Fortune Feimster

Rivoli, Toronto ON, October 2

BY Vish KhannaPublished Oct 3, 2015

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With her actual mother in the audience, Fortune Feimster went ahead and told stories about her family and North Carolina upbringing, as a closeted lesbian, with uproarious gusto.
 
On her first trip doing stand-up in Toronto, Feimster told us that she and her mother spent the day on a sightseeing bus. Having never gotten off the bus once, she made a point of observing that the city has many Asians and that there may well be a single street devoted entirely to interior design businesses. It was also rendered with such oblivious, Southern gentility, it was impossible not to be charmed by the cartoonish nature of her storytelling.
 
Playing on her own considerable height and size, Feimster is a physical comedian with the facial dexterity and lively eyes of Kate McKinnon. She sold a joke about coming out to her father and his hapless assumption that it might then be his duty to buy her a blazer and top hat, by flashing this amazingly incredulous expression that took us all right there to that moment.
 
Feimster later ripped on her mom's bizarrely morbid 'catching up with people you knew from town' anecdotes (almost everyone Feimster can vaguely recall is dead) and even got good mileage telling us about her mother's three-month marriage to a man everyone knew was gay. It was amusing for the audience to dart our eyes nervously between the comedian onstage and her mother who sat among us, particularly anytime Feimster became a bashful child while miming a hetero blow job (at least twice).
 
Some crowd work made us hate a racist guy and his wife (they claimed Asian women wouldn't stop hitting on him) and, in her gentle way, Feimster destroyed him to our delight. In a way though, the whole set felt warm and familial. Likely because there was definitely at least one mom in the house.

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