Jamie Loftus

Surreal, bizarre and avant-garde, Jamie Loftus sits in a blow-up baby pool reading an oversized pink diary on a low stage. The audience hangs on every word as she reads a passage from the day she lost her virginity. The performance is from her new one-woman show simply titled, “I Lost My Virginity on August 15, 2010.” Her unique take on comedy is bringing “alt comedy” into the mainstream. Much like Andy Kauffman or Maria Bamford, Loftus’s comedy is strange but impossible to look away from. From pretending to date an American Girl Doll to joining Mensa as a joke to a small media frenzy surrounding her attempt to eat a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest , Loftus’s comedy is nothing short of absurdism for the modern woman. At only 25, Jamie Loftus has the resume of an old comedy pro. Earlier this summer, Jamie Loftus was hired as a writer for the long-running Adult Swim show Robot Chicken. In the 14 years the show has been on the air, there have only been six women credited as writers. Even before she became one of the few women at controversial-at-the-time Adult Swim, she had already written and starred in her own web series for Comedy Central, “Irrational Fears. ” She regularly works on viral videos for Super Deluxe which get over 100,000 views. She writes comedy for Paste Magazine . She also cohosts, with screenwriter, Caitlin Durante, a popular podcast on the How Stuff Works Network called “the Bechdel Cast .” Even her solo shows have become the talk of the LA alt-comedy scene. Loftus might be the hardest working young comic today. Even with a podcast, a TV writing job, viral video production and live comedy, Loftus may have been even more overworked when she started her comedy career in Boston. Loftus put herself through college and after college worked 2 full-time jobs; from 6am to 2pm at the Boston Globe and 3pm to 9pm at the Boston Improv. Almost every night after work, she would do standup comedy shows. “I have been doing work that revolves around mental illness and trying to destigmatize it,” she explains. Her web series, “Irrational Fears,” for Comedy Central, came out of an exercise with her therapist. Her therapist would ask her about an anxiety she had and then make her think of the worst case scenario to highlight how irrational it was. Loftus continues to explain, “but in this world I am right.” In each episode of the series, Loftus is subjected to a normal situation where everything goes wrong to exaggerated ends. Loftus might be successful not only because of her work ethic, but also her process. When she thinks of an idea that might be funny she uses social media to test it out. She calls it “beta testing on Twitter.” If she gets a lot of engagement and likes, she runs with it and if not, she tries a new joke. While most of her jokes are absurd, her podcast with Caitlin Durante, “the Bechdel Cast,” is an outlier. Each week the hosts invite comedians to talk about the treatment of women in a given film. While originally a solo production, “the Bechdel Cast” was recently added to the How Stuff Works network. Loftus explains, “The idea was Caitlin’s, I was interested but doubted my ability [to do the podcast].” She continues, “It has changed the way I write and everything else I do”