Jamie Loftus
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH FAYE ORLOVE
⤏ PHOTOS BY RIKKÍ WRIGHT | MAKE-UP BY JAI JOHNSON | STYLING BY LINDSEY HARTMAN
⤏ ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 2019
Jamie is beautiful, brilliant, and busy. Our conversation jumps from one subject to another with the sort of reckless abandon only attainable by two diagnosed bipolars who consciously stopped taking their meds. The entire interview needs a companion reader to be, even vaguely, processed so I’ve included a short one here. I hope it helps:
BECHDEL CAST — Jamie’s podcast co-hosted with Caitlin Durante about women in film. Each episode features a guest and a chosen film discussed at length.
MENSA — Jamie was accepted into Mensa, the largest high IQ society in the world. Since her foray into Mensa and subsequent writings, she has been consistently threatened by a small cluster of members.
FAMILY — Jamie performed a show called “I Lost My Virginity on August 15, 2010” that features video of her family.
SUPER DELUXE — A somewhat short-lived YouTube channel owned by Turner Broadcasting. Jamie hosted two shows on Super Deluxe: Upgraded and Robot Takeover.
BOSS WHOM IS GIRL — A one-person show written by and starring Jamie about disgraced “Girlboss,” Shell Sandwich.
DOG FOOD — Jamie used to eat dog food on stage for an ongoing joke about health insurance.
*This interview contains mention of rape.
JAMIE: I haven’t conducted an interview in a while, but the last one I did was with Migos. It was horrible. It’s like the worst audio file in existence. They were doing some promotion for EA Sports and I had somehow ended up on their press list. I came so prepared, too, because I am a fan. And I wasn’t coming in, like, “So why are you so transphobic?” or with any hard-hitting questions. All my questions were like, “What video games do you play when you’re not killing it on stage?”
FAYE: Well that does lead right into my first question, what video games do you play when you’re not killing it on stage?
J: [Laughs] I don’t play a lot of video games, but I’ve watched a lot of cousins play. Actually, I play Spyro. I’m a Spyro stan.
F: If you could have dinner with any three people –– alive or dead –– who would they be?
J: Elizabeth Holmes. Her wolf. And Robert Durst. Actually I would cut Bob from the table, I think he might dominate the conversation. This is my dinner, I don’t want him to spend the whole meal defending himself. I need someone who will be on my side. I think my best friend from fourth grade, Jade Perkins. That would be a great meal.
F: You’ve gotten a ton of support for “Bechdel Cast,” especially on Patreon. Teach me how!
J: Yeah, I don’t even know how to feel about it! Podcast people are so loyal.
F: Yeah, I don’t even think you deserve that much support.
J: I don’t think so, either. I don’t think that I deserve anything. It is so crazy, comedy fans are really intense and very loyal. But I get it, I was similar. I met Scott Aukerman in college and I almost cried.
F: Oh wow. You’re exposing a lot about yourself.
J: I know, like, do I want people to know I almost cried when I met Scott Aukerman when I was 18?
F: I feel like that might have to be redacted just for the integrity of the magazine. Who would be your dream guest on Bechdel Cast? What movie would you watch?
J: If we did like a queer, campy movie with Alison Bechdel that would be the best.
F: Oh, you could do The Craft! Did you hear they are remaking The Craft? Apparently there are a lot of issues. Like they’re including a trans character, but it feels tokenizing because they are not fleshing out her narrative.
J: That’s what they did in the first one though. The only black character isn’t fleshed out at all. She is the only character where you don’t see her house. You don’t meet her parents. It sucks.
F: So true. So what’s going on with Mensa? Because I haven’t heard a lot from your team lately.
“I got a colonic on screen and made $75 before taxes...”
J: I have to opt-in-and-out of it. When I get too into it I get scared.
F: I would, too. People hate you. People with entitlement hate you. The worst type.
J: I still think the story is interesting, though, because it’s such an eclectic group of people that are entitled. I sort of assumed that it would be kind of like this white guy sausage party. Which I mean, it is. But there’s no specific type of person who hates me. They span all genders. So, the update with that is that I’m going to Arizona for a big Mensa conference in July.
F: And you did something like that before, right? Where you confronted them?
J: They confronted me. I truly just showed up. But yeah, I ended up asking like, “Why do you let your members get so abusive?” Because it was funny when, as far as I knew, it was just me. But then when I got five or six other emails of women who had a similar experience, I was like, “Oh I didn’t realize that this was such a hostile organization.” I heard from a bunch of different people; again, it was all women, but they spanned different ages, backgrounds, all that. They had all left the group for similar reasons, and some were really upset about it. They didn’t want to but they just didn’t feel safe going to events. So that was the question I was pressing. Like, why is no one prioritizing these people? They had a very locker room reply. Which sucks, because I was in a room full of women and the response was, “Oh, that’s just how we communicate here. I would never talk to someone in real life the way that I talk to someone in Mensa.”
F: That’s horrible.
J: Like, 95% of people are not like that. But it’s this one specific group that will just target people and it’s a problem.
