Tina Friml had been trying to get a drink for the better part of two hours. But her every step toward the bar was thwarted by fan after fan wanting to congratulate the comedian, or excitedly hug her, or, in one instance, ask Friml to motorboat her.
Ever the gracious host, Friml took every kudo to heart, returned each embrace — and, yes, even obliged the cheeky invitation to bury her face in a comedian friend’s chest.
And why not? On this brisk Monday night in April at the No More Café, a sleek mocktail bar in Manhattan’s East Village, Friml could do no wrong. Working the room in a form-fitting white dress with pops of red that matched her lipstick, she reveled in the celeb treatment from the small crowd that had gathered to fête the latest milestone in her ascendant career.
In the past two years, Friml has reached levels that few, if any, Vermont comics have touched.
That afternoon, Friml, 31, had hit a new high. For the second time in a year and a half, the Vermont-born standup had taped a set on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center. The shindig at the No More Café was her watch party. But as the comedian is learning, being the center of attention comes with trade-offs. Like when all you want is a drink at your own party, but you have an adoring public to attend to.
The 30 or so people bunched together on couches and barstools that night numbered some of the most important in her life — family and friends from Vermont; pals and comedian colleagues from New York City; a new boyfriend. They know better than most the challenges Friml, who has cerebral palsy, has endured to chase her dream.
In the past two years, Friml has reached levels that few, if any, Vermont comics have touched. Now based in Brooklyn, she tours all over the U.S., headlining comedy clubs from Oregon to Florida nearly every weekend. She had a European jaunt last fall. Thanks to her relentless gig schedule, she hasn’t worked a day job since 2023.
Her online presence is just as robust. Between TikTok and Instagram, Friml boasts over half a million followers, including more than a few famous comics who’ve helped her best bits about dating and disability go viral. Hari Kondabolu and Mike Birbiglia are fans. So is Maria Bamford, who tweeted her admiration of Friml in 2019, calling her “a clever and charming comic” with “well constructed jokes.”
Last summer, Variety named Friml one of its “10 Comics to Watch for 2024,” inviting her to perform at a Los Angeles showcase alongside the likes of “Deli Boys” star Asif Ali, “The Daily Show” correspondent Troy Iwata and standup Rachel Feinstein, whose latest special hit Netflix last year. In March, Friml was featured on the annual “CBS Showcase,” a live comedy event that’s been an industry stepping stone for years.
Booking a set on “The Tonight Show” is something most comedians would kill for, even though it doesn’t have the same career-launching cachet for comics that it did in the Johnny Carson era. To do so twice in 18 months is a sign she’s arrived on the national stage. To be personally plucked from the Comedy Cellar by Fallon, as Friml was, is validation for years of hard work. At the No More Café watch party, the thrill of the moment wasn’t lost on her.
Around 11:30 p.m., drink in hand at last, Friml gave a short speech to the crowd.
“Every year and a half, I bring all my closest family and friends together,” she joked, “and force you to watch an entire episode of ‘The Tonight Show.'”
Following Fallon’s introduction — during which he shouted out her headlining shows this weekend at Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington — Friml burst from the blue curtains of Studio 6B clad in sparkling denim, arms wide as she soaked up the audience applause with a full-face smile. When she reached her stage mark, she bellowed, “Hello!” Then, with an exaggerated fist pump, she unleashed a visceral “Oh!” worthy of Howard Dean — or, for comedy fans of a certain vintage, Andrew Dice Clay.
For the next five minutes, Friml held “The Tonight Show” crowd in the palm of her hand, riffing on her affinity for dating geeks — “Geeks are nerds, but useful” — and poking fun at the elephant in every room she plays: her cerebral palsy.
“I can see your faces,” she told the crowd. “You’re thinking, Is she having a stroke? Or am I having a stroke?“
Friml ended the show in a seat of honor: on the couch next to Fallon for the sign-off. That’s traditionally a spot reserved for the night’s A-list guest — in this case, Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine. That Fallon chose Friml to close the night suggests he knows something the rest of the world may soon discover: Tina Friml is a star.
‘A Funny Thing Happens When You Cheat Death’
For the first 20 minutes of her life, Tina Friml was dead.
