Jamie Loftus has mastered the art of the messy deep dive

Incredibly, Jamie Loftus is not yet sick of hot dogs. It’s a good thing, too, since the most logical place for the author of Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs to have lunch before a show in Minneapolis is The Wienery, an old-fashioned hot dog joint right next to the venue where she’ll be performing tonight.

Loftus can’t seem to escape hot dogs, nor can they escape her. About 18 months earlier, deep into the process of writing Raw Dog, which is available today, the comedian and podcaster created a one-person comedy show using competitive hot dog-eating champion Joey Chestnut as a jumping-off point. The timing could have been better. Her deadline to file a first draft of her manuscript loomed, making the prospect of an entirely new project impractical.

But she had just gotten back into a stand-up groove after a summer spent touring America’s preeminent hot dog attractions, and she wanted to do more than just microdose performing in seven-minute increments. She was itching to create the latest link in her lengthy chain of big, weird, live comedy spectacles, and if a new show pertained to hot dogs in any way, developing it technically qualified as working on her book. She was also going through a big breakup at the time. The resulting show, Mrs. Joseph Chestnut, America USA, tapped into the wildest parts of Loftus’s brain, which had been on the brink of atrophy after writing reams of manuscript prose—and it exorcised some lingering ick from the breakup.

“I can only process my feelings through work and hot dogs,” she deadpans at The Wienery’s entrance, a red metal door with a sneaker-clad anthropomorphic hot dog carved into it.

This is, more or less, how the Jamie Loftus sausage gets made. She brings her whole self to a subject—her voice, her values, her trauma—and plunges in as deep as she possibly can, with an eye trained on the next subject. (By the time she reached the third draft of Raw Dog, Loftus had already gone on a research trip for her next limited-run podcast, Ghost Church.) She is a tireless explorer and an erudite, open-hearted tour guide, whose work over the past few years suggests no terrain is off-limits, and that a legion of dedicated fans will follow her anywhere.

“I love getting to see the world the way Jamie sees it,” says Sarah Marshall, host of revisionist cultural history podcast You’re Wrong About, which Loftus cohosted during its just-wrapped spring tour. “That’s such a gift.”

It Happened to Me

Although Loftus’s first love is stand-up and she initially made a name for herself with avant-garde one-person shows, she’s lately become known for a string of hit, limited-run podcasts. Other entries in this field can sometimes feel like audio presentation pilots for Hulu original series. (Indeed, both The Dropout and Welcome to Chippendale’s started as podcasts that were adapted into limited-run shows on Hulu.) Because of the potential rewards, it’s become a crowded space. But Loftus broke in and carved out a niche for herself almost by accident.

She’s a comedian, so of course she was no stranger to podcasts beforehand. Since 2016, she’s cohosted The Bechdel Cast, a show in which she and comedian Caitlin Durante examine how women are portrayed in films—and praise or mock those films accordingly. But in 2019, she started using the medium in a different way. Her recurring column for Paste Magazine was often an outlet for Loftus’s version of “those cursed XO Jane it-happened-to-me pieces,” which were popular a decade ago and featured women telling intimate stories for little money, only for them to live online forever. Loftus’s variations included an attempt to get emotionally invested in the WWE, a #MeToo art project gone wrong, and most fruitfully, an account of the time she took the Mensa test. That last column was just meant to be a self-contained lark, but Loftus ended up acing the test and getting into Mensa. Whoops.

For a comedian and writer on the hunt for new material, she effectively had no choice but to explore the supposed high-IQ society from the inside. What Loftus found once she waded in—far-right views and cyberbullying—generated plenty of fodder for more columns. In fact, it gave her so much to work with that she needed a bigger canvas. She penned a long-form piece about her time attending Mensa events and tangling with their cohort, but it was too short to be a book and too long to be a feature. She was considering publishing it as a stand-alone zine when her manager nudged her instead toward going the podcast route.

