When Rosebud Baker found out she was pregnant in early 2023, she had to decide how to approach her standup material as she embarked on a national tour. She’s not afraid of the challenge of weaving her personal life into art — the comedian known for discussing the intimacies of her marriage onstage, as well as the death of her sister at the age of 7 — but after two miscarriages she struggled with the decision to speak about her pregnancy.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t have a ton of faith that she was going to make it,” Baker says with her signature deadpan delivery. “I’ve never had a superstition about it, where I thought oh if I talk about this something bad could happen — it was more like, if I talk about it and then something bad happens, how do I address that?”
The comedian, who is also a writer on Saturday Night Live, wound up with an hour of material about her experience as her pregnancy progressed. She put it on tape and after her daughter Minnow was born Baker wrote a new hour of stand-up that builds and reflects on what she talked about before giving birth. That material became The Mother Lode, her new Netflix special (streaming now) that weaves together footage from both sets, showing Baker at both nearly nine months pregnant and nearly one year postpartum.
“I really sat on my original material and the jokes that were in it, so that I can talk about what this feels like now as opposed to what I thought it would feel like when I was pregnant,” she says. “This special is something I really would have appreciated having when I was battling with whether or not I wanted to have kids — I made something for my former self.”
Below, Baker talks to The Hollywood Reporter about perfecting The Mother Lode, the gender politics of fertility, and what it was like to watch SNL50.
You discuss your previous miscarriages in the special, but I believe you’d also performed jokes on the topic before you had a successful pregnancy — what’s your natural inclination for working through traumatic elements with your comedy?
I had jokes about my miscarriage the week that it happened; I was going onstage and doing those jokes. That being said, after about three weeks of running those jokes I realized I hadn’t processed it enough to be telling them. It went from being exciting to “I need a second with this alone before I can bring the topic back up.” So even though I can write a joke about something sad right away, until I’ve actually dealt with it, it’s not fun. Audiences need to feel safe to laugh at this stuff, and if I don’t feel truly cool about laughing at it they don’t have a shot.
How did you come up with the concept to cut between takes of you taping your special pregnant and postpartum? It’s standard practice for comedians to weave together the best takes of several special tapings — but of course with The Mother Lode we can actually tell when you’re using different takes.
So at the beginning of my tour, when I was pregnant, I knew I was going to tape that hour because I didn’t think I’d have a lot of time after I had the baby. That’s not a good enough reason to actually put that tape out there. But then I was talking to my comic friend Ryan Hamilton and he suggested holding onto it and revisiting it after the baby, whenever I got to it. So then I filmed a whole new special with the updated material, and decided to just send both tapes to my incredible editor Kelly Lyon and told her to pick whatever worked and just air on the side of funny. So it became a combination of the two specials.
How do you find watching yourself perform as compared to watching the SNL cast perform your material?
I get the same juice from it. I really love getting a win, and that means getting people to laugh whether or not I’m the person performing it. It’s funny, when I started as a standup I didn’t think I wanted to write stuff that someone else got to do, but now it’s a really good feeling. Also, the thing about SNL is that it’s a collective win, so you don’t necessarily get credit for your specific line or joke — but when it’s a loss, it’s a collective loss.
What was it like going back to work as a standup after having the baby?
That first time going back onstage was wild. I felt like I’d gone to space and come back and was like, I went to space! And everybody’s like OK, we’ve seen pictures of space. And I’m like, but these are my pictures of space! They’re mine! You feel so weirdly separate from the world, and especially from the comedy world. I had to find my footing.
You have a few jokes in the special about feeling as though men are useless when going through things like IVF — do you find that the men who’ve watched it, whether it’s your husband or otherwise, are in on the joke? Do they get the absurdity of the gender gaps in those experiences?
Look, the short answer is I don’t care (laughs). The longer answer is, if men are able to watch it and laugh at it, that does make me happy because I do want comedy to be a unifying thing. That’s what I aim for. That being said, when I was writing this I was thinking of women because I was writing from my perspective. I thought, this one’s for the girlies. But I have been kind of surprised at the number of men that have responded to the special. I don’t hate it, I’ll take the win.
I was struck by your jokes about how expensive IVF was — not because I’m surprised it’s expensive, but moreso that an SNL writer doesn’t have health insurance coverage for that kind of treatment.
I’m on the Writer’s Guild health insurance, not the NBC insurance, so that’s why. When I think about women’s medicine I do get enraged. I often feel like I’m going to the vet. They’ll just kind of guess at things. And our pain is so minimized — the fact that it’s just now becoming possible to get pain relief for IUDs? I remember standing up from getting mine and passing out.
Which part of the SNL50 experience is going to stick with you the most?
I was lucky enough — well, lucky-ish, because it’s sort of a double-edged sword — but I did get the week of the 50th off because it was the senior writers and the alumni who were writing for the special. So I was able to just enjoy the show and the party, which was really nice. It helped remind me what a legendary place this is to work. You can lose sight of that when you come in every day. Your heroes are hanging on the walls, but it doesn’t always sink in. Being there at that show, it really sunk in how lucky I am. This is part of comedy history and I get to be there.
Have you thought about your daughter one day watching your special?
I wrote it hoping that one day she’d be of the age to really understand where it’s coming from — which is a gamble I have to take. If there is one person whose opinion about it matters to me, it’s hers. The special is all jokes, but there is a very emotional through line and I hope that when she watches it she knows that she is the happy ending to the whole thing. She is the reason why I made it. She was the muse.