On the afternoon of January 2, 1994, her mother, Ellie, went into labor. She and her husband, Bill, rushed from their Middlebury home to nearby Porter Hospital, eager to welcome their second child into the world. But six hours in, Ellie suffered a ruptured uterus, a potentially catastrophic event for both mother and baby. Racing against death, doctors scrambled to perform an emergency C-section and rescue the infant, who, with every vanishing second, was suffocating in the womb.
Friml was born without a pulse. Only after a battalion of doctors revived her did she draw her first breath.
Friml spent the next two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at Fletcher Allen Health Care — now the University of Vermont Medical Center — in Burlington. She returned home a happy, generally healthy baby. But the trauma at birth left her with cerebral palsy, a form of brain damage that affects mobility and posture. Many years later, it also gave her one of her better comedy bits.
“A funny thing happens when you cheat death on your first day of living,” Friml told “The Tonight Show” crowd in April. “Your life is kinda in the bonus round. I can do whatever.
“I’m not even on this show — I just got up here,” she went on, before flashing a Cheshire grin to Fallon at his host desk. “What is Jimmy going to say to me? No? He can’t!”
Some version of this gag is a staple of Friml’s current set, adapted to fit whatever room she’s playing. As with many of her best jokes, she baits audience members into acknowledging their own insecurities around people with disabilities and society’s absurd attitudes toward them. Fallon wouldn’t dare haul a woman with a disability offstage because, as Friml joked, “That’s a crime!”
If it seems like she’s using her disability to her advantage, well, she is. But it’s only because she’s spent most of her life pushing back against the idea that she’s at a disadvantage.
Cerebral palsy is not degenerative but can vary dramatically in severity from person to person. For Friml, it affects her gait, though she doesn’t need assistive devices such as a cane or a wheelchair. She lacks fine motor skills in her hands — she has trouble opening bottles, can’t put on her favorite earrings without help and has a tool to help her button her shirt. Her right hand is especially impacted, which is why it’s reduced to grunt work onstage: holding the mic. “This hand has one job, and it gets an A-plus,” she says in her act.
The condition also affects the muscles in her face, which impairs her speech and sometimes leads people to mistake her as deaf. Especially onstage, she needs to make a conscious effort to enunciate — good practice for any comic, really. For Friml in particular, there’s a disconnect between how audiences hear her voice and what she sounds like to herself.
“In my head, I sound like anyone else,” she said, adding that it took a long time for her to get comfortable hearing herself on video and audio recordings.
Friml said her cerebral palsy symptoms are mild compared to those with serious mobility limitations. “I tell people it’s like certain circuits in my brain shorted out and just don’t work anymore,” she said.
It was important for her to exercise from an early age to build strength, her parents said, and she had extensive physical and speech therapy throughout her childhood. Before she could walk, Bill, now 74, would hold her upright, hands above her head, and help her scamper from one end of the house to the other, training her muscles for the day she could take off on her own.
“One thing about Tina, she always knew where center stage was.” Ellie Friml
Friml and her parents described her childhood as happy and active. She was well liked and supported by her teachers and classmates at the independent Bridge School in Middlebury as a grade schooler and through junior high at the now-closed Gailer School. But with high school, things changed.
By the time she reached ninth grade, her family had moved a few miles north, from Middlebury to New Haven. So she enrolled at Mount Abraham Union High School in neighboring Bristol. Friml’s first brush with public school was a disaster.
“I was bullied right out of Mount Abe,” Friml said flatly.
After enduring a “nasty amount of abuse” from fellow students in her first year, Friml transferred to Middlebury Union High School as a sophomore. And she flourished.
“It was night and day,” she said. Like most teenagers, she still had ups and downs, she added, but “it was really just the internal struggle of being different,” rather than the external cruelty of being teased.
Friml said she had found “pockets of solace” in the theater program at Mount Abe. At Middlebury Union, she found a whole costume closet full of it. She joined the Addison Repertory Theatre, or A.R.T., a program of the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center, and began acting in school plays.
The stage has been a refuge for Friml for most of her life. Her parents were set builders at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater, where Ellie has worked in a variety of capacities for 18 years. So Friml and her older brother, Nick, spent much of their childhoods around the theater.
When she was in plays at the Bridge School, Friml first got the inkling that she was funny.
“I remember delivering my lines and cracking people up — like, them having a hard time saying their lines because they would break character,” she said. “That was a big moment for me.”
