Rosebud Baker’s grandfather is a conservative icon — but her comedy is as liberal as it gets. Read about how she upended her blue-blood roots to become one of today’s edgiest stand-ups.
’s YouTube Channel. “I loved her fearlessness, the self-deprecation, the vulnerability. As an old comic, I always get excited when I see someone new that I know is going to be great.”
About an ex-boyfriend she was desperate to marry, Baker moves seamlessly from raunchy to diabolical: ‘I was just jerking him off like I was banging on a vending machine trying to shake a ring out…To be honest, I should have blown him more. That’s what my grandma says. She’s a huge whore, my grandma. I’m just kidding, she’s dead.”
She recalls that her dad James “Jamie” Baker IV — a recently retired senior partner at the Washington offices of Baker, Botts, the massive Houston-based law firm built by her great-great-great grandfather in 1872 — was a largely absent workaholic. His emotional distance was the result of growing up in a family that valued competitiveness and accomplishment above all as the currency of love. Needless to say, there was zero precedent for stand-up comedy in two centuries of Baker family history.
daughter to ballet class. Rosebud herself suffered from an eating disorder as a kid, unable to stop obsessing over the food that she’d hidden under her bed, relishing the moment when she could leave her school friends to consume it alone in secret.“I’ve always had a drug addict’s mindset,” she says. “I’m always looking for the next thrill” — although she says she’s now able to “talk down” that self-destructive impulse.
In the years that followed, everything reached “a fever pitch,” Baker says. She self-medicated with mass quantities of liquor. At Boston’s Emerson College , she majored in acting — and minored, it seemed, in blackout drunkenness, one-night stands, suicidal ideation, and blind rage that occasionally manifested itself in drawing blood from whichever boyfriend she had just socked in the face.
After graduating from college with a B.A. in acting, Rosebud and the sister closest to her in age, Hallie, these days a pediatric nurse, went on a grand tour of Europe, which Rosebud spent in an alcoholic haze. “The time that I spent in Europe is pretty much a blackout,” she tells me. “It was supposed to be a trip that my sister had planned for the two of us, but it had gotten to a point with my drinking where she was, like, ‘I’m getting out of here.’ And she left.
was a major influence on how I ended up getting clean myself. She never pushed me to quit drinking, but she was the first person I told after I got through a week without drinking. Seeing how much better her life became and how authentically she started living it, I wanted that for myself. She just became so comfortable in her own skin as this zany, joyful, artistic weirdo. I loved it.”to the comedy world seems inevitable.
“I had no idea how to write a joke, even after about six months of doing open mics,” she says. “So I thought, I gotta learn how to write a joke. So I watched people’s specials” — Dave Attell, Amy Schumer, Dave Chapelle — “and transcribed the jokes by pressing the pause button after the setup, writing it down, and then pressing play, and writing down the punchline. And I was literally showing myself the anatomy of a joke.
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