Today we’d like to introduce you to Rebecca Rosselli.
Hi Rebecca, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I spent over a decade helping businesses figure out who they were – rebranding more than 80 companies through my agency, Pivot or Die. I was good at it. Really good. But somewhere between client number 60 and client number 80, I realized I was helping everyone else find their voice while quietly suffocating my own.
Comedy was always there. It’s how I process everything: relationships, anxiety, the absurdity of being a person. My husband Alfie had been doing stand-up for years, and on our second date he took me to a comedy club and dared me to sign up. I got on stage, told some jokes, and won $40 for best joke of the night. He didn’t sulk. He pulled out his camera and took pictures of me by the mic. I married him for a lot of reasons but that one’s near the top.
Eventually we made the kind of decision that sounds insane when you say it out loud: we packed up our Jeep, loaded up our goldendoodles, left our friends and our entire lives in Vancouver behind, and drove to Austin, Texas. We’re two of the many comedians who heard Joe Rogan announce this was the new comedy mecca and thought… this is it. Look, we loved Vancouver. Genuinely. But just like Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes and basically every Canadian with a big dream, you eventually hit the ceiling. Comedy in Canada means doing it on the side forever. We didn’t want a side career. So we came. And then we started Humpdays, and here we are.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ha. No.
You pack up your entire life, move to a new country, leave your friends, your network, your comfort zone – and then you have to build an audience from scratch while also “competing” with the 700 other comedians that moved to town while also figuring out how to make rent.
There’s the practical chaos, and then there’s the identity crisis that radiates underneath all of it. Telling the world “I’m starting over” AND wanting to be a female COMEDIAN is vulnerable and scary. Who am I to have this audacity?!! You know?
And doing it all with your husband, on camera, where everyone can watch you disagree in real time? That’s a whole other thing. Running stand up shows, hoping to fill seats – it’s all a lot of pressure but people come through and support us and we are blown away.
We’ve had to figure out how to be creative partners and married people simultaneously, which sounds romantic and sometimes is, and sometimes very much isn’t. Therapy helps. So does the goldendoodle.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I genuinely believe comedy is the most powerful tool for destroying shame. The second I say something out loud that nobody else will, the whole room exhales. I talk about my husband liking my feet on stage. Every time I do, couples in the audience visibly relax. I’ve had people come up after sets and tell me they went home and had a conversation they’d been avoiding for years.
As a 34-year-old woman, or as I like to call myself, a “former young woman”, I also want to be something real for women in their 20s. The amount of noise aimed at young women about how to look, how to act, how to build their optimal lives is genuinely suffocating. I want to be proof that being yourself is the only strategy that actually works. Come for the laughs. Stay because we accidentally helped your relationship.
That’s what our show, Humpdays (@humpdays on YouTube) is all about. Alfie and I disagree on camera regularly, laugh about it, and still clearly like each other and apparently that’s novel enough that people tune in.
We are not relationship experts. We are not selling a course on how to be a “high value woman”, “trad wife”, or an “alpha male” or whatever this week’s “you aren’t good enough to date” trend is. We are two people just figuring it out, and we think radical honesty is more useful than any of that polished advice. People can smell inauthenticity. They’re tired of it and we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and we’re so over polishing ourselves.
What sets us apart is the combination: you get both perspectives: the wife and the husband, in a space where we’re not pretending to have it together. We have hot takes, we disagree, and we laugh. That’s the show.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
odcasting and comedy are going through the same reckoning: audiences are completely done with polished and performative. They can smell a filter from a mile away. The creators who will matter over the next decade are the ones with a genuine point of view, not just a niche, but an actual perspective on the world.
For comedy specifically, I think cultural commentary is only going to grow. People are overwhelmed and they need someone to make sense of the chaos while making them laugh. The “perfect relationship advice” industrial complex is also due for a correction.
I think audiences are going to gravitate toward realness over credentials. Two people figuring it out honestly, on camera, will always beat a guru with a course to sell.
That’s the lane we’re in. We got here early and we’re not leaving.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @rebsrosselli @therossellis
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@humpdays
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4uLiKx4VQvnIQxSoXoLgvN