Her classmates’ reactions also helped cement her love for performing. Friml is a self-taught pianist and was a singer-songwriter for many years before she discovered comedy.
“Songwriting was my absolute favorite thing to do,” she said, “and it was a way I got people to take me seriously.”
Both acting and music helped her take command of her disability — or rather, of other people’s perceptions of it. For someone who has spent her life being gawked at, performing offered a way of demanding that people look at her on her terms, even if she didn’t always realize it in the moment.
In high school, she played a variety of supporting roles, including, for reasons no one is quite sure of to this day, the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof. However small or ill fitting the part, Friml often “stole the show with her comic timing,” Ellie, 72, said.
“One thing about Tina,” her mother added, “she always knew where center stage was.”
One year, Friml played one of the Lost Boys in the A.R.T. production of Peter Pan. As the Lost Boys gave chase to a band of pirates, she was supposed to shoot an arrow offstage. She raised her bow but dropped the arrow as she tried to nock it. She picked it up and tried again, but she just didn’t have the motor skills to fire the bow. Finally, after the third or fourth attempt, she improvised. “I’m new at this!” she said. Then she picked up the arrow and hurled it offstage, yelling, “Well, I’m not perfect!”
At the end of the scene, she ran offstage and apologized profusely to anyone within earshot, afraid she’d ruined the play.
“They were like, ‘Are you kidding? That was great,'” Friml recalled of her castmates.
She had no idea she’d just brought down the house.
A Star Is Born (With Teeth and Hair)
All sorts of people take Standup 101 at Vermont Comedy Club. Some are hungry young comics looking to become the next Patton Oswalt or Iliza Shlesinger. Others hope to improve their public speaking skills for work or are just searching for a new challenge or hobby in middle age or retirement. Some have obvious talent and natural ability, while others need lots of guidance and encouragement to make it through a single joke. Almost no student shows up to the class ready to take the stage.
Except for one.
“Tina arrived pretty fully formed,” said comedian Kendall Farrell, who was shadowing Nathan Hartswick, the instructor and comedy club co-owner, when Friml took the class in fall 2016. “Her first week, it was like, Yeah, that’s already better than most people in the comedy scene.”
At the time, Friml was fresh out of Saint Michael’s College with a degree in journalism. Like many new grads, she was grappling with life after school. She’d never considered comedy before, but earlier that summer she’d taken an impromptu trip with friends to Montréal for the Just for Laughs festival, which draws comics from all over the world. It planted a seed.
“I remember looking around and seeing all these different types of comedians and thinking, I could do this,” Friml recalled.
Before she’d even finished the 101 class, Farrell poached her for the weekly showcase he was hosting at the Skinny Pancake in Burlington. She killed.
“She kind of burst forth,” said Farrell, 31. “You know when a baby comes, like, two weeks after its due date and it already has teeth and hair? That’s how Tina came onto the scene.”
Most new comics, even the very good ones, require a lot of editing and coaching before they’re ready for the spotlight. Owing to her theater and music background, Friml was already comfortable onstage. Because of her journalism training, she also understood how to construct a story and the importance of brevity.
“She was very concise,” Farrell said. “She knew what she wanted to say and how to say it quickly and get a big laugh.”
At first, Friml was reluctant to focus on cerebral palsy in her set, not because she was afraid of offending but because she didn’t want to be seen as “the disabled comedian.” She’s heavily influenced by the absurdist comedy of Emo Philips and British TV panel shows, which she discovered in college, so her early sets were more fanciful and offbeat, she said, with jokes about disability as “filler.”
“I was really stubborn about it,” Friml admitted. “I wanted to be the weird, whimsical comedian. I didn’t want to talk about my actual life.”
But it wasn’t long before she realized an immutable truth.
“The reality was, that’s what people were affected by,” Friml said. “The best reactions I’d get were from me talking about being disabled.”
However, Friml doesn’t fully subscribe to the idea that humor comes from adversity.
“Saying all the funniest comedians are miserable, I don’t believe that,” she said. “I believe a lot of them are,” she added, chuckling. “But it’s correlation, not causation. People like me, we hone our skill because of adversity, but it’s not the source of it.”
At every standup class he teaches, Hartswick preaches the importance of a good first impression.
