Rachelle Cochran Got Funnier When She Picked Herself

In a recent Instagram video, comedian Rachelle Cochran swings into the phone camera, blue eyes alight and peeled banana in hand, and delivers the line: “As a lesbian in a very Catholic family, my parents are hoping I’ll come out as bisexual—like instead of just fucking women, they’re hoping I’ll fuck everyone,” she says. “It’s like, bro, the only thing I wanna come out of is my student debt.”

The delivery is punchy and confident, one she’s likely worked to perfect, with content she’s worked even harder to share. “I did not come out until I was 27 years old, and I did not think I was going to come out until my parents died,” Cochran says. “The word ‘lesbian’—even saying that out loud terrified me.”

That terror doesn’t overshadow Cochran’s jokes, or her demeanor. On the phone, the comedian is kind and excited—there’s a buoyancy in her voice, even as she holds her syllables for an extra beat when her answers ride the line between highly personal and small asides, much like her jokes. She’s slightly squeamish when I refer to her comedy as her work.

Cochran, now 34, grew up in Elmira, Ore., an unincorporated area a stone’s throw from the annual Oregon Country Fair. The family moved there for Cochran to attend a family friend’s Catholic school. By 10, she knew she wanted to be a comedian, fully solidified after seeing Maria Bamford on TV. She took speech classes in high school, more in college at University of Oregon, where she majored in accounting (still Cochran’s daytime gig).

By age 21, she was ready to finally attempt comedy. “The first time I got onstage I got completely shitfaced, and I proceeded to act out a scene where I tripped on a leaf,” Cochran says. “The silence was so deafening, but I was like, this is what I want to do until I die. Whatever comes, I fuckin’ love this.”

Cochran moved to Portland in 2012 and kept up with her comedy. Her jokes hovered around observations and similar tripping humor, and tended to require that same liquid courage. There were no jokes about herself in the set. By the pandemic, Cochran felt she’d plateaued.

Around the same time, during a visit to confession, a priest essentially recommended conversion therapy. At age 30, Cochran had still been going to confession monthly, “because if you don’t go to confession and clear that mortal sin—and clearly I was committing mortal sins, I was living with my quote-unquote roommate and doing more than roommate stuff—then you go to hell,” she says, “and I was like, “What the fuck am I doing? I’m never going to change.’”

Cochran left the church (“deprogrammed myself, if you will”) and started therapy, not the conversion kind. Then something else happened. She started to joke about it.

“Style didn’t become important to me until I started to talk about what it was like to grow up gay in a very religious family—it just feels more real,” she says. “I got backlash from a lot of family, so I basically fixed that by blocking most of them.”

Cochran got sober too, and started taking writing classes. Portland’s been a supportive place for her to bring herself to the forefront of her comedy, a scene that embraces women and queer comedians. “I think we hold each other accountable and to a higher standard with what we say onstage,” she says. “I’ve been to mics in Orlando, I was one of two girls, and the amount of misogynistic, sexist, racist things said would get you canceled very easily in Portland. I like that if you write a joke in Portland and it’s acceptable, you can basically tell it anywhere.”

Cochran has moved leaps and bounds in the past few years, but even though her confidence feels pronounced, she’s still honing it, or owning it. “I’m still working on it; there’s still a fear in the back of my head I’m gonna go to hell,” Cochran says.

But it’s just a fear, and Cochran is getting over those set by set, video by video. Each is a step toward being herself without hesitation, and she hopes to take others with her, too. “Now that I’ve done it, I want people to feel less alone—with my stupid art, my work.”

What is the funniest thing Rachelle Cochran has seen in Portland? “Nariko Ott’s final set for Portland’s Funniest Person at Helium Comedy Club over a decade ago—I’m pretty sure it was 2015. He had this bit about the Mattress Ranch in Washington that absolutely destroyed the room. People, myself included, couldn’t catch their breath. I remember feeling the entire place vibrating, just buzzin’ and thinking, holy shit, this is a whole other level—I’ve got work to do.”