‘SNL’ Writer Turns Her Darkest Stories Into Funniest Comedy

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In her book, Fully Baked, comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer Rosebud Baker, to quote her favorite programming, Bravo, “mentions it all.”

She details the grief following the death of her sister, who drowned at age 7 in a freak pool accident, and the miscarriage she would have decades later.

With astonishing candor, she recounts her alcoholism and the seemingly endless rock bottoms she’d crash through before becoming sober.

If you can believe it, after all that, Fully Baked is one of the funniest books I’ve read this year.

I spoke with Baker, 41, over Zoom after Fully Baked had been out in the world for two weeks. Her secrets were out. She’d been doing the press tour, from podcasts to being a guest on Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live. (“I was more excited to introduce my daughter to Andy Cohen than her own grandparents,” she told me, and I don’t think she was fully kidding.) And she had been answering question after question about some of the darkest periods of her life.

“It’s almost like putting your diary out there and then having people ask you questions about it,” she said.

There’s also a sense of relief. It is all out there, for everyone to process, be it her friends and family, fans of her comedy, or SNL diehards, however they choose.

“I just wrote it to the best of my ability, with empathy for everyone involved,” Baker said. “It’s interesting to me that the focus more has been on my experience of grief with losing my sister and experiencing a miscarriage. That has more been the focus of people’s attention than, say, my experience at SNL. Which, on the one hand, I kind of hoped for, because it was more of an experience that shaped me as a person rather than my career.”

That career path is one she never planned for.

Prior to trying out stand-up comedy, Baker was a struggling, aspiring actress, cycling between jobs as a nanny, waitress, and yoga instructor for as long as she could keep them between benders. It was just months after her sister’s death in 2002 that Baker left for college, kicking off a dependency on booze that quickly ceased any party-girl charms.

Her middle sister, Hallie, got so fed up with her drinking that she left the Europtrip they went on after graduation early, out of a mixture of disgust and fear. When her parents paid for Baker to come home and go to rehab, she skipped out on the ticket and invited her then-boyfriend to essentially go on the lam with her, drinking their way across the continent. When they returned to New York, with Baker now cut off by her family, the debauchery continued.

Eventually, Baker found her way to a grief counselor, and then to Alcoholics Anonymous, becoming sober in 2007. Still, it would be seven years before she’d, on a lark, perform at her first open mic night at a comedy club in Austin. She eventually caught the stand-up bug, honing her craft and being selected as one of Just for Laughs’ Best New Faces in 2018.

Three years later, she released her first comedy special, Whiskey Fists, and joined the writing team for the sketch comedy series That Damn Michael Che. The following year, she was employed at Studio 8H as a writer for Saturday Night Live.

“Stand-ups are just like night lurkers,” she told me about her late arrival to comedy. “There’s something in my DNA that I didn’t see before, because I didn’t want to. I frankly didn’t have any respect for comedy or comedians. I just thought of it all as kind of, well, a joke, you know? And now it’s like the only things I really take seriously in my life are comedy and my daughter.”

Baker gave birth to her daughter, Minnow, in 2023. Her latest comedy special, The Mother Lode was filmed half when she was eight months pregnant, and the other half a year after she had given birth. The finished product hilariously doesn’t acknowledge the cuts between the two tapings, and two very different body types.

Many writers have described her comedy as “dark,” as some of the same stories that populate Fully Baked are also material in her sets, including her sister’s death, or the domestic abuse she experienced with an alcoholic ex-boyfriend.

“I wouldn’t be writing about this stuff if I hadn’t worked it out in therapy already,” Baker said, about her comfort being so open with her audiences—and now her readers.

“Through writing this book, dare I say, I acquired more compassion for myself than I had in the past and for the things that I’ve been through in my life,” she continued. “I’ve lived a very privileged life. I’ve been very lucky. But when it comes to loss, I experienced close loss at a younger age. And the loss of a child. It is devastating. Through the process of writing this book, I started to recognize symptoms in myself of—I haven’t been diagnosed with this, but post-traumatic stress disorder.”

For years, her default was to power through her grief, pain, and trauma. Writing the book forced her, for the first time, to really slow down. “Luckily, I was paid for it,” she said, smiling. “I don’t know that I would’ve done it if there was no money at the end of it.”

One of the most eye-opening and affecting things about Fully Baked is the vividness and emotional intelligence with which she writes about her own alcoholism, with a clear-eyed candor and lack of judgment. Reading her accounts, you never lose awareness that this is someone in a dangerous, unhealthy tailspin. But she also fascinatingly conveys the attraction of alcohol in her life, both as a numbing device and a chaos agent. When she describes her torrid relationship with a problematic ex, it’s concerning, yes, but also somewhat romantic-seeming and intoxicating.

“I have to say, before I quit drinking alcohol, it saved my life,” she said. “Like, it was the greatest thing I’d discovered until it absolutely turned on me.”

Now that she’s sober, she’s always intrigued to be at a party where people are drinking. They evolve before her eyes from just a person in the crowd to the person in the crowd. They might just be walking up and down stairs, talking to a friend, or going out for a cigarette. “That’s all they’re doing. But to them, this is suddenly Studio 54. You know what I mean?”

“I had to write about drinking the way that I experienced drinking, which was like, yeah, it ruined my life, but also I loved it,” she said. “I think that’s the part that gets left out of every addict’s story in a show or a movie. I never see the parts that were like, ‘Why did you stay?’”

She finds that now she still gets along with alcoholics, whether they are now sober or still partying.

“There’s an intensity,” she said. “It’s like we all swallowed a hive of bees or something. There’s such an inner restlessness that we all kind of recognize in one another. It kind of puts us immediately on the same wavelength.”

Speaking of intensity, obviously, we needed to talk about SNL.

Baker is typically pummelled with the usual questions about which sketches she wrote and what the celebrity hosts were like. On Watch What Happens Live, for example, a fan asked what sketch she was most proud of. Her answer was a spoof of the Netflix series The Watcher when Amy Schumer hosted. (Baker toured with Schumer in 2018 and 2019, and wrote for Inside Amy Schumer.) The premise was that, rather than capturing Schumer doing anything nefarious or scandalous, she was “just struggling on the toilet, and just basically wacking off to the Property Brothers.”

Those kinds of questions are fun, she said, but there’s more to the experience she wants to talk about, like how it changed her approach to comedy.

Before she started writing for the show, she was a club comic and thought there was one way to be funny: a setup and a punchline. She also thought comedy had to be deep, that it had to encompass these dark experiences that she had gone through and made part of her act.

“When I got there, I kind of felt stupid for how seriously I was taking comedy,” she said. “That was really, really, really valuable because what it made me realize is that I was limiting myself. It can be just funny to watch somebody, like, fall down. It can be just funny to watch somebody step in a bucket, slip on a banana peel, and step on a rake, and watch their eyes bug out. I had lost touch with the silly side of me, and I had lost touch with it ironically by doing standup.”

Now, with a book out and in a transition phase of her career—she left SNL in 2025—it’s a lesson she’s grateful for, and most excited to employ while she figures out what’s next.

“When I got to SNL, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been really f---ing up,” she said. This place is putting me in touch with the funniest parts of myself.”

Who knows if a person ever gets there, but maybe, just maybe, now Rosebud Baker is even closer to finally being fully baked.