“The audience sees you come onstage, hears you say three words and makes a judgment,” he said. “What’s this person all about? What’s their sense of humor?
“With her, it was: She’s going to come out onstage, and something is going to be obvious to the audience right away,” Hartswick went on. “So you have to take that power back right away.”
For Friml, that meant writing the joke that’s been her go-to opener for close to a decade: “I’m Tina. I’m disabled. But don’t worry, you’re going to be OK.”
After graduating the standup class, Friml sought out as much stage time as she could in Vermont while working retail jobs by day. She was living with her parents in New Haven at the time and didn’t drive. So either Bill or Ellie would ferry her to comedy shows, sometimes several times a week, usually for short 10- or 15-minute sets.
“That was a really happy time in my life,” Friml said. It was also a formative one.
On rides home from Burlington or St. Albans or whatever far-flung corner of the state she’d performed in, she and Bill, especially, would talk about her sets — what worked, what didn’t, what she could do better. While other comics hit the bars or parties after shows, she was still working on her act.
“My dad isn’t a comedian, but he’s really observant,” Friml said of her father, a retired engineer. “So I got this mixture of having a really supportive Burlington community and having a 45-minute ride home where we could dig into what I was doing.”
Friml’s hard work paid off in September 2018, when she won the annual Vermont’s Funniest Comedian contest at Vermont Comedy Club and scored an audition for the New Faces showcase at the following year’s Just for Laughs.
Comedy talent agent Tovah Silbermann was a judge for the contest. She was tempted to sign Friml on the spot.
“She just completely won over the room,” Silbermann recalled. “Her jokes were funny, sharp, self-aware and unexpected — everything I look for.”
Silbermann didn’t end up signing Friml that night, “because I’m stupid,” she joked. Also, representing a new comic in Vermont, as opposed to New York or Los Angeles, posed real logistical challenges. But after Friml’s Just for Laughs set in 2019, Silbermann realized that if she didn’t sign Friml, someone else would.
“I no longer had the luxury of sitting on this incredible talent,” Silbermann said. And so she didn’t.
‘Everything I Do Is an Inspiration’
If you’ve seen only one Tina Friml bit, it’s probably this: “People think I suffer from cerebral palsy, which I don’t. I have cerebral palsy. I suffer from people.”
That’s one of her oldest and best jokes. Most people assume it’s a commentary on the hardships she’s endured over the years because of her disability — looking at you, Mount Abe bullies. And it is, but not in the way you might think.
“Being disabled, it’s very easy to be put in the inspirational bin and be seen as a novelty,” Friml said. She has a good joke about that, too.
“Being born disabled turned out to be the best decision I ever made,” she says. “Everything I do is an inspiration. I can’t lose!”
Like any good joke, there’s a kernel of truth in the absurdity. Would she have chosen to be born with cerebral palsy? “I wouldn’t change anything,” she said. “I have a fabulous life, and I wouldn’t trade it for some unknown with the possibility of being better simply because I’m not disabled. It would honestly probably be a lot more boring, and I would definitely be more insufferable.”
And the truth is, being disabled has helped Friml’s career.
In conversation, Friml is warm, thoughtful and interested. Of course, she’s funny, too. Over dinner at a hole-in-the-wall old-school Italian restaurant in the East Village the night after her “Tonight Show” appearance, she answered questions about her life and career with startling openness.
“Being disabled gets me into rooms,” she said. “It gets me meetings with executives. But once I’m in that room, it’s up to me to show them I belong there.”
After Just for Laughs, Friml’s career hit a new gear. With the help of Silbermann, she booked shows around New England and rapidly built an online following. After a stint living in Burlington, it wasn’t a question of if she would move to New York City, but when. As more and more opportunities came her way, she finally landed in the city at the end of 2019, joining a cadre of Vermont comedians including Carmen Lagala, Ash Diggs and Farrell.
“Being born disabled turned out to be the best decision I ever made.” Tina Friml
Despite her growing success, Friml struggled to shake a pervasive sense of imposter syndrome.
“I was haunted by the thought, Am I actually funny? Or am I funny for a disabled person? Am I funny, or am I just underestimated and trying to prove myself?”
Her first big milestones — playing Just for Laughs, signing with Silbermann — helped quiet those doubts. But the universe had a nasty surprise in store that would cause her to question her career choice.
