Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fortune Feimster: Good Fortune’ On Netflix, In Which The Comedian Confronts Her Butchness, Or Lack Thereof

Fortune Feimster’s first solo hour for Netflix, Sweet and Salty, was one of the best stand-up comedy specials of 2020. Can she go 2-for-2 in 2022?

FORTUNE FEIMSTER: GOOD FORTUNE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In Sweet & Salty, Feimster looked back on her awkward childhood in North Carolina, with delightful stories about family outings to Hooters and revelatory Lifetime movies, all presented with even more joy seeing her mother in the audience.
Two and a half years later, Feimster has even more to be joyful about, having found love and happiness. Hence: ‘Good Fortune.’ But her path is not without its pitfalls still, as she explains how her marriage proposal went awry, how haters try to burst her bubble of positivity, how not even her wife could judge her by how she looks, and how she faced her biggest challenge while being a dog mom. Are these stories going to have happy endings? You bet!
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: She’s not the first Netflix comedian this month to share an embarrassing anecdote about a comedy club audience getting her drunk. Gabriel Iglesias just did likewise last week in his special Stadium Fluffy. The two comedians also share a desire to promote positive vibes.
Memorable Jokes: A superhero name-drop will get your attention, even if it didn’t convince Feimster to take appropriate action in the moment.
It’s all part of establishing her personality in the first half-hour, and how she might not fit neatly into lesbian stereotypes, despite how she looks and carries herself.

The focal point, though, of this hour revolves around Feimster’s titular good fortune to find and marry her partner, Jax, as she recounts how her proposal in Big Sur didn’t go quite exactly as planned (“Did I order the “It’ll Do” package?”), how her mother offered to help the couple plan their wedding — which offers a tangential revisiting of her mom’s own nuptials under a big top circus tent, complete with applause breaks for Feimster’s re-enactment of her mom’s wedding singer. Feimster’s own wedding was a much more intimate, albeit Zoomed-in affair. If you ask Netflix to play the end credits, you’ll be rewarded with the wedding photos that Feimster jokes about.
Before then, you’ll also be treated to Feimster’s misadventure in Des Moines, where the audience was determined to get her drunk, and a slightly more serious life-or-death encounter for her little Pomeranian named Biggie.
Our Take: If Feimster were self-conscious about her image growing up, she now has learned how to turn it to her comedic advantage, playing off and against cultural stereotypes toward masculine-looking lesbians. Even if she presents this news as if it’s a sudden revelation to her during the pandemic: “I found out, y’all. I’m not butch! I look very handy, though.”
She bounces deftly from clever wordplay, at one point evoking a misleading movie trailer, before asking us to picture her delighting in multiple butt massages. Yes, you read that correctly. Butt massages. Feimster wants us to envision her instead as “a dainty lady,” “a delicate flower,” and illustrates this herself with a story about how she and Jax reacted quite differently when the burglar alarm went off in their home.
The rest of the hour finds Feimster finding her worth in the relationship, sometimes quite literally, while trying to fight off her insecurities and any potential haters (we see you, Gary, in the DMs).
But as she reminds us: “I try to put out positivity.” That means no time for Gary to bring her down, nor anyone who might bum her out when she eats nachos. Everyone will go home smiling once more.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Though not quite as cathartic as her first hour, Feimster remains the fun aunt, cousin, or friend you want to sidle up to at the party when things get weird. Or need to get weird. Plus, now we know she can belt out a showtune or two, too!

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.