Written by Catie Keck
On a Wednesday afternoon in late March, Rachel Scanlon is preparing to showcase a new hour. For a comedian, this is invaluable pre-show time. It’s the stretch that might usually get eaten up by workshopping, refining, and tightening. What she’s doing instead is sharing an hour of her time talking to Lesbian Culture Club about the importance of building community. It’s something that’s happened organically across her many creative projects, work that positions her as a quasi-evangelist for queer joy with a comedic style that’s unmistakably her own.
When Rachel logs on for our interview, she’s roughly two minutes late—overly apologetic and immediately gracious—because her wife reminded her to actually eat something after hours of aforementioned show prep. It’s a small detail, but it tracks: even in the middle of a packed schedule, she is present and so charmingly herself.
And it’s been a year.
Rachel’s recently married, she’s touring her own standup, and somehow, she’s also on the road with Two Dykes and a Mic, the podcast she hosts with her work wife, McKenzie Goodwin (an equally, categorically brilliant comedian). When I ask how she’s managing all of it, her answer comes as automatically as naming the weather:
“I think you’ll naturally make time for things that you love,” she says. “I love my wife, I love standup, and I love Two Dykes and a Mic.”
If standup is the primary engine behind Rachel Scanlon, Two Dykes and a Mic—a weekly series covering everything from lifestyle topics and queer dating, to finding your people and building shared circles—is the chassis. It’s part call-and-response, part ribbing, and part celebration of nothing in particular and everything all at once.
With Two Dykes and a Mic, the authenticity is tactile. The rhythm is constant. Listening to them tackle topics big and small each week feels a little like eavesdropping on a shared language that never quite stops. What makes the show so delightful is the palpable chemistry between Rachel and McKenzie, two friends who’ve really put their message into motion.
“McKenzie was this smart, goal-driven person that taught me queer friendship and boundaries,” Rachel says of her co-host. “But when we’re not together, because I tour so much on my own lately, I’m FaceTiming McKenzie almost every night.”
That closeness is the show. But the show also captures something rare about Rachel’s personal comedy: She’s a self-described “open book,” and you always feel like you’re reading from her same pages. Standup is a very specific skillset that in essence requires a comic to convince an audience to agree with them. And not just once or twice, but ideally for a whole set. A Rachel Scanlon show feels so participatory and jubilant, it’s easy to forget you’re watching a performance and not just the funniest person you know regaling a few hundred of her closest friends about everything from bible camps to the fluidity of gender identity.
Whatever the topic, though, Rachel has an instinct for going high. Many comedians harden over time by sharpening their edges and leaning more into the bite. Rachel has decisively taken another route, saying, “The older I get, the softer I am.”
“As a comedian, I get the instinct to put extra teeth in your jokes and make fun of the community, because we get to speak a language that we understand,” she says. “But I try to look bigger and go, ‘Well, that’s not what I’m doing right now.’ Not until things get safer for us, and not until we as a movement have more fucking traction.”
The focus is on expanding the scope of what the spaces she creates look like, and what that generates in a room is something pretty special. As someone who identifies as genderfluid, for instance, she says she’s persistently delighted to meet the male partners of bisexual women at her sets who earnestly connect with her material about how much she loves her wife.
“That’s actually super fucking cool,” she says. “Having these moments like that, it’s true pureness of humanity.”
Of course, the podcast and the tours and the new hours and the myriad other creative projects don’t stop there. Beyond the podcast and her tour, Rachel’s also somehow making time for acting—yet one more sandbox in which to experiment with storytelling. She recently shot a short film where she plays a youth pastor at a conversion camp, which is super on-the-nose if you’re even marginally familiar with Rachel’s material. (Her dream role is something in the Jennifer’s Body vein: horror-comedy, a little unhinged. She’d also love to voice a character in the new SpongeBob movies, which, again, scans.) You may be wondering where she conjures the time to do all of this? Sobriety, she shares. Her wife gets first dibs on the time she does make for herself, which is increasingly intentional.
Rachel’s comedy feels expansive. It centers on queerness but opens outward and into something more broadly inclusive that intentionally splinters from styles so often dominating comedy: the sharper, meaner strains that isolate or otherize. Rachel is building something specific and new. She’s inviting something bright, kind, and frankly maybe a little too honest about that church group you attended in middle school.
“As long as I’m telling jokes that I feel are true and authentic to me, once they reach the world, I just hope someone is laughing, and laughing hard,” she says. “We need as many people as we can who can see us, laugh, and stand arm-in-arm as we try to dismantle what’s happening. I’m here to draw people in.”
Follow Rachel on Instagram at @rachelscanloncomedy
Visit her website at rachelscanloncomedy.com
