Tara Schuster was a 25-year-old working at Comedy Central who’d worked her way up from interning at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to curating Jokes dot com when she hit an emotional rock bottom. She then began learning how to reparent herself, which she turned into her first book, “Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies.” She did that while rising to become a vice president of talent and development at Comedy Central, working on the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Key & Peele, Emmy-winning @midnight, Another Period, Detroiters, Hood Adjacent, and Lights Out with David Spade. When the pandemic hit and Comedy Central imploded, taking Schuster’s job with it, she found she needed to do more work healing herself — that’s the focus of her second book, “Glow in the F*cking Dark.” Schuster sat down with me to talk about her transition from comedy executive to self-care expert, and about how the work of healing is never truly finished.
Want to discover other cool Substacks? Each morning, The Sample sends you one article from a random blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests. When you get one you like, you can subscribe to the writer with one click. Sign up here.
If you’re not already subscribed to my podcast, please seek it out and subscribe to Last Things First on the podcast platform of your choice! Among them: Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Stitcher; Amazon Music/Audible; iHeartRadio; Player.FM; and my original hosting platform, Libsyn.
This transcript has been edited and condensed only slightly for your convenience.
Tara Schuster, last things first: Congratulations on your second book! You wrote in the inscription of my copy, “You know the actual truth.”
Hahahahaha. So I talk a lot about comedy, or not a lot, but obviously that's where my career started. But I'm usually talking to audiences who don't know anything about TV or comedy in particular. So yeah, you know where the bodies are buried. You know the truth.
I do, and you mentioned “soc med,” social media, a little bit in the book. And as it happens, (the day we spoke), Facebook was kind enough to remind me in Facebook Memories, on this day in 2018, I was moderating a panel for Comedy Central at South by Southwest, with Kent Alterman and Jonathan Mayers to talk about the first Clusterfest. Which I thought was kind of bizarre at the time. Not that Comedy Central would ask me to moderate this, but that we were talking at SXSW about a competing festival.
Yeah, wow, that brings back memories.
But then I thought, well, when did I meet Tara Schuster first? And it turns out I met you at Just For Laughs in Montreal in July of 2015. I'd like to thank Bart Coleman for making that happen.
Oh, Bart. Yeah. Wonderful. I love Bart.
That was the time of at midnight, and definitely the time of Key and Peele. I was crunching the numbers. And if I'm doing this right, you were four years removed from the brink, your emotional rock bottom that you talk about at age 25. So you were starting to learn to reparent yourself. But at the same time, summer 2015, that was also when you were going through the Emmy un-nomination saga (you write about in the book)?
Maybe! There’s a huge disclaimer at the front of the book. The very first thing I say is I am not good with numbers, math, years. Nobody wants me to do the check at a restaurant, so I basically I'm just like, I don't know? This all happened. I don't know exactly when and I guess if I looked at Instagram, I'd be able to figure it out. But who has time for these details?
I did have to go back through my iPhone camera roll to piece it together myself. That was the year Van and Mike received a digital Emmy nomination, so I figured that was it. Not to put you on the spot.
But what was your life like when I met you back in 2015?
Good question. So I was at Comedy Central working on developing shows. And I had not pitched the book yet, because I believe I pitched the book in 2016 to Random House. So I was in this position where, Comedy Central was my home. My first job ever was being an intern at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which was amazing. And those connections led me to get my first job at Comedy Central. I was a PA for a website called Jokes dot com. So all my friends were like ‘We work at McKinsey. We work at Goldman Sachs.’ I was like, I work at Jokes dot com. I remember I was once at a party where someone literally turned away from me when I said that, like ‘cool bye.’ And so at that point, I was definitely exploring like what a development job in Hollywood would be like, and I loved it. I loved getting to go to things like Just For Laughs or get to meet these like epic, amazing comedians and learn from them. And also amazing executives, like Kent Alterman. He is one of the smartest, most artist-friendly — I don't know anybody who doesn't like Kent. Like if you don't like Kent, then that kind of reflects on you. Not Kent. So at that time, really purely, comedy is what I'm doing.
So for those people who don't remember, can we just spend one or two more minutes on jokes.com?
Oh, please! Deep cut. Deep cut!