn’s the Bell House, she grilled New York’s future mayor about his policies, saying: “Politicians are liars, so how can we trust these things are achievable?”
That takes guts, I say. “Maybe there’s something in my brain where I don’t even know when things are socially unacceptable,” she replies. “I just asked him questions that I wanted to know the answers to! It’s the same with my jokes. Sometimes I’ll say things on stage and people will be like, ‘I can’t believe you said that.’ And I’m like, ‘But it’s true.’”
Comedy isn’t the only way to change people’s minds, but laughter can sure make politics feel like less of a black box. To celebrate the special, Barone is planning a series of fun release-week events including a pool party at a Brooklyn spa and the Galaxy Brain Ball, a party co-hosted with Skinner at a local queer club. “I really wanted to do events with the people I made this special for,” she says.
It’s tough to picture Barone’s down-to-earth qualities changing as more eyes turn towards her. “It’s hard to know how much to continue to say,” she says. “But I want to write about what’s going on in my life. And even though that can be really vulnerable and personal, it is what I want to talk about. I just can’t help it.”
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Mary Beth Barone: Galaxy Brain is on Netflix now
