Livin' La Vida Feinstein

Comedian's debut album takes a gleefully raunchy New York attitude a long way

By Michael Shashoua / Jester editor-in-chief

Comedian Rachel Feinstein’s masters bawdy irony on her album “Thug Tears,” recently released as a digital download by Comedy Central.

Some highlights are the pieces titled “Sprinkled With Gay,” “Puerto Rican Confidence” and “Humping Game.” In the first, Feinstein bemoans being a single woman dealing with metrosexual guys whose appearance seems to straddle a line between straight and gay. On “Puerto Rican Confidence,” she talks about white women with concerns about weight and appearance not being able to relate to, much less understand how a 300-pound Puerto Rican woman could wear a hot pink t-shirt saying “I look good.”

Feinstein’s material goes over well in a comedy club setting. Even something as twisted as the story “Humping Game” is built around – inappropriate dry humping with a female cousin as a kid – is told in a tone of incredulity about how the adults trying to stop this could be so clueless. Or maybe how dumb and unbelievable childrens’ lies can be.

Either way, Feinstein has carved out her own identity, through certain colors and tones – some of the funny voices of Maria Bamford but not the extreme surrealism of her material, and the roast-friendly self-deprecation of Amy Schumer, but a little more relatable. Those are just a few shades you can hear in Feinstein’s material but they don’t dominate, and she’s got her own characters that populate her pieces, and her own point of view in the material she writes.