‘I don’t think about it as a sex show. It’s a feminist show’: Corinne Fisher on her Guys We F**ked podcast, threesomes and censorship

It’s a bright mid-afternoon in Corinne Fisher’s New York apartment, where she apologises for her next door neighbour renovating for “what seems like the past year”. Dull beats punctuate the sentences of our conversation, one I’ve been trying to organise for some three weeks, battling schedules and time differences.

For those trying to pin down Fisher, a long road lies ahead. “People can accuse me of a lot of things,” she laughs, twisting her shoulder-length brunette hair with her fingers to lie along the top of her spaghetti straps. Her broad New Jersey accent, thick and juicy like tomato sauce-covered meatballs, unravels as she meets me at eyeline again. “But laziness is not one of them.”

Born to a Jewish father and a lapsed-Catholic mother with a radical approach to sex (“we were never shamed for talking about it”), Fisher studied film direction in New York City before pivoting to open-mic nights and improvisation work (Fisher is an alumna of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre’s prestigious improvisation training program) in late 2010.

Her art first made critics stand up with her debut one-woman show “Corinne Fisher: I STALK YOU,” which ran at The People’s Improv Theater in 2010 and was featured in Time Out New York. Since then, she has boasted regularity on the stand-up scene, selling out shows across the US and internationally, including at The Comedy Store, New York Comedy Club, The Stand, and Caroline’s on Broadway as well as The Wilbur in Boston, the Athenaeum in Chicago, and the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York City.

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In 2013, when Fisher was dumped by a then-boyfriend at a Panera Bread restaurant (“It’s like… a step above McDonald’s”), she texted her friend on the comedy scene, then-Saturday Night Live intern Krystyna Hutchinson (they had previously teamed up at Gotham City Improv to tell tales about their own sex lives) to say: “We should do a podcast where we interview the guys we fucked.” Raunchy, rough, and a subverting mixture of absurdist and caustic, Fisher and Hutchinson’s “Guys We F**ked,” debuted under the radar, later that year. A blend of bold-face interviews, mostly about sex with the people who they used to do it with; and tough-love agony-aunt style advice (Stalin’s regime, at times, was more compassionate), the series had an unusually high hit rate for a new comedy show.

“We wanted the title to draw people in, and I guess we did that,” Fisher laughs today. It quickly became a megalith, top-five iTunes chart sensation and self-proclaimed “anti-slut-shaming podcast,” drifting somewhere between voyeurism and education, all under episode titles such as “WHERE DO YOUR ORGANS GO WHEN THE BABY COMES OUT?” and “DID I RUIN THE BEST SEX OF MY LIFE BY BEING A BITCH?”.

The show... provides a fascinating insight into the way we shape our own narratives, like how we truly believe that the person we flirt with at work needs to be with us and not their live-in girlfriend

It grew to host several like-minded provocateurs, fellow comics and people in the sex industry such as Hannah Berner and Amber Rose, and remains steady at over one million listeners (f**kers, as they’re called) worldwide, who share not only intriguing sexual encounters but experiences of sexual assault, abuse and shame due to sexual exploration – when censorship doesn’t block their content, that is. “I just think it’s so silly,” Fisher says now. “Out of all the problems we have in the world, the f-word is the thing you’re gonna focus on?”

The show, now in its 10th year and exceeding 500 episodes, provides a fascinating insight into the way we shape our own narratives, like how we truly believe that the person we flirt with at work needs to be with us and not their live-in girlfriend, or how we refuse to identify ourselves as victims because the sexual assaults we’ve experienced haven’t been “that bad”.

‘Stench of stigma’

“I don’t ever want to make someone feel like a victim,” Fisher shares. “I don’t know what it’s like in Ireland, but we’re obsessed with victimisation over in the US – and sort of making it our whole identity. And I think that can be just as dangerous as not recognising that something bad has happened to you. It’s a big reason why we’ve moved on from the term ‘sexual assault victim’ to ‘sexual assault survivor’, because otherwise there’s this like… stench of stigma on having something like that have happened to you. If you really don’t consider yourself a survivor or victim, then you really don’t have to deal with it. It’s a lot to ask someone to unpack. And, quite frankly, we don’t have the time. Being a woman is exhausting enough already.”

As it happened, Guys We F**ked came at a good time. The early aughts bet on bawdy, female-driven comedy with a never-before-seen tenacity: What’s Your Number?, Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher – which starred Cameron Diaz as a weed-smoking, foul-mouthed school teacher – received widespread critical acclaim, allowing the new genre of “hard” female comedies, resplendent with women behaving badly, to provide new footing for the way we view us all. None of this dismisses Guys We F**ked’s brilliance, instead commending Hollywood for catching up.

