Jo Firestone is full of surprises. The comedian trades in jokes but is inspired by sadness. She bowls audiences over with supremely soft-spoken humor. And she somehow manages to poke fun at life’s most major and most inconsequential disappointments in equal measure.
“Has anyone moved in with someone they wanted to love,” she asks in a recent stand-up routine on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, not long after confessing to being a 33-year-old woman who is reluctantly drawn to Ann Taylor. “I don’t even know if it’s a store, I just know it’s a portal to menopause,” she laments. Both observations feel equally tragic in Firestone’s world.
If you ask the comedian how she manages stress, she’ll tell you she’s taken up jelly beans. When she’s overwhelmed, “she’s just popping them.” If you ask about time management, she’ll refer again to the jelly beans. And if you ask after her many achievements, she’ll liken her success to the accumulation of a large pile of trash that’s been built up over time by many individual pieces of garbage.
Watch the video above to see how Firestone gets it done.