After adding a layer of research, she expanded the piece into four episodes and recorded them largely on her own. By that point, The Bechdel Cast had been acquired by the iHeartRadio network and Loftus was contractually obligated to inform them that she was putting out another podcast, in case they wanted to buy and release it on the network. “They essentially told me to go fuck myself,” she recalls. 

On New Year’s Day 2020, she self-released My Year in Mensa, which went on to become so popular that it was recently used as a clue in The Atlantic’s crossword puzzle.

My Year in Mensa bears many of the same hallmarks as the other limited series that would follow. It’s funny, fearless, and every bit as smart as the average Mensa member considers themself, but also probing, personal, and empathetic (to a point). It’s the loosest of her solo audio projects, laced with a distinct Am-I-doing-this-right? energy—most pronounced in her frequent use of an air-horn siren. Listen closely and you can hear the sound of Loftus figuring out what she’s doing as she goes along, bringing together several disparate strengths that she’d cultivated over the years.

After a wave of positive press, iHeartRadio apologized for passing on her pitch and picked up My Year In Mensa, paving the way for future collaborations.

“Weirdly, the fact that they said no to it originally ended up working out in my favor,” Loftus says, “because it felt like proof that, like, Hey, if you mostly leave me alone, I’ll make something good and not lose my mind in the process.”

Committing to the bit

Loftus is seated across from me at The Wienery, rocking a gold nameplate necklace and the ornate goth choker that has become something of her signature. After some menu deliberation (“I’m not really a slaw head”), she chooses the Hairy Brain, an all-beef dog with mayo, cheese, and sauerkraut. When it arrives, she snaps a pro forma pic for her Instagram story and digs in.

Keeping up with her in hot dog-eating turns out to be easier than keeping up with her prodigious creative output. To be a Jamie Loftus fan requires stamina. The tour for You’re Wrong About, which is what has brought her to Minneapolis on a frigid late-March afternoon, is the second podcast tour she’s been on this year, after a jaunt back in January for The Bechdel Cast. The late-May release of Raw Dog heralds more shows, including some performances of Mrs. Chestnut, and it will be shortly followed in July by the fifth limited-run podcast she’s put out in four years, the topic of which she’s officially keeping under wraps for now. She’s just contributed a pre-WGA-strike freelance episode of an unnamed Nickelodeon show, the first of her animated TV writing that isn’t aimed at adults, and she does stand-up sets as often as she can.

If there’s one thing Loftus is gonna do, it’s everything.

The earliest major project she remembers completing is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, which she wrote in eighth grade. Loftus grew up lower-middle class in Brockton, Massachusetts—her father, a hockey reporter; her mother operating an illegal daycare center—and took up writing as an alternative to the dance classes her mom enrolled her in. She didn’t like the way she felt judged in those classes. With writing, she could exert more control over the terms of her perception.

At age 12, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and spent the next 3-and-a-half rather formative years wearing a back brace 22 hours each day, inspiring everyone in her life to offer copies of the Judy Blume book, Deenie, though she personally preferred Lemony Snicket. While her wardrobe was mainly restricted to bulky San Jose Sharks T-shirts that hung strategically loose over her rig, she started paying close attention to what everyone else was wearing. She kept detailed tabs on her classmates’ outfits each day, filling up “serial killer notebooks” with illegible shorthand. Many years later, Loftus would discover she had grown up with undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder and sought treatment for it. “My parents didn’t know what that was,” she says, “so they just thought, ‘Jamie sure loves to write stuff down!’”

Although she knew that she wanted to be a writer, Loftus didn’t know exactly which kind. She gravitated toward screenwriting at Emerson College on a whim, but quickly figured out she didn’t quite mesh with the proto-Letterboxd film nerd crowd and switched gears to radio. While juggling multiple part-time jobs and a slot in a sketch group, she learned the dying art of terrestrial radio at WERS. Grizzled producers would cue her up to share three facts about the Gorillaz in between songs—pronto! “I don’t think I would’ve been able to do stand-up if I hadn’t done any on-air radio performance first,” Loftus says. “Because nobody was looking at me, I could have a personality on air and I didn’t suck at it.”

