Galaxy Brain is on Netflix July 28.
Photo: Lindsay Ellary for New York Magazine
I find the comedian Mary Beth Barone curled up on a bench in Bushwick Inlet Park, watching clouds roll in. A major section of the park opened in May after years of stagnation, and she has questions. “They must have built this without Eric Adams knowing because he never would let something like this happen. How did this slip in under his budget?” she says. Adams was a font of derisive comedic inspiration for Barone during his tenure. Sometimes, a joke was as easy as simply repeating something he said at a press conference word for word. “I have always been vocal about Eric Adams and my desire to never hear from him again,” she tells me.
In her first Netflix special, Galaxy Brain, she jokes about what one of her first orders of business would be if she were mayor. “I’m going to re-open the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory as a gay club,” she says with a mischievous smile before explaining its history and delivering the kicker. “Once a night we do a smoke machine to honor those we lost.” Later, as we walk down the street to the French restaurant Le Crocodile, I notice that her pink Dior Saddle bag has a hammer and sickle painted on the side. (She interviewed Zohran Mamdani in a “Politics for Hot People” segment of her headlining show at Brooklyn’s Bell House in February 2025, back when he had very little name recognition.) If Barone’s brand of comedy could be rolled up and fit into a purse, it would look exactly like this: political, wry, referential, and unabashedly girlie pop.
It stands out in a sea of mumblecore-inflected shoegaze comedy and loosey-goosey crowdwork clips with its surgical precision. “There’s gonna be some tough concepts,” she says in the special in which she jokes about how the comedian Chris D’Elia, who has been accused of sexual misconduct, took a year off and had a baby, “so now he has more access to kids than ever.” (A spokesperson for D’Elia denied the allegations, and the plaintiff later voluntarily withdrew the lawsuit against him.) She enjoys toying with audience expectations. “I don’t feel like I get the benefit of the doubt, really. Because ‘She looks like that,’ or ‘She has this resting bitch face,’ or ‘Her voice is monotone,’ people want to put me in this box,” Barone explains as we settle into a booth. She likes to subvert people’s expectations when she meets them, “being so nice, and smiling, and overtipping, and trying to disarm people in that way.” She’s a Gemini—her outfit in Galaxy Brain features a beaded Gemini constellation—and is on a mission to launder the star sign’s reputation. “I know we get a lot of bad press, but I’m here to say that there are good ones.”
In 2020, Vulture crowned Barone “the undisputed queen of Hot Girl Comedy,” but 2026 has been her hottest streak to date. In January, she was the red carpet correspondent for the Golden Globes and made the otherwise tedious genre of preshow banter look fun and easy, baking jokes (co-written with George Civeris) into all of her questions. She asked Hudson Williams, “What’s harder: Being a gay male hockey player or a straight male flight attendant?” and Stranger Things’s Joe Keery, “What type of projects do you want to do next: Is your plan to be in things that are good, or do you want fat checks?” The miracle in these clips is how she established an easy rapport with these A-listers, hitting them with questions that could be read as confrontational, volleying quick comebacks at their answers, and still leaving them smiling and amused.
“I’d never done anything like that before, and I wanted to make everyone I interviewed feel like I was matching their energy,” she says. She got the offer around three weeks before the Globes and was told she’d be doing 20 celebrity interviews; she ended up filming 50. It’s hard to imagine who can follow up her act; she even wonders if she could do it herself. “Maybe I should just never do it again,” she says. “I think if it wasn’t as explosive as the first one, people would be like, ‘She’s a one-hit wonder.’ You don’t want to let discourse prevent you from doing the stuff you want to do.”
Photo: Lindsay Ellary for New York Magazine
The youngest of six children, Barone was raised in Connecticut, where her father worked as a surgeon and her mother was a nurse. “Growing up, I never thought that being a comedian is a job that a woman can do,” she says. “I didn’t consider that as a career possibility until I was 25.” She remembers how Inside Amy Schumer and Trainwreck were such huge moments in the culture, and Broad City was “the biggest show on TV” among comedy nerds in Brooklyn. But so many of her comedy role models, going back to childhood, are “either disgraced, or racist, or obsessed with trans people, or D: all of the above,” she jokes in Galaxy Brain.
Her comedy began as a hobby she picked up a few years after she dropped out of Boston College and moved to New York. She started taking improv classes (an early UCB instructor of hers was Dicks: The Musical’s Aaron Jackson.) She gained popularity hosting a live show called Drag His Ass: A Fuckboy Treatment Program, which she began in 2019 and which she hoped would be “inclusive and educational” for straight men in the crowd, alongside her ever-growing fan base of women and gays. “I think women are really just starved for comedy,” she says. She sees the internet as a democratizing force “because I don’t have to go perform at clubs for guys in baseball caps who want to kill me.”
Barone is hyperattuned to how she’s coming across at any given time. She sees people’s perceptions of her as a “tool” she can use in her comedy and is reflexive on the subject in her special. She jokes in the beginning of the set that Netflix told her that she needs to win viewers over in three minutes so that they don’t click away and deadpans, “I’ve literally never won someone over in three minutes, ’cause of how my face looks.” When she dyed her hair blonde in 2024, she says that she became far more approachable in person. “I got asked out three times by random people when I was blonde. That never happens to me when I’m brunette. But I found that my darker material just wasn’t landing as well,” she says, picking up a French fry.
