Sara Benincasa

Sara Benincasa's comedy grew up online. After studying creative writing at Warren Wilson College and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, she blogged for Nerve.com and made Tub Talk with Sara B, an interview series with comedians that she later relaunched on YouTube as Gettin' Wet with Sara Benincasa, with guests including Margaret Cho and Neil Gaiman. During the 2008 election she reported as a citizen journalist for MTV and, in the same season, found a wider audience with her Sarah Palin parody videos, which moved from YouTube to the Huffington Post humour site 23/6.

Radio and podcasting came next. She co-hosted the talk show Get in Bed on Sirius XM Cosmo Radio and later started the podcast Sex and Other Human Activities with Marcus Parks. Observational bits about rural New Jersey turn up in her material, and her one-woman show became the basis for her first book, Agorafabulous!: Dispatches from My Bedroom. More books followed: the fiction titles Great, DC Trip and Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad, and the non-fiction Real Artists Have Day Jobs.