One of the most valuable traits in a comedian is commitment to the bit; getting lost inside a character, keeping a running joke going, or simply doing something uncomfortable, regrettable, or ill-advised because it makes sense in the moment. From the very beginning of her career, Loftus always committed to the bit. One of her early stand-up jokes was about having to resort to homemade remedies when unable to afford healthcare, citing dog food as a stealth substitute for antidepressants. She followed up this sly capitalist critique by horking down dog food onstage, her voice and her values coming together to shock laughter out of audiences.

When it came time for her senior project, Loftus decided to do a half-hour stand-up set. Her thesis adviser strongly urged her to consult a playwriting professor, to help turn it into something more whole. Initially, she resisted the suggestion—stand-up requires jokes, not dramaturgy—but her conversations with this professor led to a breakthrough. Stand-up, it turns out, can involve jokes and dramaturgy. Her sets already leaned heavily on performance art; they needed only a jolt of cohesion to become more theatrical. Her show-slash-project centered around the very 21-year-old’s topic of her parents’ divorce and featured a practical effect where a rabbit explodes in a microwave.

It predicted the next half decade of her career.

Although she would have many gigs in the years to come—from odd jobs in Boston to researching articles for Playboy; from developing a pilot in Comedy Central’s incubator program to writing episodes of the adult animated series, Robot Chicken—her most steady job was creating and performing one-person shows. Some of them were confessional, such as I Lost My Virginity on August 15, 2010, which included the other person who participated that day calling in via Skype for all seven performances. Others were more political: Boss Whom Is Girl is a satire about Elizabeth “Liz” Holmes and corporate feminism. 

In every one of them, she commits to the bit.

A pandemic pivot

Our meal has come to an end. Nothing left but crumbs in our little, red hot dog baskets. I ask Loftus to rate The Wienery’s wares against some of the finer hot dogs she’d eaten while researching her book. She is complimentary, but admits the Hairy Brain didn’t crack her top 10. Fair enough.

My next question is more difficult: What would she like to do that she hasn’t yet done?

“There are so many things I want to do,” she says, “but how and when to do them is unclear.”

What’s also uncertain is how the world will look by the time she gets around to doing them.

When the pandemic shut everything down in March 2020, Loftus had been gearing up to tour Boss Whom Is Girl in the wake of a successful run at Edinburgh Fringe. She also wanted to shop around a version of it as a TV pilot. The next thing she knew, the whole world was on lockdown, all forms of live performance were canceled, and the market for animated TV writers suddenly got a lot more cutthroat as most live-action shows were paused. Since My Year in Mensa had made a splash a few months earlier, making more podcasts looked like it might be Loftus’s survival option.

Once iHeartRadio signaled an interest in putting out the next My Year in Mensa, she came up with a list of five topics around which she could build a new series. The list ended up playing out like the napkin sketches at the infamous 1994 Pixar lunch that ultimately outlined the company’s miracle run of hits after Toy Story. Her list included the following topics: Nabokov’s Lolita, the comic strip Cathy, all things hot dog, and American spiritualism. She went on to make projects out of them all but was stunned when the network selected Lolita to be next.

Loftus first read the legendarily divisive book around the time everyone started recommending Judy Blume’s Deenie to her, and remained fascinated with it ever after. The main benefit of working as a research assistant at Playboy in the mid-2010s had been using company materials and equipment to make zines and promote her shows, but Loftus also learned how to dig in and fact-find on that job in a way that informed her approach to making things for herself. Between July 2020 and the following February, she reread Lolita five times, watched every adaptation of it, talked to Nabokov scholars, and trawled Tumblr and the fashion world to map the contours between what the book says about pedophilia and how people interpret what the book says. “It was six solid months locked in a house thinking about the most depressing thing in the entire world,” Loftus recalls, “and it still felt like an escape from reality.”