In the early months of 2020, Friml was on a hot streak. She had an upcoming run of big gigs, including overseas and opening for one of her idols, Maria Bamford. Her personal life was picking up, too. And yeah, she’s got a bit about that.
“I lost my virginity two days before lockdown,” she says. “And you know what? It was good! Sex is amazing. Why is nobody talking about this?”
She can joke about it now — and certainly there were far worse outcomes for millions — but the pandemic presented Friml with an existential crisis.
“COVID was the big reality check,” she said. “Like, OK, comedy. That happened. Now go get a real job.”
She didn’t. Instead, she moved back in with her parents for a year and bided her time playing live-stream gigs and writing comedy sketches with Vermont musicians Josh Panda and Clint Bierman of the Grift, and Middlebury filmmaker Andy Mitchell — an informal crew dubbed “the Friminals.”
Bierman, 50, first met Friml when she was a teenager attending a rock music camp he was teaching at Town Hall Theater.
“I had no idea she was funny,” Bierman said of his first impression of Friml. That, of course, changed as their relationship grew from mentor-mentee to peers.
“I just love being around her for the funny,” Bierman said. He added that the Friml audiences see onstage is pretty similar to who she is off it: “She’s always working the bit.”
As the world slowly reopened, Friml split her time between New Haven and the city. By 2022, she had moved to Brooklyn full time and resumed her career in earnest.
Friml hit the ground running, touring for weeks at a time all over the country. But the rigors of the road wore her down physically and mentally. She’s since scaled back and now travels only on the weekends. During the week, she’s a regular at comedy clubs across New York City, including New York Comedy Club, Gotham Comedy Club and the Comedy Cellar, the club for aspiring comedians. If she had any lingering bouts of imposter syndrome, a chance encounter at the Cellar put her fears to rest.
In July 2023, thanks to her growing success and name recognition in New York comedy circles, Friml joined a rarified rotation of comics who are invited to book weekly slots at the Cellar — what’s known as “getting passed” in the comedy world. One night in late October that year, she was waiting in the wings to take the stage. Out in the audience were her parents, who were seeing her at the Cellar for the first time.
“So I was already nervous about doing well in front of them,” Friml recalled.
She looked to her left. Standing next to her in the backstage room was Fallon, watching the show. “The Tonight Show” host struck up a conversation with Friml, and they hit it off.
When it was time for her to go on, Friml excused herself.
“I said, ‘This was awesome, Jimmy, but I gotta go. I’m up next,'” she recalled. As she turned to leave, Fallon leaned in over her shoulder and said, “Go crush it.”
“So now I’m actually nervous,” Friml said, “because not only am I trying not to bomb in front of my parents, I’m trying not to bomb in front of Jimmy Fallon.”
In the middle of her set, she looked out into the crowd and spotted Fallon and Mike Birbiglia. “And they were dying laughing,” she said. “That was a surreal moment.”
After the show, Fallon caught Friml on her way out of the club. He gave her a big hug and fawned over her set. “Then he disappeared into the night,” Friml recalled.
The next morning, Silbermann called the producers at “The Tonight Show.” What she didn’t know was that they had already called the Cellar to find out who Friml was. Two weeks later, she was on the show.
Standup booker Michael Cox is the gatekeeper for comedians on “The Tonight Show.” Even Fallon can’t get someone on without going through Cox. Friml, he said, was an easy sell.
“What makes Tina unique is her ability to tell extremely personal and vulnerable jokes,” Cox said. He offered an example — “one of my all-time favorite jokes” — from Friml’s April appearance:
“I’m getting destroyed on these dating apps,” Friml said. “I’ll read all the profiles of all of these Manhattan guys. Turns out a lot of guys are ‘open-minded’ and ‘down for whatever.’
“I used to think that ‘down for whatever’ was a green light for me!” she went on. “Turns out I don’t need a guy who is down for whatever, but more a guy who’s up for something very particular.”
“This joke is genius,” Cox said.
Friml’s April appearance likely won’t be her last on the show. Cox explained that he maintains a cast of regulars, comics who are “sure bets” and are invited back based on the strength of their past performances.
“Tina,” he said, “is one of them.”
