When you laugh, you defy death…Rachel Bloom’s Life@GWN

During the height of the pandemic, Rachel Bloom gave birth to her firstborn, with complications that put her daughter in the NICU, and suffered the loss of her longtime friend and collaborator Adam Schlesinger to complications with COVID-19 as the world grappled with grief and transformation on an unprecedented scale.

Her daughter is now a healthy toddler, and Rachel is coping with the loss of her writing partner the best way she knows how, laughter. Her one-woman off-Broadway production, Death, Let Me Do My Show, was adapted into a Netflix special wherein Rachel lives out her tragedies in front of a live studio audience. But for Rachel, it’s more than a coping mechanism, humor is a beacon of hope in a chaotic world. When confronted with so much we can’t control, Bloom chooses to laugh.

In doing so, she chooses to see the bright (or absurdly dark) side of life, and make way for other underdogs like her to get to share the stories that keep them going. That’s why she began supporting Girls Write Now—with a donation every single month for over a decade—placing her in the category of one of our most dedicated champions. We are proud to honor Rachel this year through this feature and other special activities like the 2025 Girls Write Now Awards. Together with Girls Write Now mentee Inica Kotasthane  from the Girls Write Now program “Power of Punchlines Journey” this spring, Rachel unapologetically tells the story of how comedy can convert the most acute pain into life-giving balm.

Girls Write Now 2025 Awards

This Life@ is a snippet of a conversation between Girls Write Now mentee Inica Kotasthane and Girls Write Now Honoree, writer, actress, and producer, Rachel Bloom. Stay tuned for the full conversation in a special season of Speaking in First Draft.

Hi Rachel! Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about why you support Girls Write Now?

Hi! I’m Rachel Bloom. I’m a writer, comedian, and actor. When I was in college, for a moment, I tried to start an all-girls sketch comedy group and I thought, “Oh boy this is going to be a huge meet-up.” Two people showed up. When I questioned a couple of the people I thought were going to come and didn’t show up, they were like, “Oh, I can’t do comedy. That’s not my thing.” It was a really interesting contrast to all of the guys in my theatre program who I knew did sketch comedy. It’s just a confidence thing. I think it’s really, really important to get past. That was, I think, in 2009. Which makes me feel quite old.

I think we’ve come a long way. But I noticed that confidence gap, and it made me think it’s always really important to level the playing field. That’s why it’s important for me to support Girls Write Now—the organization  really resonates with me.

Your Netflix special “Death, Let Me Do My Special” is about loss, Covid-19 and parenthood, while also being, at its core, a comedy. Obviously those are pretty difficult topics to talk about, but you chose to make them humorous. Why do you think it’s important to be able to talk about difficult topics in a funny way?

First of all, I come much more from a comedy space than a drama space. But I think talking about dark things with a comedic lens is just more interesting, because I think it’s much easier to talk about dark things and wallow in that emotion. But also when I was going through what I went through, I found that I was thinking a lot about the role of comedy and laughter in my life. A lot of the ways I escaped the feeling of grief and dread in March and April 2020 was just rereading funny books or listening to funny podcasts. When you’re laughing, you defy death. We don’t know why we’re here, or if there’s a reason we’re here. So if nothing matters, laugh about it and it almost defeats death in that way.

Could you talk about the different mediums and what you get from performing live?

I think performing live, you get understanding and empathy. You’re in the room with someone. You understand the full context of where they’re coming from. There’s this idea: the medium is the message, and so when you’re live, you can experiment in a fuller way than if you’re on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, because you have half an hour with an audience. The internet has to be much more curated because you have less time. The way that I take internet comedy is like, I’ll watch it and if I get the joke I’ll scroll past, to my detriment, because maybe there was something at the end that made everything together. So I think there’s a reason that live performance, live comedy, live music still remains popular. There is nothing to replace being in a room with other people for an extended period of time. That’s definitely something we learned after COVID.

Our theme for this year’s Girls Write Now anthology is Hope Lives in Our Words and comedy definitely gives people hope. It encourages you to see outside of your immediate surroundings. So what is something that gives you hope these days?

People being in rooms with each other, people talking face to face. I think that human interaction remains very understanding and empathetic. That is what gives me hope: that at the root of all of us there is a fundamental desire to understand and to have empathy and to connect. You realize how many people there are and how many different lives and possibilities there are. It is very eye opening and feels very exciting to be surrounded by that all the time. I think it allows you to connect with people on a deeper level. You understand that there is a fullness to this person that you just don’t know yet. It allows you to be more empathetic.

Patton Oswald has a special he did right after his wife passed away, where he talks about his wife’s point of view on the world, and she would always say, “it’s chaos, be kind” and I really just love that. It’s chaos, be kind.

What role has mentorship played in your career and how can generational differences educate the next generation of comedians?

I think this idea of helping people, not pulling the ladder up, but lowering the ladder is relatively new, especially in comedy, because it’s a competitive field. I think now about the mentors that have mattered to me, I think about Arlene Brosh McKenna, with whom I created Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It was all about them asking “How can I build you up? How can I support you? How can I help make what you’re doing better?” And so I think, if you’re looking for mentors who will help make you a better writer, that also don’t make you feel like shit, you need someone who at least gives you a little kernel of praise, because otherwise you can’t create if you’re just in a self-hating mode the whole time. So it’s finding someone who’s that mix of love with critique. Someone who understands where you’re coming from and will push you.

We’re excited to honor Rachel Bloom at the Girls Write Now Awards hosted by Diane von Furstenberg, where she will be introduced by her close friend Bowen Yang. We’re also ecstatic about Rachel’s upcoming projects, The Devil Wears Prada the sequel, and her ABC pilot that just got picked up called Do You Want to Have Kids?