19 guide 12-18 Aug 2017
nerd, they couldn’t make fun
of me for it.” Schaefer’s big
break into comedy was some
time coming. When she started
gigging, she had a day job with a
law firm. “I wrote a song about
my cubicle. Write what you know!
I went from club to club with this
CD with the backing track on it.
I remember doing this show and
I had three or four people coming
from the firm I worked at, one of
whom was a partner at the firm.
And they came to the club – this
horrible club – and I get there
and the CD player doesn’t work.
And I have no other material.
I can’t perform. So I’m crying,
I’m literally crying in the club
and apologising to the people
I invited. Nights like that are
hard to think about.”
Schaefer has done some
unusual jobs in showbiz,
including writing the questions
for Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire. But success came
with a job on Jimmy Fallon’s
late-night show, where she won
two Emmys for her work writing
the show’s blogs, at a time when
the industry was just waking up
to social media. “I remember a
conference call at the start where
someone from NBC literally
said the sentence: ‘Twitter is
dangerous.’ And within four
months, it was: ‘Every single
person involved in the show has
to have a Twitter account.’”
Now Schaefer has earned the
right to pitch her own shows, and
be taken very seriously by media
platforms. But for the next few
weeks, she’ll just be entertaining
Edinburgh audiences and baiting
Trump online. “Just the other
day, I posted all these comments
under one of his tweets,” she
says. “It looked like I was really
praising him, but one word
in each tweet was in capitals;
when you put them all together,
it said: ‘Suck my dick, you
incompetent toad.’”
Little White Box is at Pleasance
Courtyard, Edinburgh, to 28 Aug