She plays with this dynamic on Overcompensating, the A24-produced Amazon series created by and starring her best friend and collaborator, Benito Skinner, which is slated to return next year. Barone met Skinner in 2018, when they were both on a lineup at a “sparsely attended” stand-up show in Bushwick. After a few more comedy scene run-ins, he asked her to play Mary Magdalene in a sketch and from that moment forward, “the universe kept bringing us together.” On the show, Barone plays Grace, the perfectionist older sister of Benny’s closeted freshman, trapped in a relationship with a noxious fail-bro played by Adam DiMarco. What could be a stock campus ice-queen role is subverted throughout the season, through the empathy for the character that courses through her performance. “Most people have a reason for how they move through the world,” she says. Skinner wrote the role for Barone, who also writes on the series, but she had to audition four times for Amazon executives before they let her have the part. “I had never really acted in anything before,” she says. It’s why, for now, she’s more focused on writing and starring in her own projects than putting herself out there for roles. “Auditioning is a thankless exercise for me. I’ve almost never booked anything off an audition,” she says. “When I think about being in something that would take time away from my projects, where I’m trying to write really complex women who have depth, it’s like, Would that be worth it?” She pauses and rephrases. “Not to say that I don’t want to be in other people’s projects, because I absolutely do, but I still get auditions for ‘girlfriend of blank,’ or ‘hot girl in blank,’ or the character description has one line, and it’s just how they relate to men in the show. So it’s hard not to feel bad about that.”
Barone is at her loosest, goofiest, and most vulnerable on Ride, the podcast she co-hosts with Skinner, which returned from hiatus earlier this month. The duo have a mind-meld rapport. When bouncing off each other, the two are like a nuclear-power plant of millennial bon mots and catchphrases. They do what many other people at this level of fame would consider oversharing and have cultivated a legion of fans who would go to war for them if asked. The two have talked about their relationships (Barone dated the British actor Edward Bluemel for many years) and her and Skinner’s respective breakups. In May, Barone was spotted with Emily in Paris actor Lucas Bravo at Cannes, leading to Reddit speculation about their relationship. (She says she is currently not romantically involved with anyone). Now she doesn’t check the Ride sub-Reddit at all: “I had to just block it on all devices. Up to now, I’ve been really spoiled in that I don’t end up on the wrong side of the internet very much.”
As Netflix and Amazon expose her to a larger audience she says that they’ve grown more cautious about what they say on the podcast, both because “you just have more people that are sort of waiting for you to mess up” and because it affects their personal lives. “We tediously go line by line and decide what we want to keep and what we want to cut. We are being very thoughtful even though sometimes it might seem like brain rot.”
She’s been working on a new hour featuring a section about what became of the Me Too movement. She’s interested in how, in a valid attempt to hold men accountable for sexual assault, the culture created a backlash effect; accused men have become a new class of aggrieved victims, and women who come forward with their stories end up getting attacked. “I wanted to make it work for this special, but it was undercooked. I have a lot more to say on it. So I want to give it the space to breathe and see how people are responding to it. When people hear jokes about the Me Too movement, you have to really expertly craft them in order to make people laugh, and not just feel uncomfortable,” She says.
Recently, she cut a joke from her new special that involved Ariana Grande. “It was a joke about me,” she says, but she didn’t want people to think she was making fun of the singer, whose extreme thinness has been a topic of constant conversation over the past couple of years. “I have an eating disorder, and the joke was really about me and how mentally ill I am, but I knew that people hearing it, a lot of them would think, ‘You’re making light of this really scary situation,’ and that’s not worth it to me.” (Grande has never said she has an eating disorder). Barone has used comedy to work through this particular subject for years. In a Comedy Central Up Next showcase from 2019, she quips, “College wasn’t a complete waste of a hundred thousand dollars because I got an eating disorder out of it.”
Last summer, Barone wrote a “Grub Street Diet” for this magazine and wrote frankly and honestly in it about struggling with an eating disorder in public and about working through it with a therapist and nutritionist. “When my eating disorder got really bad last year, it was more a result of what was going on in my personal life. I went through a breakup, my dad died, I was navigating things I never felt before,” she says. It took an Overcompensating castmate reaching out to her, and telling her it was noticeable, to seek help. “I was sobbing on the phone and that phone call got me to reach out to another friend who had a nutritionist recommendation. I started working with her and then I had to do a ‘Grub Street Diet’ in the middle of that.”
She insisted on total transparency. “If all I eat in a day is a doughnut, and I don’t say that I have an eating disorder, what is that communicating?’ ” She said. Readers were supportive. “I cried when I wrote it,” she says. “I have to be honest. Vulnerability used to be seen as this weakness that women have, that we can’t use to our advantage, but I think vulnerability is a strength. I think that’s what I’ve led with my whole career, and I do think that’s what people respond to.”
Photo: Lindsay Ellary for New York Magazine
Production Credits
-
Photographs by
Lindsay Ellary -
Styling by
Kat Typaldos -
Hair by
Nathaniel Dezan at OPUS Beauty -
Makeup by
Hinako at A-Frame Agency
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the July 27, 2026, issue of
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