Mary Beth Barone
Mary Beth Barone is an American comedian and actress., she stars as Grace on Benito Skinner's Amazon Prime Video comedy series Overcompensating, for which she also writes, and co-hosts the Dear Media podcast Ride with Skinner. The two also previously co-hosted the Spotify podcast Obsessed.
Barone began her comedy career in New York City in 2015 after working with the Upright Citizens Brigade. She became known for her live show Drag His Ass: A Fuckboy Treatment Program, which was created in 2019 and adapted into a Comedy Central web series in 2021.
Early life
Barone was born on May 28, 1991, and raised in a Catholic family in Stamford, Connecticut and has five older siblings. Her father worked as a surgeon and briefly performed as a stand-up comedian in New York City in the 1970s; he died in June 2025. She attended Catholic school in Greenwich for 10 years and later graduated from Westhill High School in Stamford. Prior to attending college, she identified as a Republican. She began studying English at Boston College, but dropped out two years later and moved to Chinatown in Manhattan at age 20, where she lived for several years.Career
While working at a start-up, Barone took two months of improv classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade before doing stand-up during an all-women open mic for the group in 2015, after which she decided to pursue comedy full-time. A humorous "frequently asked questions" pamphlet she created to answer her family's anticipated questions about a date she was going on while on vacation in Florida went viral on Twitter in May 2019. She met fellow comedian Benito Skinner in 2019 at a comedy show in Bushwick and began hosting a monthly comedy show with him that year. Also in 2019, she performed a stand-up set for Comedy Central and started the Instagram account and Brooklyn–based live comedy show Drag His Ass: A Fuckboy Treatment Program. In May 2021, Drag His Ass had been adapted into a Comedy Central web series. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she started Coming Clean, a livestreamed comedy show on Instagram filmed from her bathtub.Barone and Skinner co-hosted the weekly Spotify podcast Obsessed, in which they discussed their pop culture "obsessions", from March 2021 to March 2023. Also in March 2021, Barone performed for the first time on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She and Skinner began co-hosting the weekly Dear Media podcast Ride in March 2023. The Atlantic included it on their list of the best podcasts of 2023. In March 2024, she released her self-produced stand-up special, Thought Provoking, on YouTube, and performed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to promote it. Barone started the social media video series Politics for Hot People, which focused on progressive politics, in February 2025.
In 2025, Barone began starring in Skinner's Amazon Prime Video series Overcompensating, adapted from his live show of the same name, as Grace, an uptight and popular college student at the fictional Yates University and the older sister of Benny, a closeted freshman at Yates played by Skinner. She is also a writer for the series. Henry Chandonnet of The Daily Beast called her a "series standout" and one of several "genuine breakouts" on the show, while Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times called her role "poignant" and "perhaps the show's most moving performance". Barone co-starred on the music video for the song "Wild Guess" by Australian singer-songwriter Ruel, which premiered in October 2025.