In a lot of ways, Rachel Kaly is the quintessential Jewish comedian. She’s from New York City, extremely neurotic, has a dark sensibility and talks about being Jewish in her stand-up a lot.
Even so, in our humble opinion, Rachel is in a league of her own. Her comedy is deeply vulnerable and deeply weird in equal measure. She’s experienced multiple things in her life that have happened to nobody else — in a Kramer from “Seinfeld” kind of way — and speaks about them onstage with candor and a trademark deadpan. When she’s onstage, it’s impossible to look away.
It’s for all these reasons — and the fact that she can now be seen in “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat” — that we predict it won’t be long before everyone knows about Rachel Kaly.
So without further ado, here are 18 things to know about Rachel Kaly.
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1. Rachel was born on May 30, 1995 and grew up in New York City.
2. She’s a Gemini!
3. She is Moroccan Jewish on her father’s side.
4. She was featured on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” when she was just 5 years old!
5. “I started doing stand-up when I was 8 or 9 at the Gotham Comedy Club,” Rachel told Vulture in 2023. “They had a program called Kids ’N Comedy, which is both the worst and best thing to ever happen to me.”
6. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, Rachel says witnessing 9/11 likely explains how she became a comedian. “I think seeing something so absurd happen immediately makes your imagination run wild: If that happened, what else can happen?” she has said. “I also think it forever changed my brain chemistry to basically be as mentally ill as possible, so my neuroses have inevitably led me to write jokes about my life for better or worse.”
7. The worst comedy show Rachel has ever done was at 10 years old.
“At this one particular show, which was in the basement and every wall was a mirror, I did a set and it was a boy’s 12th birthday, and he and his friends were all sitting in the front row,” she explained. “They absolutely hated me and heckled me the whole time, saying I wasn’t funny and I was ugly and other amazing things, and I obviously had no idea what to do. So I told them to ‘please stop’ after every punch line, and I cried after and honestly may have even cried onstage.”
She added, “For whatever reason, I didn’t stop doing stand-up after that, and now I beg people to heckle me because it is the most fun thing that could possibly happen to me.”
8. Nowadays, her jokes are typically about “being Jewish, gay, mentally ill, and growing up in New York City with an absent father.”
9. Rachel graduated from Hunter College High School and Wesleyan University.
10. She once met Timothée Chalamet!
11. She used to do a podcast with Robby Hoffman called “Too Far,” which the New York Times called an “addictive listen” (mainly because the majority of the podcast was Rachel and Robby arguing).
12. Rachel has performed her show “Hospital Hour” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The set recounts her trauma and poor mental health, including anecdotes from her over 300 hospitalizations.
13. She had a guest role in the Hanukkah episode of the HBO show “High Maintenance.”
14. Rachel made her adult late night debut doing stand-up on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”
15. Rachel is a scene-stealer in “Worried,” a pilot adaption of the extremely Jewish novel “Worry” by Alexandra Tanner. In it, she plays the extremely neurotic and troubled Poppy, who moves in with her sister Jules (Gideon Adlon). The two then proceed to spiral.
16. Below, listen to the whole “Worried” team discuss the pilot at Sundance:
17. Rachel plays Claire, an awkward remote employee of Rockin’ Grandma’s Hot Sauce, on “Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.”
18. According to Rachel, she prepared for the role by watching 11 seasons of the show “Bones.”
