'It was like lightning': Fortune Feimster recalls how she discovered her passion for comedy

Fortune Feimster first encountered improv while she was in university. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, the comedian, actor and writer says that she was so enamoured with it that she decided to give it a shot herself.

"Then they were like, 'Well actually, to do the classes is going to be like $600,'" she says. "And as a broke college kid, I was like, 'Whoa, there goes that!' So I just kind of left it in the past and didn't think about it again."

A few years later, Feimster left her home state of North Carolina for Los Angeles. But unlike most transplants to L.A., she wasn't seeking fame and fortune. "I just kind of went as a life experience," she says.

Feimster found it hard to make friends in her new city. "It's a very difficult place to connect with people," she says. "They're not really interested. Everyone kind of stays in their own lane."

To try and find connections, she started taking classes at The Groundlings, the legendary L.A. improv theatre that's produced a slew of Saturday Night Live cast members.

"It was like lightning," she says of her experience at The Groundlings. "A light bulb [went] off like, 'My God, this is where has this been?'"

And not only did Feimster love improv, she was also really good at it.

"I just remember the teachers consistently just saying, 'Hey, you're really good at this. You need to keep doing this,'" she says. "And I was just having fun.… I think it was my teachers reinforcing this to me that made me go, 'Oh, there is something here.'"

Feimster is the star of her own one-hour Netflix comedy special, Crushing It. While it's her third stand-up special, the previous two were only half an hour. She says that putting together a full hour of material was a different process.

"With half hours, you just kind of throw jokes up against the wall," she says. "This is funny, this is funny, this is funny — and nothing has a through line or there's not a story to it. I really wanted [Crushing It] to have a narrative, and I wanted it to feel like a little book with a beginning, middle, and end, and everything kind of coming full circle. I had never done that before. So that was the challenge with that one was figuring out how to do that. Now, I feel like I've settled into that type of storytelling."

Crushing It is streaming now on Netflix.

The full interview with Fortune Feimster is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Fortune Feimster produced by Kaitlyn Swan.