Comic’s disastrous marriage proposal ‘just one misstep after another’

A seaside cabin, candles, rose petals, champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries: when comedian Fortune Feimster decided to propose to her girlfriend, Jax Smith, she envisioned the kind of dry-ice lovemaking aesthetic worthy of The Bachelor. To ensure the moment went off without a hitch, she enlisted the help of the accommodation’s management – and that’s when the trouble started.

To allow staff to covertly decorate their room, Feimster took Smith to an upmarket restaurant: a venue with an excessive reliance on edible foams, seashells and other gimmicks. But Feimster’s hopes of a romcom-worthy proposal were dashed the moment she and Smith returned to their cabin. Mounds of wilted rose petals, seemingly arranged with a leaf blower, were strewn across the floor. Electric candles flickered feebly (or not at all) while a roaring fire melted the chocolate off the strawberries and brought the champagne to a simmer. A passer-by would be forgiven for thinking the room had been ransacked.

Panicking, Feimster became unable to control her nervous tic: making finger-gun gestures – much like David Brent in The Office – at her beloved. Figuring it was too late to get down on bended knee, she simply threw open her arms and asked, “You wanna?”

“The whole thing was just one misstep after another,” Feimster says, laughing. “I paid all this money for an ocean view but there was so much fog and rain, you couldn’t even see in front of your hand. It was like throwing money into a fire pit. But luckily, Jax did say yes.”

“[At the debutante ball], I actually had to wear a giant white wedding gown and be ‘presented to society as a woman’ – by my own brothers!”

Fortune Feimster

In October, the couple will celebrate their third anniversary. But first, Feimster will tour Australia in July with her Live Laugh Love! show, performing in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Speaking via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, she appears much as she does in her popular Netflix stand-up specials Sweet & Salty and Good Fortune; her open, friendly face ringed by honey-coloured curls, with a warm laugh and an inclination to put her conversational partner at ease.

“I used to do what you do,” she says of her seven-year stint as an entertainment reporter at outlets including Los Angeles Daily News and New York Daily News. “It was such a cool job. I wanted to be an actor and a comedian and it taught me so much; I got to go to events and red carpets and talk to so many different people.”

Born in 1980 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Emily Fortune Feimster is the youngest of three children. (Fortune is her maternal great-grandmother’s maiden name.) Despite growing up on opposite sides of the world, we soon realise our identical birth year translates to many common childhood experiences.

Consider the piece of playground equipment known as the whirligig or merry-go-round: a rapidly spinning platform that ensured recently devoured snacks would reappear, unbidden, in partially digested form. (Less fortunate thrillseekers acquired stitches or plaster casts after being flung into the air.)

“The teachers just let us loose on the playground while they checked out,” Feimster says. “They were like, ‘This is our time now; you guys go and do your thing.’ I feel like it toughened us up and gave us some character.”

Debutante balls were another matter entirely. A relic of 18th-century England, they involved teenagers receiving instruction in social etiquette and correct moral behaviour. Boys wore tuxedos and girls strapped themselves into floor-length gowns with long silk gloves, setting the scene for a series of ballroom dances.

“My mom really had to talk me into it,” Feimster says. “They teach you how to eat in a ladylike fashion, which means you can’t just wipe your mouth with a napkin; you have to dab daintily at the corners. We had lunches with little cucumber sandwiches and afterwards, you had to write a thank you note on a card. If you ask my wife, she’ll tell you that I learnt absolutely nothing from all that.

“I actually had to wear a giant white wedding gown and be ‘presented to society as a woman’ – by my own brothers! – and I was so embarrassed I just wanted to lock that part of my life in a box and never talk about it again. Except the producer of my Good Fortune Netflix special knew all about it and was like, ‘You have to talk about this [on stage]!’”

In May, Feimster’s latest television project FUBAR – an action-comedy series starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Luke Brunner and Monica Barbaro as his daughter Emma – premiered on Netflix. Both are caught in a years-long lie, neither knowing the other is actually a CIA operative.

“It’s a big crazy action series but there’s this fascinating dynamic of the father-daughter relationship,” Feimster says. “I play one of the CIA agents who’s a spy on Arnold’s team and has to keep the world from imploding but also to keep this father and daughter from going at each other.”

At first glance, Feimster’s body of work is impressively diverse, incorporating TV series such as Last Comic Standing, Chelsea Lately, The Mindy Project, The L Word: Generation Q and multiple appearances on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Her films include Office Christmas Party and The Happytime Murders and her latest podcast is Sincerely Fortune, in which she discusses a different topic each week.

But there is a common theme to these seemingly disparate projects: using humour to highlight our similarities as much as our differences.

“I didn’t have representation growing up and it did affect me coming out [as gay] later on,” she says. “Maybe if I’d had that representation it would have been different, you know? And now that I get to be the representation that I so wished I had when I was younger ... that’s like a trippy, full-circle moment.”

Often, a fan will approach Feimster to reveal, for the first time, that they’re gay. “The fact they’ve never told a single person ever but they’re now telling me – I’m like, ‘Holy cow, I can’t believe I’m part of this person’s coming out story forever!’ I really take that to heart.

“I’ve had parents tell me they’ve had inklings of their kid being gay so they watched one of my specials with them to show they’re cool with it – and then their kid felt comfortable enough to come out. I even had a straight guy call in on a radio show to say he’d never really thought about how difficult it was for a gay person to come out and it really made him understand that in a new way. Of course, I started crying.”

While this is Feimster’s fourth trip to Australia, it’s her first time performing a solo show.

“I’ve learned about meat pies, I love the coffee culture and I’ve realised that nobody actually says, ‘I’ll slip another shrimp on the barbie for ya’,” she says. “Melbourne has obviously established itself as a comedy mecca and I feel like audiences have been trained to really get comedy; to really appreciate and want it. I used to worry about coming to Australia as an American because I’d be wondering if my stories and my background would translate – but Australian audiences are just so on board with everything.”

Fortune Feimster plays July 16 in Adelaide, July 19-20 in Sydney, July 21 in Brisbane and July 23 in Melbourne. Tickets at tegdainty.com

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