Tina Friml Needs No Introduction
Friml will likely never stop doing jokes about disability — at least not entirely. But they have gradually become less prominent in her sets. Or more accurately, she’s gotten better at weaving together bits about her life and bits about her life with cerebral palsy.
Compare her two “Tonight Show” appearances. Her first, in November 2023, was heavy on disability jokes. Sporting red hair, she skipped “You’re going to be OK,” but she did bust out “I suffer from people,” alongside newer jokes about being a fully functioning woman with disabilities in the city — “I’ve got very ‘You go, girl’ energy” — and nondisabled people’s expectations for disabled people: “When people want a disabled person to ‘live their best life,’ they’re thinking giving a TED Talk or finishing a marathon in last place.”
For her late-night debut, she was introducing herself to a massive new audience and undoubtedly had in mind her early mentor Hartswick’s lesson about first impressions. By this April, 18 months later and now blonde, she was more of a known quantity and could afford to stretch out. She still threaded her set with some ace jokes on cerebral palsy, but she also ventured into topics not explicitly tied to disability, such as dating and embarrassing kinks.
This approach is reflective of her current career strategy, which is measured and methodical. For one thing, she has yet to record a special in an age when it’s never been easier or cheaper to do it. That makes her an outlier among comics at her level. But it’s also a shrewd decision.
Friml is anxious to do a special and has had meetings with Netflix. She’s currently honing an hour that she thinks could work. But she’s waiting to record it until she not only feels that she’s ready but her audience is, too.
“I don’t want it to be introductory,” she explained, before mocking herself doing her classic opener in a singsong voice: “Oh, hi. I’m Tina. I’m disabled, but don’t worry!”
“I love that joke. It’s given me a career,” she continued. “But I don’t want to do it on a special. I’ll do jokes about being disabled, but I want it to feel like I’m talking to a friend.”
She also needs time to write. Friml said she’s modeling her career on another Tina: Tina Fey, the former Second City comedian who went on to cohost “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live” before creating her own hit sitcom, “30 Rock,” and becoming a movie and TV producer. At some point in the next five or 10 years, Friml wants to stop doing standup and pivot to TV or sketch comedy or something else creative, such as writing or music.
“I would love to put my energy into helping other people tell their stories,” she said. “I do believe there will be a point where I’ve said all I have to say about my life.”
‘It Will Always Find a Way to Humble You’
The night after the high of her April “Tonight Show” set, Friml had booked a pair of club gigs in Manhattan to give me a sense of the New York City comedy grind. But I doubt even she realized how vivid a picture she would paint.
After dinner in the East Village, we took the subway to the Upper West Side’s New York Comedy Club — a roughly 30-minute trek, including changing trains. We were running late, and Friml was fending off polite texts from the club owner wondering where her next act was. Hustling from the subway stop, we burst through the club’s doors a few minutes after 8 p.m. Not on time, but close enough.
We made our way from the bar to the theater, where the host was keeping the folks in the crowd entertained — all seven of them. When he saw that Friml had arrived, the host introduced her. Sort of.
“Folks, you might have seen her on ‘The Tonight Show’ last night. Please give it up for Tinaaaa Frimmm … er, Tina!”
That may have been the high point of the set. The tiny crowd of tourists, three of whom were from Singapore, simply didn’t know what to make of Tina Friml. After trying out a few jokes that barely induced a polite laugh, she switched course to her version of crowd work, preplanned bits whose leading questions have an off-the-cuff feel to unsuspecting audiences. By the end of the set, she was joking about the front wedgie her new red velvet pants were giving her. That, finally, got a laugh — though mostly from Friml herself. At the end of what might have been the longest 15-minute set of her life, she bid the crowd good night: “Welp, I should go.”
And she did.
If Friml was demoralized by the set, she didn’t show it. Over drinks at the bar afterward, she couldn’t contain her amusement.
“I’m actually glad you saw that,” she said, smiling as she stirred her rum and Coke. “Because one thing you need to know about comedy in New York is that it will always find a way to humble you. You could be on ‘The Tonight Show’ one night, and the next…” she said, gesturing to the empty room.
That’s undoubtedly true. But you know what? Tina Friml is going to be OK.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tina Friml Can’t Lose | From Vermont to “The Tonight Show,” the Middlebury-born comedian with cerebral palsy is having a moment. Just don’t call her an inspiration.”
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This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2025.
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