F: I wanna know more about your family because I’m obsessed with them after your Virginity show.
J: They’re great. I love my family a lot. All my family is from the same place: Brockton, Massachusetts. I’m third generation Brocktonian. Go Boxers. City of Champions.
F: And your younger brother is getting into comedy. You really make it look glamorous, huh?
J: Haha, yes. I mean, all the buses I get to go on and all the Rodeway Inns I get to grace with my presence.
F: How do you feel about the passing of Super Deluxe? I feel like they were really giving a bunch of young people jobs.
J: Yeah, the creative people I worked with were amazing, and I met so many close friends there. But all of those companies, you can trace it back to some gigantic corporation. Like literally AT&T shut it down. I don’t know, I love it and I hate it because I got to meet so many awesome collaborators and friends there. But you’re basically being paid in exposure. I got a colonic on screen and made $75 before taxes and AT&T got the rest. So, it’s good and weird to reflect on. And slightly sinister.
F: And I feel like in addition to $75 you also got some mean comments on YouTube.
J: Oh yeah. People just see a woman do anything and they need to call her ugly. I always read the comments. I don’t possess the self control not to. The first time that something like that happened, I immediately got a haircut and sobbed for days. And then I got my check for $75. I really admire and respect any woman existing online who does not read the comments and actually takes care of themself. My therapist makes a lot of money off those comments, certainly more than I made off the video.
F: Well, your therapist came out on top.
J: I did once cold-contact someone who started a “hot-or-not” thread about me on a Facebook video. We spoke for months. He was like a gym instructor in Queens. His name was SwolSauce. But I contacted him like, “Hey I saw this and it hurt my feelings. And I just want you to know that if you see people, it’s not unlikely that they will see what you say.”
F: Was he receptive to the fact that you’re a human being?
J: At first he was just like, “Oh well, I was just expressing my opinion so I don’t know what the problem is.” But then he was like, “Well I was kinda pissed ‘cause you kinda looked like my ex-girlfriend.” You can always identify the root cause of them hating other people. I do think that there is value in having those conversations if you’re able to. I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to do it very often, but it is nice to be like, “Oh, I kinda made a dent in someone’s hideous worldview.” You have to ask, how much of yourself are you willing to dedicate to a point of view that you know is wrong?
F: A point of view that isn’t humanist in any way. I’m grateful that people are doing the work.
J: But we’re just doing another side of the work which is communicating with people who have been ignored forever. I would rather do that than try to de-radicalize a bunch of incels. But I recognize that has to be done.
F: Tell me about how Boss Whom is Girl came to be. Because that is doing good work, too.
“Oh, I kinda made a dent in someone’s hideous worldview.”
J: I started doing comedy late in college and it took me a while to even recognize how gaslighty that environment was and how submissive I had become for self preservation. It wasn’t until after I got raped by my college boyfriend — who was in my comedy group — that I could even piece together a common thread [in terms of how men treated me]. I think I sort of fell for a lot of corporate feminism like, “Oh yeah, you’re hot . . . if you buy that soap.” It was very one note. There are so many Super Bowl commercials about how liberated I am asterisk if I smell like this. So now I’m trying to write about and make more comedy about the bullshit of capitalism in feminism.
F: I love that it decimates corporations that monetize feminism under the guise of empowerment.
J: It’s so hollow and shitty and only serves the same type of woman. You don’t want to discourage young girls from participating in feminism, but —
F: From being a CEO!
J: From being a GEO!
F: [Laughs] That kills me.
J: It’s about the idea that “Feminism means you can never be critical of another woman.” You can’t be mean to Sheryl Sandberg, she’s a lady!
F: What would you say to a young person trying to become a comedian?
J: I would say — first of all — do it and try it and don’t be discouraged by being in a room full of men. Especially in comedy, you’re gonna wind up in a room full of men. And comedy is very high risk, low reward. I let myself sort of be pushed around a little bit. I would try to write jokes for a roomful of men from Boston and it was really bad stuff. If you’re writing jokes for a room full of dudes who aren’t listening to you, you’re not gonna get very far or feel very good about yourself.
F: You would have never eaten dog food on stage.
J: Oh yeah, no one wanted me to do that. And yet, she persisted.
⤏ BUY THE PRINT EDITION OF JR HI THE MAGAZINE | ISSUE 006 HERE.
⤏ FAYE ORLOVE (SHE/HER) IS AN ILLUSTRATOR, ANIMATOR AND ACTIVIST ORIGINALLY FROM THE EAST COAST. IN 2015, SHE BEGAN THE NON-PROFIT SPACE JUNIOR HIGH IN EAST HOLLYWOOD. FAYE LOVES POP-CULTURE, THE FACT THAT KIM KARDASHIAN IS STUDYING TO BE A LAWYER, AND THE JONAS BROTHERS COMEBACK. SHE DESCRIBES HERSELF AS A VIRGO, A JEWISH AMERICAN PRINCESS AND SOMEONE JUST TRYING REALLY, REALLY HARD.