Though funny in parts, Lolita Podcast is a sprawling, sensitive dissection of a complex cultural legacy. Previously, Loftus’s greatest act of literary criticism involved slowly eating all 1,079 pages of Infinite Jest as a statement to the men who wouldn’t stop recommending it to her. Lolita Podcast proved infinitely more digestible. Listeners ate up her synthesis of literary analysis, personal history, and illuminating interviews when the show debuted in February 2021. Then they came back hungry for more just five months later when Loftus dropped Aack Cast, her similarly heady unpacking of the Cathy comic strip, featuring extensive interviews with creator Cathy Guisewite. The two podcasts would compete against each other for space on 2021’s best-of-the-year lists.

The one-two punch cemented Loftus’s reputation as someone who attacks topics from every conceivable angle and doesn’t shy away from getting personal. Just as her status changed and she found herself courted by book editors, the world changed again, with a tepid tiptoe back toward normalcy that proved pitiably brief. During that time, Loftus reveled in her ability to pitch projects she could actually leave her apartment to make. Both Raw Dog and the American spiritualism podcast, Ghost Church, involved much-needed road trips.

They’re also each unlike anything she’d done before, the only connective tissue being Loftus’s authorial voice. Her next podcast continues the trend. “If I was doing the same project over and over,” she says, “I wouldn’t be able to make as much as I do because I’d just get bored of myself.”

Full Immersion

The next time I see Loftus, a few hours later, she’s onstage with Marshall for the You’re Wrong About show. She is now wearing a skin-tight gold-lamé dress and a baseball hat that reads, Bimbo. As per the show’s premise, Loftus proceeds to tell Marshall what she’s possibly wrong about regarding Bonnie and Clyde—a “young, horny couple who stole $12”—when the conversation turns toward a familiar topic. Apparently, Bonnie and Clyde ate nothing but hot dogs while on the run, and the cop who was hot on their trail tried eating more hot dogs himself in order to get inside their heads.

When an editor reached out in the spring of 2021 to ask if Loftus was interested in writing a book, hot dogs seemed like the idea most suited to the format. Several books about hot dogs already existed, but after examining the space, Loftus quickly concluded there was room for one with a critical perspective—warthogs and all.

While Raw Dog celebrates the humble, tubular foodstuff, Loftus also examines it through a leftist lens. Not just the horrible treatment of animals involved, or the ghoulish gross negligence toward factory workers during the pandemic, but also the entire exploitative system that “presents hot dogs to people with no money as a filling and affordable alternative to health, all while people with too much money have found a way to charge fifteen fucking dollars for them.” Despite all the hot dog fun and relationship turmoil that’s chronicled in the book, it’s as close to a long-form polemic as she’s come yet. 

“All of Jamie’s work is driven by how deeply she cares about people,” Marshall says, “especially America’s working class and marginalized communities and their right to survive.” 

Loftus’s values extend far beyond the page. In February 2022, for instance, she successfully helped unionize iHeartRadio. In real life, just as in the worlds she creates with her comedy, she’s all commitment—even when there’s no bit.

For one of her future projects, Loftus is chasing another object of longtime fascination: haunted hayrides. She has not yet decided what form the project will take—ideally something she could direct herself—but her head is buzzing with possibilities for this next weird world. Although there are plenty of safer and easier ways to gather material on the subject, she spent last October working an actual job at a haunted hayride in Los Angeles. “I prefer full-immersion research,” she says.

In the meantime, she and Marshall end the You’re Wrong About show fully immersed in pie. As a nod to conservative agitator Phyllis Schlafly, famously pied for her virulent homophobia, the hosts are ending every show of the tour with pies in their faces to promote the LGBTQ rights currently under threat. Although the pair concocted this stunt together, it’s a messy, Loftus-esque way to close a show.

She also ends all the performances of Mrs. Chestnut in the coming weeks by devouring eight hot dogs and drinking a hot dog-water martini onstage. Eating the hot dogs can’t be faked because what even looks like a hot dog and would be easier to eat, but a “hot dog-water martini” could just as easily be any clear fluid, as far as the audience knows. After one performance, I ask Loftus if the drink is really what she says it is, even though I already know the answer.

“It’s always real.”