When comedian Edy Modica arrives at the Condé Nast offices in downtown Manhattan, she looks as if she’s just wrapped filming on a Bravo show—her hoop earrings are sparkly and huge, her heeled denim boots coordinate perfectly with her long denim shorts, and a nameplate necklace spells out EDY. As I soon learn, that is, in fact, exactly the case; Modica is coming straight from guest-bartending on an episode of Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.
Modica is promoting I’m Just Like You (And It Sucks), her chatty, confrontational, and sometimes crude debut special. (One of its best parts revolves around a young Modica browsing sites with names like “boobs.com” and “sex.com.”) But her strong and singular comedic voice has remained largely unchanged since I saw her perform a fully nude show at Williamsburg’s now-shuttered Annoyance Theatre a decade ago. I struggle with how to bring it up without sounding like a pervert, but Modica excitedly tells me that she remembers the set well; in fact, both of her parents were in attendance.
Modica’s parents were also there when she taped I’m Just Like You (And It Sucks), with her mother audibly contributing to a punchline from the front row. “I’m really close with them,” Modica tells me. “I’m an only child, so they know me for real and I know them for real. I’m like, You did this. My dad is like, ‘Stop taking your tits out,’ but if they actually had a problem with a joke, I think they would tell me.”
It’s been a busy few years for Modica, who co-starred on the first season of the James Marsden-fronted reality-sitcom Jury Duty in 2023 and is hard at work on a half-hour comedy pilot for HBO based on her 2021 debut short film Nicole. If she weren’t writing and performing, though, Modica thinks she’d be working in restaurants. “I was born to serve,” she says, explaining that her parents met while working at a now-closed steakhouse and her father is currently a server at Bobby Van’s.
It’s easy enough to imagine Modica as the waitress or barista whose bubbly warmth unexpectedly makes your day, but in an era of increasingly disaffected, Daria-voiced alt-comedy, that energy is particularly valuable onstage. Her penchant for body humor bordering on body horror (at one point in the special, she proudly shows the audience her bloody tongue, yelling, “Yeah, bitch, it’s like that!”) may draw her comparisons to Saturday Night Live’s Sarah Squirm, but Modica’s good cheer as she narrates middle-school misadventures and tween cruise antics reminds me more of the banter between zany, deranged besties Anna and Maya on Pen15.
A lifelong New Yorker, Modica went to acting school in Manhattan and now lives in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, where she encourages me to hunt for vintage gems everywhere from Other People’s Clothes to “the thrift store behind the White Castle.” (Another Ridgewood thrift store that Modica simply describes as being “by the grocery store” yielded a real fur coat for $10.) The tie-front cardigan, knee-high boots, and apple-green miniskirt that Modica wears during the special are serving Fran Drescher circa The Nanny, a comparison I do not make lightly, but Modica also isn’t above performing in sweatpants. “My boyfriend was wearing mine so much that I finally got him two pairs of women’s large Aritzia sweatpants,” Modica recalls. When I ask if Modica’s boyfriend is also a comedian, she recoils; he’s actually a drummer in a band called Wish Castle, whose most recent music video Modica directed.
