Funny Business

Britt Migs is no stranger to taking opportunity after opportunity and when there isn’t any, creating her own. But the most recent and most impressive of her achievements is her touring show, Dolphin Mode. When we met in Tompkins Park, she had just returned from a trip from Boston and before that, L.A., tired, but still somehow full of life. One of the biggest updates she filled me in on was her time at Fringe Fest 2025, where she succeeded in making me jealous for not attending. She described it like a summer camp of comedy, where performing art was placed above all else, even though for many people the dream of getting noticed at Fringe Fest and potentially get a Fleabag level show bubbled underneath. Britt herself had several reviewers come to her show to do a write-up, but she didn’t want to think about that. “If you think, ‘This very performance is going to determine my future,’ you can’t think like that,” she tells me. And this is exactly the direction I wanted to take the conversation. Getting down to the business of being funny. The contractionary nature of modern art where creatives have to use their talent and free expression to earn money that will then allow them to, ideally, have more freedom to express. Comedy to me often is a snake eating itself. 

“It sucks that we have to post five times a week and make sure we’re pumping out reels and all this shit. That sucks. That is kind of the business end of it. But at the same time, one must drive the other. So, I’m trying my very best to make stuff that I like.” Britt feels gratitude that in some capacity, big or small, she’s able to live out her dream. “Of course, the algorithm makes all of us want to kill ourselves all the time. But I do try to hold myself to that standard where, ‘Well I like it, and that’s all that matters.’”

Show business is a game of being an entrepreneur and an entertainer at the same time. It’s a rare skill and one that some of the funniest people I know lack. But Britt seems to have it in spades. Her outlook on life is a huge driving force of this. “The problem that I think that we run into as creatives is we keep setting these goalposts and if we don’t hit them, life will go on. We do have to live the ‘normal part’ of our lives.” 

If an artist wants to make money out of their art, then they have to do it for the love of the game. I always ask myself, ‘If there was no way to make money off of this talent, would I still do it?” The answer is always yes. And I think it is for Britt too. “When I see a comic who has been doing this for, you know,  25 years, who has, I don’t know – there’s an unruly crowd and they have such control…It’s not an envy in a bad negative way where I’m mad about it. I’m like, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get to that level where I can do that.’”

“In my mind’s eye, I am — not in like a self-deprecating  way — but I’m so goofy and crazy. I think of myself as the Mucinex booger wife.” What I gleaned from Britt above all else is don’t take anything too seriously and if you have to make money from your art, picture yourself as a booger lady.