Comedian Catherine Cohen: I had a stroke at 31

This time last year the American comedian Catherine Cohen, who blends stand-up with cabaret, was riding high: she had built on the success of being crowned best newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in 2019 and her Netflix special, The Twist …? She’s Gorgeous, was a critically acclaimed hit. She was at home in New York, preparing to return to the Edinburgh Fringe. But while she was packing for her “big trip”, as she calls it, she started to feel a sharp pain in her chest and couldn’t move her arm. “I was, like, ‘OK, this could be a stroke.’”
Cohen, 32, speeds through the story of her diagnosis: she walked to hospital, had several scans and was told she had patent foramen ovale (PFO), a hole in the heart between the left and right atria which can lead to mini strokes if it’s left untreated. “Sorry, I get a bit anxious when I talk about it,” Cohen says, admitting that she’s only just beginning to process what happened. “I’ve always been a hypochondriac.”
She continues, blasé: “Thankfully the doctors said they could close it up,” then goes on to describe a terrifying-sounding operation for which she had to be awake. “I was begging to be put down like a dog.” Cohen says, laughing. “It was not on the cards, not on the itinerary. It was so f***ing weird.”
She didn’t feel like writing jokes for a while and spent her time in recovery watching “the entire series” of Game of Thrones. Her view on how to move on from potentially life-threatening trauma? “It’s best not to think about it.” Now she is planning to make up for lost time.
Her Edinburgh show is the one she was supposed to perform last year, Come for Me, which she has already toured around the US and Europe. She promises that on stage she’s the same self-obsessed, glamorous character we saw in her Netflix special. “She’s me, just heightened,” Cohen says. But this time, rather than focusing on what it means to be in your twenties and “kind of a mess”, her show deals with what it is like to enter your thirties. She discusses everything from freezing eggs to long-term relationships to still feeling insecure about your body. “It’s about having some things figured out but not being fully at peace, which I long to be.”
These may sound like standard millennial concerns, but she is a master of her craft. Watching one of her sets, you’re treated to the sight of Cohen wearing head-to-toe sequins while performing glorious music with hilarious lyrics — her most famous song, Look at Me, which she performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2019, includes the line: “Boys never wanted to kiss me so now I do comedy.”
As we chat at the bar of Soho Theatre, her natural wit and warmth is in abundance. The Diet Coke she’s drinking is “medicine”; her health issues are “actually chic” because Hailey Bieber also had a PFO. But being a comedian was never her goal. She grew up in Houston, Texas, the daughter of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, studied English at Princeton and had dreams of being an actress. She moved to New York and, frustrated by a lack of opportunities, decided to try improv, then sketch and finally stand-up. The first time she performed, at an open-mike night in the East Village, she “blacked out” because of nerves.
But, luckily for her fans, whom she calls her “friends”, she persevered. Her dreams of acting haven’t faded. “I want to be a movie star,” she says. Cohen has already starred in the Paramount+ film At Midnight and she will be in the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building. Does she worry about being pigeonholed by her onstage persona? The answer is a resounding no. “Why shouldn’t I be able to do it all?”
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Returning to Edinburgh makes her anxious, though. “Of course I care what people think of me,” she says when I ask her about her Edinburgh Comedy award, which she celebrated by buying a pair of AirPods with her mum. And packing for the Fringe again, just as she was doing before her mini-stroke, is “kind of weirding [her] out”.
“Every now and then I’ll get a major rush of gratitude that I’m OK, but most days I’m still bitching about the same shit as before,” she says. And you can bet Cohen will be using her stage time as a sort of therapy. “That will be the next show.”
Catherine Cohen’s show Come for Me is at the Pleasance Courtyard (Forth) for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe until Aug 25, catherine-cohen.com
Four comedians who have found humour in their health traumas
Gilbert realised that something was wrong in May 2022, when he was on a fundraising walk in Cuba. His choking and sore throat were, it turned out, signs of stage four head and neck cancer. After successful treatment, the Welsh comedian turned his story into a show: A Pain in the Neck. He has said that he feels he is getting something right with the process of “ripping cancer a new one” on stage.
The stand-up comedian, who worked on Spitting Image, was performing at the Fringe last year when he felt pain in his back, which he assumed was a slipped disc. It turned out to be a tumour. The base of his spine was removed during surgery and he now has a stoma and has learnt to walk again with the aid of sticks. Forde, who is returning to the Fringe this year with his Political Party show, says: “I hopefully won’t have my life shortened by it, and my quality of life hasn’t significantly diminished.”
A script commission from the BBC gave Smyth the confidence to quit her teaching job in September 2021. That same month she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Smyth had a mastectomy, six months of chemotherapy and three weeks of radiotherapy. A fortnight after she finished her treatment she appeared on Live at the Apollo. She has since made a BBC special about people’s responses to traumatic news and recently appeared as Glenda, the MC of a comedy competition, in the Netflix showBaby Reindeer.
The comedian and expert quizzer, who is known as the Sinnerman on the ITV game show The Chase, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2019 after suffering from incontinence and a stiff shoulder. He has said that while he will never be able to appear on Strictly, he feels reassured that he has been able to retain his quizzing capability and brain function. “I’m trying to prove to the world that Parkinson’s doesn’t have to be the end of somebody’s story … that you can carry on doing the things you love.”