Cat Cohen was zipping up the bag she had just packed for a trip to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe when she began to feel ill. Then, as she reached for the remote to pause the television, she realized her left arm had stopped working. It was August 2023, and Cohen, a New York comedian with a loyal following, had been preparing to spend several weeks presenting her signature mix of cabaret and stand-up at the annual performing arts showcase in Scotland. Instead, she took an Uber to the emergency room.
Cohen, then 31, might have suffered a stroke, or something similar called a transient ischemic attack. Not only that: She had a congenital heart condition — an opening between her heart’s upper chambers that needed patching. It had led to the stroke symptoms, apparently the result of a blood clot that bypassed her lungs and blocked blood flow to her brain.
Lying in a hospital bed with her boyfriend at her side, Cohen tried to process this news. “If my arm stopped moving,” she had wondered, “what does that mean for the rest of my body? Am I going to be able to be onstage again? The thought of losing that was terrifying.”
As questions swirled in her head, one idea took hold: “This is going to be great material,” she remembered thinking.
Cohen has made her name as an exuberant, physical performer whose musings about how we live now often feel fresh and specific. But her greatest subject is herself. In her stage shows and comedy specials, Cohen alternates between songs and vignettes on themes like food, sex and her insatiable need for attention. One song details a past life as an old woman who baked crusty bread; another is about begging to be sent flattering party photos from a friend’s phone. Then there are the poems about sharing nude photos or the inadequacy of cauliflower rice.
So, it should come as no surprise that she is revisiting her life-threatening experience in a one-woman show, “Broad Strokes,” directed by Alex Timbers at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village. It is her most ambitious work to date: not only is it her Off Broadway debut after years of performing in clubs and at festivals, but it is also her most cohesive show — with a narrative about her brush with mortality.
Cohen, whose credits include screen roles in “Only Murders in the Building” and “Sentimental Value,” is part of a cohort of comics whose humor deepens in song. Audiences have responded to her gameness and the unhinged quality she brings to her glamour-puss shtick, sharing what others might not admit — experiences she often sings about: acid reflux from pad Thai, how boys never wanted to kiss her as a “tweenage girl” or her desperate desire to attend any and all formal events as a plus one. (In a review of Cohen’s show “Come for Me” at Joe’s Pub, Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that Cohen’s songs “pack more delicious hooks than most pop albums.”)
Cohen has been honing her style for about a decade. Alan Cumming met Cohen in 2017, when she was performing at Club Cumming, the East Village cabaret spot he co-owns. She stands out for “the amazing combination she has of attention-seeking and vulnerability, both apparent in equal measures,” he wrote in an email. A favorite gag, he added, “is when she burped onstage and said: ‘I literally can’t stop creating content.’”
But Cohen’s absurdist, hot-mess persona belies a smart, serious, driven performer who thinks deeply about her craft. When we met at a West Village diner in May, Cohen wore her long dark hair down and black eyeliner winged around her seafoam-color eyes. Her excitement about her new show was palpable.
“It’s very ‘pinch me,’” she said.
“Broad Strokes” traces an arc that begins just before Cohen’s medical emergency and continues with the unexpected diagnosis, the cardiac catheterization surgery she underwent with a physician named, incredibly, Dr. Love, and her recovery. In Cohen’s hands, the tale is lighthearted.
“I’m obsessed with the juxtaposition of something brash and grotesque and humiliating with something completely heartfelt and embarrassing and real,” Cohen said. “That’s the core of what I like to do.”
Last summer, she returned to Edinburgh, where she presented a version of “Broad Strokes.” At one point during a performance, the paramedics had to be called. But not for Cohen — an audience member had fainted when she started describing her catheterization procedure, which involved the insertion of a needle into a vein in her groin. Two more fainted at later performances, around the same moment.
“I’m still trying to iron out the kinks of the show, and people are being wheeled off,” Cohen said. “Obviously, it kills the vibe.”
RAISED IN HOUSTON, by parents who worked in law and business, Cohen grew up listening to Stephen Sondheim and Britney Spears. (One of her two younger brothers, Billy, is an ensemble member in “Ragtime” on Broadway.) Cohen attended Princeton University, where she studied English literature with a focus on 20th-century American poetry. She also took theater classes and sang in an a cappella group.
Cohen continues to write and perform poetry, which is often ribald and characteristically self-deprecating. At times, it’s transcendent. “You’re surprised when I tell you I pray / but I like the idea of wanting something / all the way / into space” reads one poem in her 2021 collection, “God I Feel Modern Tonight.”
After graduating, she got an apartment with fellow young creatives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and worked as a nanny, in restaurants and even as an SAT tutor while taking improv classes at Upright Citizens Brigade and trying out stand-up material. She trained with a voice-over coach, Marla Kirban, who helped her land commercial work and became a mentor and surrogate New York grandmother, Cohen said. (After Kirban died in 2021, Cohen got a tattoo of a martini glass in her honor.)
Cohen has a particular way with language — of sometimes rolling words around in her mouth so that they come out buoyant. “I am absolutely slurped into this sequin jumpsuit!” she exclaims in her special “Come for Me,” before imitating the crack of a whip.
The first time that the comedian and writer Pat Regan saw Cohen onstage, in 2017, “I remember laughing so hard it hurt,” he said in an interview. One of the songs she performed, about being intimidated by fit moms at Equinox, “was an earworm for four years,” he said.
In 2018, Cohen and Regan started recording a podcast, “Seek Treatment,” which recently released its 500th episode. It plumbs the depths of its co-hosts’ personal lives and pop-culture opinions, and welcomes guests like the comedians Caleb Hearon and John Early. Its appeal is niche; Cohen and Regan, who now lives in Los Angeles, have a long-running bit that the podcast has only 30 listeners.
Still, they keep recording, often in a playful banter that Cohen called “our own language.” Regan said they both loved “the feeling of saying something in the funniest way — you just put as much mustard on it as possible.”
ON A SCORCHING AFTERNOON earlier this month, Cohen was hard at work in a bright Times Square rehearsal space. Along with Timbers and the show’s music supervisor, David Dabbon, Cohen considered details like how and when she might cross the stage, on which song lyric she might lock her microphone back into its stand and what musical motif ought to accompany a moment in which she relates how the hospital staff shaved her pubic hair before surgery.
Timbers, who won a Tony for directing “Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” said he contacted Cohen about working together after seeing her 2022 Netflix special, “The Twist…? She’s Gorgeous.”
“I felt like I was watching a kindred spirit,” he said in an interview. “This person similarly feels evangelical about combining stand-up comedy and musical theater.”
Now, Timbers said, he has seen firsthand that Cohen “brings wit, intelligence and a sense of danger and mischief to everything she does.”
Cohen rehearsed a number, “Normal Girl,” in which she dramatizes how she spiraled before her surgery, wondering if she would live to ever see her name in lights — or, crucially, survive to learn how to use an air fryer. For Cohen, there is pathos in playing silly moments off the sincere.
Since her recovery from her procedure, she has become engaged to her longtime boyfriend, the actor Brian Muller, who proposed to her last summer in Scotland. The couple recently adopted a Chihuahua mix named Romeo.
For a comedian whose material had once revolved in part around dating woes, her domestic happiness has been something of an adjustment — one she has been grateful to make.
In an earlier song called “The Void,” Cohen sings about a bottomless pit of need and yearning. “That was before I found out I had a true void in my heart,” she said. Being in love, though, has changed her. “I am feeling that the void is less cavernous than it was,” she said. “These physical things so often are true manifestations of the emotional.”
