In her viral TikTok videos and stand-up sets, comedian Meg Stalter creates characters — a mom of 24 children, for instance — who seem as though they’ve sprung directly from one of these mini revenge fantasies, except these characters are nothing like what any of us imagine we’ll look like when we’re rubbing it in. These characters have decidedly not won, and yet they pretend as though they have, with hilarious and cringe-inducing results. For her HBO Max special, Megan Stalter: Queer Comedy Showcase, she even requested that the laughs from the audience be edited out so we can feel her characters’ pain — as she desperately tries to be a stand-up comedian — even more keenly.

“A lot of my characters are clearly very nervous yet appear extremely confident at the same time.”

“Everything’s going wrong, but they’re trying to pretend like it’s not.” It’s that awkward tension that defines Stalter’s unique brand of comedy, including her performance on the HBO Max show Hacks, where she plays Kayla, an incompetent-by-choice and deeply hilarious assistant to a talent agent. Hacks received 15 Emmy nominations (it won three awards), and Stalter’s performance is one of the most memorable from the show. Kayla is almost an amalgamation of every character Stalter has ever created, which is what makes the project such a joy for the actor.

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