Marie Faustin Loves To Waste Men’s Time

NYLON’S INSIDE JOKE offers an intimate look at your favorite comedians as they workshop new material at home and on stage.

While the larger cultural landscape is in something of a charisma drought, Brooklyn comedian Marie Faustin has more than enough to spare. Faustin is an “if you know, you know” comedian — and if you don’t, keep that to yourself. With her signature, booming cackle, Faustin cuts observations and musings to shreds, possessing a roasting prowess so robust that you’ll identify as a masochist by the time she’s done with you. As a staple of the New York comedy scene, Faustin is a bonafide hit from the stage to the podcast circuit to your TikTok FYP. Like all great artists and comedic geniuses, Faustin is constantly ideating ways to make her audiences laugh harder, and she let NYLON in on the process.

Faustin’s new hour zeroes in on her dating life, with one specific joke in mind: How much she loves to waste men’s time. “Because you’re wasting my time, too,” she notes. “So, touché, beech.” The joke was well-received in earlier sets, so the comedian wanted to see exactly how far she could take the bit: “People would clap and cheer, and all the girls would throw their underwear on the stage and the guys would be like, ‘Huh. She’s not even that funny.’ And I would be like, ‘Yeah, there’s something gold there.’”

With the Bell House audience as her test subjects, Faustin listens to recordings of her earlier sets to get her joke timing perfect. She’s also inspired by the behind the scene’s joke writing tips from her friends who work “at this little show, it’s called Saturday Night Live,” prompting her to use Post-it notes to nail the flow of her sets. “I like to get a laugh as close to the top of me getting on stage as possible,” she says. “That’s how I figure out the set: Where am I gonna get the laugh the fastest and what makes sense to be said after that, and after that, all the way to the end.”

Faustin’s original goal with comedy is honestly sage life advice: Even if they don’t enjoy her comedy, they will think she looks fantastic. “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you have to dress down or dumb down you look so that men will take you seriously,” she says. “They don’t even take themselves seriously.”

Watch NYLON’s Inside Joke With Marie Faustin in full, below.