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The ahistorical truism of internet comedy before that used to be that the more a site led with sexually explicit content, the fewer women signed up for it; early doors dating sites resorted to euphemism, letting users look for “activity partners” or “meet-cutes” and added questions about hobbies or children to attract people seeking long-term relationships, less the seedy underbelly. While comedy generally remained an outlier to such tact, shows such as Guys We F**ked allowed the underground feminist streaks finally to let their roots grow out.

“We’ve gotten a few people who have written things like, ‘I bet your dad’s proud!’, which is actually funny because no one was more proud of me than my dad

—  Corinne Fisher

According to the Luminary, the US-based subscription podcast network on which Guys We F**ked is hosted, the typical listener is female, between 25 and 35, and lives in a big city, most likely New York or Los Angeles. “We’re huge in Australia too,” Fisher continues. “I’m not sure where specifically, but big, big, big.” She credits the recent cultural shift in sexuality with its simultaneous release and acceptance. “It’s so funny, when we started [the podcast], the idea of having a threesome was so interesting and shocking. These days you see, like, Refinery29 articles about ‘5 Ways To Make Your First Threesome Amazing”. It’s hacky, she smiles, but good.

Ten years down and topics such as transitioning, shower sex, codependency and flatulence are commonplace. Do they get tired of being the sex girls? “Oh, god, yes,” she laughs. “We joke that it’s gonna say ‘Guys We F**ked girls’ on our graves. I mean, you know, I’m very proud of the show. But to me, I think my issue with it is that I don’t think about it as a sex show. It’s a feminist show. So, I’d be perfectly happy to be thought of as a feminist, but it kind of bothers me that when people hear about this programme that we’ve done for a decade, all they get out of it is sex. That makes me feel like I’ve failed in the messaging, you know? It’s not at all about sex really, we just put that title on to get people to listen.”

There’s nothing new about comedy with a feminist bent, but recognition of the hitherto artistic radicals who paved the way for Guys We F**ked, such as Eve Ensler of The Vagina Monologues or Candace Bushnell’s Sex and The City, act as useful relics when feminists were labelled as not funny, a smear that persists. “It’s just a joke,” an anti-feminist (or “reply guy” in today’s parlance) might retort. “We’ve gotten a few people who have written things like, ‘I bet your dad’s proud!’, which is actually funny because no one was more proud of me than my dad. He passed away not too long ago, but up until then he was literally my number one fan.”

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Offstage, Fisher behaves assuredly, breaking character occasionally to laugh. Her dark hair and sweeping eyes lean into Disney villain territory, with a brogue one might associate with the feminist heroines we categorise with Gloria Steinem’s 1970s, all steady-voiced and strong-postured. She talks about travelling and quotes Michelle Obama (“or is it Hillary Clinton?”) about learning about a place by the way they treat their women.

I ask her feelings on the word ‘ladylike’. ‘My relationship with that word is… estranged,’ she laughs

Onstage, she’s fearless. Fisher draws your attention like a petite, pouting fawn ambling through a shooting club meadow – wide-eyed and vulnerable, yet perennially the focus of your attention, nimbly darting through the danger. Her voice is an important part of that. Defiant and booming, it erupts from her lips like a loaded gun. I ask her feelings on the word “ladylike”. “My relationship with that word is… estranged,” she laughs. “I think it’s been used as a way to tell women to shut up and sit down in a way that sounds somewhat still socially acceptable.”

The default

This subject matter isn’t Fisher’s alone, of course. It would be easy to lump her in with others who talk dirty, Amy Schumer, Grace Campbell, and Ali Wong among them, but such comparisons often read like a trap, suggesting that female comics exist only in the context of one another, rather than the world at large. That said, there’s something to be said for Fisher and Hutchinson’s work, allowing material of a sexual nature to become the default and not the exception.

The light dims in Fisher’s apartment as next door’s renovations kick into a higher gear. She leaves for Ireland next week for eight days (“my friends are going for 10… and no offence to them, but there’s nothing relaxing to me about leaving for more than eight days”) where her friends have a whole itinerary planned. Ding, my phone goes off. A bonus episode of Guys We F**ked” has just dropped. “SHOULD HE TELL YOU YA CAN’T SLEEP OVER BEFORE YOU GO TO HIS PLACE TO F**K?” Another day another dollar, especially when podcast hosts won’t let you use every letter.

Guys We F****d is available to stream or download on all podcast platforms